 Hi, how's everybody doing today? I'm your host Rich here on behalf of Rich TV Live with our very special guest, the CEO of Fiori Cannabis, Eric Anderson. How you doing today, Eric? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. Excited to have you on the show today. And I wanted to start off by asking you a little bit about your background and what made you want to become the CEO of Fiori Cannabis. Yeah, so I was involved in the Canadian cannabis business as an investor first back in around 2013. And we didn't really know that it was going to go fully adult rec legal across the nation, but the medical program was great. I got to meet a lot of great people, got to really meet a lot of the, the companies in their pre IPO stage and then sort of when everybody went public and benefited from, you know, taking a couple of private companies through the ACMPR licensing process to become a licensed producer in Canada, work with a couple of, you know, early stage retailers. And, you know, I really saw in 2018 that the run the bull run on the markets had kind of got to this fever pitch where as the fundamental business and financial numbers were about to be disclosed and this is for the big guys and the little guys, but I just didn't think that those valuations were going to, we're going to kind of be able to justify some of the wild market caps that we saw there in 2018, 2019. So for a brief period of time, I exited the business and really didn't have any designs on coming back until I was introduced to this company by a couple of major shareholders. And the more I got to kind of understand what they were doing, you know, I immediately jumped on a plane, I immediately went down to Las Vegas to look at the cultivation and production facility there. I immediately went over to Palm Springs to look at the retail dispensary there and then I looked at the, the property that we had in Washington, which I've since divested. And then I looked at the Canadian assets as well too. So we're very close to divesting all of the Canadian assets and just focusing on the Las Vegas market and the Palm Springs Coachella Valley market. So the reason that I really wanted to do this is I fundamentally believed that the US is marching towards if not full legalization, but certainly decriminalization. And with the Biden Harris win in November, I think that what we're seeing on the markets right now is a common belief in the US that it's going to go legal as states are continuing to go legal. There was another four who went to adult rec at the election time. There was another state that went medical, you know, Utah prior to that had gone medical. And then you see, you know, with Virginia recently with New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania and a few of those other sort of those Northeastern states kind of looks like they're going to come online here in 2021. So I don't think it's a matter of if the US is going to go legal, I think it's a matter of when. And as the more act in the States Act and the Safe Banking Act and you know, the post COVID stimulus as that involves some, you know, some cannabis tax revenue and other types of, you know, ancillary revenues, I think that it's going to be a matter of time that, you know, this is going to be fully open. And we're going to see exactly what happened in Canada on the bull run. And it's the US. So they're going to probably do it way bigger and way better. And that's that's sort of what the US, you know, what Americans do, right? So I'm really happy to be a US multi-state operator. I kind of had to be convinced to take the job. And then when I went and had a look for myself as to what the, what the assets and the operations look like, I was super happy to take on the role. And I think we've pretty much completed our turnaround throughout 2020 and heading into 2021. We've got a ton of momentum. Yeah. And the stock is doing really well today. Congratulations on that. What are your main focuses for Fiora cannabis for the first half of 2021? So we said that by turning the company around, so we divested Washington, we're in the process of divesting Canada. We put a lot of money into Las Vegas and we put a lot of money and some supply chain optimization into Palm Springs. We said, we're going to be profitable. And I'm happy to report, we actually just news released it today that, you know, our first month of 2021 January, we turned to profit. We've got, yeah, thank you. It's it's been a lot of hard work and I really got a point to our team. Basically, everybody at the company now is new. And that goes from our CFO, Kevin Cornish, who came on around the same time that I did. We basically brought on a completely new grow team out of Nevada. I had told our recruiter, I want the best and only the best. And I think we found the team that's just working so, so great down there. We grow in organic living soil and there's there's different methodologies and protocols associated with that. We still have our Canadian guys out of BC who are acting as kind of consultants and advisors for those protocols. These are people who have been growing for generations in the in the BC interior. So yeah, we said that we think we can clean up the balance sheet. We think that we can make the company profitable. And I'm happy to report we're off to a great, great start. We're one for one in terms of the months of the year and already have some great momentum with the crops coming down here in in February. And interesting to note that the first two crops that came off in January, again, organic living soil, high THC, which is very important in the Las Vegas market, that those menus weren't on the street for more than about a day. And we had dispensaries saying that they take the whole lot. So we're hoping that we can almost advance sell our crops going down. And it all comes down to those test results, which basically proves that we've got a high yield operation. We've got a high THC operation. Well, right now the cannabis sector is on fire. It seems like all cannabis stocks, Canada and the United States are on fire right now. Yeah. So what separates Fiori cannabis from all the rest of the companies that are out there? That's a great question. I think business fundamentals is again, I just want to have a really clean balance sheet, low debt profile. I want to be able to show that, you know, we're a publicly traded company, so we're going to have to show profitability or at least a path to profitability. There's some, you know, one of the things about, you know, further, I guess, legislative relaxation in the US, you know, if we can get to a more active, we can get to a safe banking act. We won't have things like 280 standing in front of us to really sort of crush our bottom line profitability. But I think that, you know, I'm a simple guy. I've run tech businesses before I've run businesses in oil and gas. I've run cannabis businesses in Canada. And I just come back to the basics of and the fundamentals of business, which is, you know, have a very low debt profile, have a clean balance sheet, be able to demonstrate that you can have positive cash flow and that you can have profitability and then scale it from there. Any type of scaling that we're going to be able to do, you know, we sit on seven acres of land in Las Vegas and we've got 10,000 square feet built out, but I've got engineering drawings and I've got sort of a plan to get us to about 80,000 square feet this year. And I've got a lot of people knocking on our door saying, hey, we'd like to finance that. And non-dilutively as well, too, just, you know, maybe some debt financing or some convertible financing or just some JV financing because I think that we can turn that that's that's roughly about a 10 million dollar a year revenue potential in Las Vegas at the cultivation and production facility. We could easily make that a 60 to 70 million dollar proposition by just expanding it. And that's called profitable growth. Right. So the fundamentals that myself and the team have brought in, it's just kind of getting back to basics a little bit less on the kind of pump and dump sort of schemes that, you know, we've kind of seen out there, learned a lot from the Canadian experience. It was a great learning experience. But again, when I was involved with private companies and then advising some publicly traded companies, I would always be the guy in the room saying, hey, don't we got to get to profitability? Don't we got to get to fundamentals? And we're hoping that that will behoove us in our sort of our strategy going forward. And like I said, we're already already off to a great start here in 2021. So let's talk about that. So you mentioned that you are profitable already in your first month of 2021. And that is something to be very excited about. How do you plan to maintain that throughout the year? And what are your plans and what are your projections for the rest of 2021? Great question. So really for us, what we were able to do, I'll talk about the dispensary in Coachella Valley for a minute there is that it had the potential very early upon my arrival to make money and where it wasn't making money was on the supply chain. So we really needed to get back to those vendor relationships, get better terms, more, you know, just that kind of bulk buying and let's get some payment terms rather than cash for everything, you know. And, you know, we put some banking in place in both of our operations. We've got point of sale. We've got an ATM machine for cash. We're now dabbling into delivery. And so we've actually taken that we've increased the revenues from about April of last year, 22%. And so we've increased the revenues, but we've also optimized sort of the back office so that we're even more profitable. So that heading into around the Christmas period of time, we started making money on that store on a month over month basis. And so we're happy to report that sales are still strong, even though tourism is weak in the Palm Springs area. And we put some marketing initiatives, which will include a new website, e-commerce delivery. And when that tourism industry picks back up, whether you're at a wellness spa or a resort or Airbnb or wherever it is, you can just dial us up because we're, you know, we're actively marketing with billboards and other types of promotional stuff in the Valley there. And you can order it right up online and we'll deliver it right to your resort room door kind of thing, right? So that was the first change that we were able to enact going forward in back to Las Vegas with cultivation and production. We've now got the harvest schedule set up for the year and we'll do somewhere around 30 to 34 harvests out of our facility there, 10,000 square feet, every success of harvest because we are using organic living soil. So that's the type of soil you don't have to throw out at the end of the harvest, right? Every time you reuse it, you're putting in nutritional amendments, you're basically stimulating the soil to be truly a living soil. You know, we've got earthworms in there, we've got crickets and all kinds of other crazy stuff that it's truly an organic product and that the soil gets better over time. So every success of crop, we're going to see higher yield, we're going to see higher THC percentages, which is huge for the retail market in Las Vegas. And the soil is just going to get better and better over time. So we're forecasting every time I look at a harvest going out to March, April, May, we're getting, we're squeezing some more harvests in and we're actually making each crop more profitable on a crop over crop harvesting basis. So that's really where we're focused right now. Our grow team is exceptional. They have a great reputation in the market. Our head grower, I don't have to go in and sell his skill set to the dispensaries in Las Vegas. I just mentioned that he's on our team and typically we will sell crops before they even hit the market just because he's a known master grower and we're growing organically and that's a huge differentiator in the market. That's perfect. You're mentioning some of your members. Can we talk a little bit about that? What separates your members and your team from other teams out there? What makes your members so special? And what are the key members of your team that you want to let the people that are watching all over the world know about? That's great. I love talking about our people. So right around the time that I was asked to first thing was that they wanted me to join the board and then it looked like, you know, we had a little bit of a change that they wanted to make. So they asked me to be CEO. So I actually helped them hire a CFO. And his name is Kevin Cornish. He's a younger guy. He comes from the Canadian cannabis retail sort of background. He was with high tide and, you know, just a young energetic guy. And I think that passion in this business understanding the cultural significance of this business. It's not just a suit and tie thing for investors or for the banking world. It's understanding the culture and he does. Right. So what he brings to the table is a high level of energy. You know, in COVID, we joke around a lot, but we're working 16 hour days. And sometimes the days just merge into the next day. And it's almost like we, you know, we went to a home based scenario because of the pandemic and our productivities never been higher in 28 years of my career. I've never been more productive than I have then, then during this pandemic. And thankfully, we've been able to travel a little bit. We have got down to our operations. But, you know, Kevin's a key member of the team. Just again, young, energetic, very passionate about the space. You know, when I think about our grow team, you know, Hassan, our master grower, he comes into this with a great deal of experience. He's worked in the industry in Colorado, in Michigan, in Montana, in the Northeast, as well, too. He's worked for the big guys like Ocresco. And now he's working for a company of our size where, you know, there was no secret. We had to reboot everything in this business. So we had sort of stumbled along earlier last year with just maybe some growers who weren't up to our standards, right? We were going for a grade A plus standard. So when we found him, he was able to start bringing his team in slowly. And now we're up to a grow team of five in the in the cultivation and production facility. We've got an excellent compliance regulatory person. We've got some great help when it comes to the packaging and the trim team. And it's really this sort of, you know, it's a 10,000 square foot facility. But I always said this back to the Canadian days. If you were able to scale in increments of 10,000 square feet, you would be successful because one of the things that the big, big, big guys, when they were building their indoor football field stadiums were, you know, these huge indoor, whether it was a greenhouse or just a massive indoor grow, they all sort of assumed that it's weed, right? It's just going to grow. We're going to grow the most of it. It's going to be the best in the history of the world. And, you know, we're not going to have any problems there. And then the crop failure started coming. Then, oh, my gosh, infestation and, you know, powdery mildew, mold, mites, all that kind of stuff. If you're in open canopy and you've got one master grower for, say, 500,000 square feet, it's a difficult job. And, you know, you've got a lot of master growers that come out of that, I'll call it that gray market over the decades, they grew fantastic crops, high yielders, high testers with 20 lights. Well, scaling from 20 lights to 2,000 lights is not an easy job. No. So what we're doing in Las Vegas is that when we modular, we're going to build out our facility there in modular chunks of 10,000 square feet. And for every one of those, I'm going to have a master grower. Because it's just my philosophy. I've just seen it in action. A lot of where the Canadian market started to do this when they were reporting their financials is that it was crop failure and it was really crops that weren't worthy of the retail, you know, everybody thought it might be in A grade but was really a D minus grade kind of thing, right? And the other thing too that, you know, a lot of people don't talk about is just access to genetics. So the good news about Nevada and our grow team that Hassan has kind of led up is that we were able to do a review of our genetic library ourselves. And then through the medical system, you're also able to bring new genetics in. And I often likened, I don't want to beat up too much on Canada because I'm a Canadian and you know, I love being a Canadian. But when you were buying legal cannabis in stores in 2018, 2019, even up until now, it's a lot of Coors light, Bud light, Michelob light. It's not the heavy hitter genetic strains that you would find safe, for instance, in the gray market. So that's one of the big things that we were able to do as well to is people first, I think you're always going to need the best people. And then looking at your facility, you've got to upgrade it. We upgraded to LED lights. We upgraded to a better water, our system. We've put UV lights into all of our HVACs we air purification, super important to us. We don't want to have crop failures and we don't want to have infestations and other types of, you know, things that can really take down a crop. So and then it comes to your genetics, right? You've got to be growing the best. And for us, we've got a genetic library now of over 50 strains. And we're trying to cherry pick which are the ones that yield the best, which are the ones that that test best. And really for us, it's that 25 percent THC and higher. We can get it up to the, you know, 32 33 on our flower. Our flower is known as a top shelf flower in the Las Vegas market. And that's probably a real testament to our grow team and our organic platform. And really at the end of the day, the market's going to tell you how you're going to do. And, you know, if you're building brands and, you know, all these buzzwords that you're in the industry, well, you can go build a brand. And it's got the greatest packaging in the history of the cannabis industry. It's got the greatest marketing and promo. But at the end of the day, if you sell that into the market and it's a connoisseur market and you start getting bad reviews, the brand is dead right out of the gate. So there's all these elements that we're working on, but it all starts with people, it starts with the facility, the genetics and just making sure that you do what you say you're going to do. That's great. Now for us, our community is all over the world. I believe we've got about 100 countries watching Rich TV Live now. And we love to help put companies on the map like yourself. Now, it's vital that we understand your share structure. We love tight float stocks. One of the issues that we've seen with cannabis stocks, not all of them, some of them, very dilutive because they were literally printing shares to keep the lights on printing shares to not go bankrupt in a lot of cases. And some of them turned it around. Some of them have found their way through it. Some of them have not. What is your share structure? How much is held by insiders and institutions? Because we love tight float stocks. Well, I'm super glad you asked because when I took the job around a year ago, we had 156 million shares issued note standing. And there were a lot of warrants that have since expired. They just didn't make, didn't make the mark. I reversed a transaction that my predecessors had done whereby I took back into Treasury 18.5 million shares. So I have reversed diluted the company. We sit at around 134 million shares issued note standing today. 84% of those, we know where they are. And really, when I talk about a cleanup, 2020 was the year of the cleanup. So not only did we improve the facilities and get the dispensary more profitable, but we went back into the share structure and we probably crossed out around 20 to 25 million shares. So just by identifying who those potential shareholders were that wanted to wanted to exit the business, we made crosses. So if you saw any volume spikes in 2020 that was pretty much a cross that we were taking from what I would call unknown hands into friendly hands. And so we're we're held at about 84% of our issued note standing is in friendly hands. We've sort of broken it down by brokerage house. And that's a lot in friendly hands. That's pretty good. Yeah. So so what we, you know, people say, well, what's your public float? And you know, it's probably somewhere still around 20 million shares, maybe 25, but as as we've been, you know, we believe in this business, our management team, board and, you know, some of our close, you know, long term shareholders, they've understood that this was a turnaround project. We're pretty much on the precipice of announcing for once and for all that this is turned around and we're off to profitability. And we've been accumulating shares along the way. I've put a lot of my own personal money into the business, both in the form of buying shares and I've, you know, loaned the business some money, just as we did that turnaround. I at one point in my career had a very fledgling upstart tech company and it was private, had a couple partners in that business. And I always remember our advisor telling us like, you're going to sell this business someday. So your private company, treat it like it's a publicly traded company. So when we sold that business to to tremble, you know, six billion dollar market cap and they sick their lawyers and accountants on you for due diligence. Well, we passed with flying colors. It was an all cash deal. Now that I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company, I'm sort of reversing that. I'm saying treat it kind of like a private company for a little bit here. Right. I understand I've got to talk to shareholders where, you know, we've made probably over 40 news releases since my arrival 12 months ago, just to keep the news out there. Just I've done CEO forums. I've done zoom meetings with shareholders because it's important that everybody understand what the message is and everything that we said we're going to do we've done. So now that we looked at the capitalization table as we headed into the new year, again, we would love to have new shareholders coming on board that really buy into the long term strategy here. I think the US space is still going to just explode. We want to be one of the primary players in that space. You know, if you look at the board game monopoly in the in the US cannabis space, I think having Las Vegas and Palm Springs are two awesome pieces of the board. And we're profitable on both. And then, you know, some people talk to me about, you know, options and warrants. And, you know, is there a bunch that are going to come on the market and dilute the shares? Well, I can tell you this, all the warrants are from our new investors. And, you know, for instance, I never brought friends and family into any deals before. And I've probably brought brought about 40 to 50 of my, you know, the people that wanted to kind of come along from the ride. So a few of our other large shareholders, they're bringing people in every time that we know people who are buying shares, we just think that that we're just really tightening our hold on the on the share structure. And then any warrants that are going to come do are going to come from these friendly investors and they know that this is a long term buy and hold for a period of time here. And then our options are all management. So that was just, you know, that we're incentivizing our people by way of options and helping grow the company to make it profitable and really expand ourselves like we can begin our expansion on, we've got an extra license, an extra cultivation license in Las Vegas. We've got that out on the market. It's worth a couple million bucks. So that money would go, we'll sell that license and we'll immediately put it into the expansion of our apex facility in Las Vegas, non dilutive, no debt. We're actually organically growing as well as not just, you know, producing a high product and getting good margin for it. And then yeah, am I going to have to raise some money? Probably. But, you know, now that the share price has sort of been stabilized, you're going to start to see, especially with, you know, more market awareness out there. I've always said if I'd like to be in 2021, the best kept secret in the US MSO space, you know, we're kind of a little guy right now. But I think we can beef ourselves up, you know, we're also in discussions to potentially buy a dispensary in Las Vegas. By the time we expand our footprint in Las Vegas to like I say, 80 to 100,000 square feet. Get that retail dispensary. I think that's a hundred million dollar business. And then over the border in California, we've got a very profitable store right now. We're going to put some additional marketing behind it, but we also own two and a half acres of land that's literally a five minute drive away. And we've got some designs to build out a cultivation there too. So our goal vertically integrated in Las Vegas, vertically integrated in Palm Springs. And everything that we do is going to either be profitable from the get go or have an automatic ROI in terms of raising capital. If there was one thing you would want shareholders to know or potential investors that are watching this video about Fiora cannabis, what would it be? There were a fundamentally sound business that we we've really tightened our operating expenses. So as we climb revenues, we're not adding more and more people or more and more equipment, supplies, whatever it is, we're going to run it profitable from here on out. And we're going to do everything for for shareholder value that we can, right? And that includes great communication. And every time that we've got opportunities to maybe expand our footprint, we are looking at some M&A opportunities, not just retail, but we're looking at some other potential synergistic acquisitions in the Nevada market. Just being super transparent with our with our shareholder and investor base and being like I'd love to just be known as that unicorn in the US MSO space that we might not be the biggest or building a platform here that we can bring in some accretive M&A opportunities. And then, you know, sort of to what I saw in the Canadian space, probably one of the big guys is going to knock on your door at some point in time and they're going to do that due diligence and they're going to look for some chinks in the armor and there aren't going to be any because it's a fundamentally sound business. There's going to be shareholders all over the world. They're going to want to get in contact with you that potentially business partners like you're talking about mergers and acquisitions. A lot of other public companies watch these videos that might be watching and learning about your company. What's the best way for them to get in contact with you? Yes, we just sort of did a new launch of our website. So the best thing would be to go to the investor section of our website. Sign up for our newsletter. It kind of gets into the database. We've been doing some mail outs recently because we put a telegram app together where people can kind of have some discussion relative to our company. We put a YouTube channel together. We're sort of stepping up our game on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, just on that social media aspect. And yeah, so it all starts with just putting your name into the database or trying to find us on one of the various social media or business media outlets. We don't intend to kind of shy away at this stage right now. You know, we did the name change back in November. I think we doubled our share price since that name change. That name change was really from the Nevada market where, you know, the the brand is synonymous with, you know, high quality flour. It's Italian for flour. We like the name. It really represents who we are. It instantly sells when those menus hit the hit the Las Vegas market. So we think that by the time that we were almost ready to say, hey, the turnaround is complete, we did the name change, we did the brand and change new website, all these other channels, we enjoy talking to shareholders. And the fun part is taking somebody who's maybe been a long term shareholder and really changing their mind that this is actually going to return an investment to them. Right. It's not just to get your money back scenario anymore. It's you're going to actually make some money here. And then for our new investors coming in, they're coming in fresh. And it's just really important to us whatever we communicate to the market, if we say we're going to do it, we're going to do it. I'm really impressed with everything I hear. Eric Anderson, the CEO of Fiori Cannabis. Remember, Rich Stevie Live is strictly for education and entertainment purposes. Always do your due diligence. Always do your research and consult a financial advisor before you make any investment in any companies that we talk about on our show. Chances are, if you speak to a financial advisor, they're going to do their due diligence and they say, yeah, it's like a little, really, really, really good deal. I really like what I see here, Eric. I think this is a company that is undervalued, underappreciated, underexposed. Before today, I didn't know about Fiori Cannabis. So this is something that is really going to, I think, become way more mainstream. I think way more investors and members of our community are going to be learning about this company, researching this company, getting a better feel for the company. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of them also position themselves in the company. Early stage, price right, starting to build momentum, like you said, you're lowering the share structure, 84%, like you mentioned, held by friends and people that you're comfortable with, institutions, friendly hands. And you mentioned like a 20 million flow. That is extremely tight flow. So we look for that here at Rich TV Live. So thank you for doing the business the right way and building a strong company. We're not concerned about having the biggest company. We're concerned about finding the best company at the lowest prices. And seems as though this is a company that is on the rise. If you guys like the video, please smash the like button, comment down below, share the video everywhere and subscribe. Eric Anderson, the CEO. Thank you for joining us today, Eric. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure. And thank you guys for watching. If you're not winning, you're not watching. This is Rich from Rich TV Live with Eric Anderson, the CEO of Fiori Cannabis saying have a nice day and we'll talk to you soon.