Bryan Passman, Co-founder, CEO of Hunter + Esquire
Bryan is the Co-founder and CEO of Hunter + Esquire. His professional background before launching H+E was entirely in retained executive search for 18 years in MedTech/Pharma (15 yrs) and Food and Adult Beverage CPG (3 yrs). His deep knowledge of those highly regulated and nuanced industries has helped H+E significantly understand the needs and wants of their cannabis clients. Bryan’s deep and genuine networks within those industries helped them deliver that rare talent “unicorn” clients desire to fit their particular needs.
https://www.hunteresquire.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanpassman/
bryan@hunteresquire.com
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Thinking Outside the Bud where we speak with entrepreneurs investors thought leaders researchers advocates and policymakers who are finding new and exciting ways for cannabis to positively impact business society and culture. And now, here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:30] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc. Award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For details on the program visit Eckfeldt.com/thrive. That's E C K F E L D T.com/thrive.
[00:01:07] Welcome, everyone. This is Thinking Outside the Bud. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Bryan Passman. He is founder of Hunter and Esquire, which has a retained executive recruiting consultancy. We're going to talk to him about talent. We're going to talk to him about cannabis. I'm excited for this. I think that's the whole talent question. The talent challenge in cannabis is significant growing industry. I think where we're lacking highly skilled folks really at all levels, particularly people that have the right business skills to run a company you stop a company is to grow company is develop strategy. So I'm excited to talk about this and see where the talent market is going, what people are doing to find good talent, retain good talent. So with that, Brian, welcome to the program.
[00:01:47] Thank you, Bruce. I'm happy to be here with you. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:50] Let's talk a little bit about your background and talent and recruiting and then how you how you got into cannabis. What was the kind of a story? Tell us a little bit about your professional background and how you got to where you are today.
[00:02:01] Sure. So began my professional career now 20 years ago in retained executive search, in fact, with a Miami based agency focused on the medical device industry and spent fifteen years with that. So that was global placement of technical, financial and operational leaders and FDA regulated settings for medical device companies eventually worked with Big Pharma as well. That was every corner of the world imaginable. Moved on to food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, executive recruitment for about two and a half years with another agency where I had an opportunity to lead a lot of client interactions in the adult beverage space and had been watching very closely probably since about twenty fourteen the development of the cannabis industry and wasn't sure of my entry point to the space. And you know, watching it and growing a network in the space because friends, neighbors, acquaintances were getting in and just learning it about it, studying it.
[00:03:05] We made a decision together, we being my wife and I, to launch into the space with a retained executive search firm. So that's two years ago. We officially launched with that. And that was after, you know, just again, watching the industry wanting in.
[00:03:24] We I personally have a long standing relationship with the players and really passionate about the success of the industry. And what we saw was largely unmet need being met where these companies were looking to really elevate the executive talent and hire outside of the friends and family and just inner circle referral network. And, you know, we had to have that sign. There were a number of staffing agencies and job boards serving the industry. But to our knowledge, no one was a dedicated executive search consultancy at that time. So we launched. And I can safely say it's the best professional decision in just to kind of educate people a little bit.
[00:04:06] When we talk about retained executive recruitment, executive search, how does that model work? How is it different than some of the other models people use for talent acquisition and talent search and talent acquisition?
[00:04:16] Right. So there's there's an easy way to draw a line between retained search and contingency search, the executive level. There's know staffing for hourly or entry or mid-level professionals you can put into a different bucket. But in the executive search world, you could say there's retained and contingency. The difference with retain model is you get a guarantee to get the role filled, you get a fulfillment guarantee and a dick guarantee where that person will be employed for some amount of time in the role.
[00:04:50] And a retained recruiter will offer those guarantees because the retain model will allow for a more purposeful selection process whereby everyone can feel confident that the fullest slate of best in class talent was compiled and the best possible candidate was hired again after a very purposeful and rigorous selection process. So the fee is calculated upfront. So say that that executive hire you're one compensation is $200000 a year and you agree on a 30 percent fee. Right. So you're talking about sixty thousand dollars. You would chop that up into a third. And the company would pay the one third twenty thousand upfront in the form of a retainer to allow a search agency to put all of their resources towards executing on that search for a week or two or three to deliver that slate, a contingency model is if a company decides to fill this role. We agree to pay a fee on a contingency that we hire someone's candidate. They'll allow any number of search firms to throw resume gays in the mix. And then, you know, it sort of becomes a jumble of sorts. After a while, recruiters are bumping into the same candidates fighting over who owns who. It's just it's more of a mad dash to get talent in and hope your person gets hired first. So, again, it's a little bit less rigorous, a little bit less purposeful in the development of the process to ensure that you're checking off all the boxes on both sides. And, you know, there's more of a time and monetary investment from the company. Seemingly. But in the end, your time is saved because you're only reviewing a very short list of highly qualified talent when you go with a retainer model because their recruiter should be heavily focused on protecting your time and only delivering those that are 100 percent worth consideration.
[00:06:40] I've learned both, but having having been hiring CEO looking for senior talent as well as being on the other side, being hired by folks, that kind of Wild West aspect of contingency search is certainly very true. I get flooded with resumes, flooded with candidates that I have to kind of then end up sorting through versus retained as a it's a much more kind of bespoke model where where I know that that recruiter is investing a lot in the process, investing a lot and qualifying the candidates and really bringing on the table the people that we really should talk to. They're really of final, final candidates. I think it's it's an important distinction. I think a lot of people don't don't understand the differences between these models and kind of the application of them. I'm curious, as as a recruiter in cannabis and the retain side, what it does is allow you to do in terms of finding talent, like where are you looking for talent? Where are the kind of sources and another process that you're using to find folks. I mean, given that in the cannabis space, there is there are few people that actually have long experiences with cannabis. You know, you're kind of left with trying to pivot and recruit people from adjacent industries or transition people. How does it look from a recruiting standpoint?
[00:07:46] Sure. Like in year one for us? The VA asked 100 percent of the time was for talent without any pre-existing cannabis industry experience, regardless of CFO, CEO, V.P. of marketing, regardless of the higher cannabis companies wanted a professional, accomplished, proven leader from a blue chip company setting an established industry. Someone who knew what great looks like in a World-Class setting, who could carry everything over to their company in the cannabis industry and simply have to learn the industry itself and checked off every other functional box, all the hard skills and soft skills, and where our backgrounds came into play because our teams here are made up of people I've worked with in the past. So we all share the same backgrounds and heavily FDA regulated health care settings or food or beverage. We have people here in retail and hospitality. Picking apart our networks. Of course, there are job postings we post on LinkedIn and our Web site and we've had all applicants, but we typically exceed the applicant pool with types of candidates that we reach out to through our database or just active researching and networking. And the unicorn profile will say that was frequently asked for with someone who had healthcare and CPG, ideally adult beverage experience for many roles because of some of the shared nuances between those industries.
[00:09:14] And that was perfect for us, because the more narrow the goalposts, the more selective the hiring company and more specific. The role is really more of an opportunity for us to shine and deliver on our value proposition. It's been interesting to see that evolve. And over the past couple of years we've built up our executive network in cannabis with people who are homegrown in it for many years, who are doing great, still thriving, and others who in the past 1, 2 or 3 years have entered the industry, but more established industries. And now the new unicorn profile ask is, well, let's get someone with all the established industry experience and then has also spent the past, you know, one or few years in the cannabis industry. Right. So they're coming in, eyes wide open. They really understand all of the very unique challenges that we deal with here. So we can we can deliver on any of those. And it's for us. You know, very tailored approach, whatever the company wants. They get so long as the compensation package that's constructed aligns. And, you know, it's not too much of a, you know, champagne budget misalignment.
[00:10:20] And then and then we can advise on that.
[00:10:23] And then our experience for all these years comes into play and we can say, OK, well, let's let's adjust the desire profile, ask or. Or the comp package a little bit.
[00:10:31] I'm curious in terms of transitioning people from other industries. You know, I've I've dealt with this quite a bit with some of the clients that I work with and bringing in folks from, you know, whether it's pharmaceutical or agricultural science or research. Know, I must say, not everyone makes a good transition. There's some differences about the cannabis space from some of these other spaces that's, you know, can be offputting or can be challenging for folks. I guess what have you noticed in terms of people that are coming out of these more established, you know, bigger industries pivoting into cannabis? What makes a candidate that can make that transition?
[00:11:05] Well. And what do you notice around folks that don't necessarily make that transition so well?
[00:11:10] Yeah, a lot of things. So we can we can speak to the tangible things that we measure on a resumé and a profile such as people for a mix of big and small company experience. If someone is only worked in a very large, very well-established company where budgets and systems and teams have been handed to them for many years, they're probably going to struggle. We do like people that have demonstrated an ability to take risk and change industries. So, you know, if someone's only work, Natalie, same company or or say two big companies, but only in the same industry, it makes a little bit more difficult to gauge their adaptability, which, you know, then leads to really the part that we bet heavily on, which are the soft skills. And, you know, how adaptable is this person? How passionate are they all about being in the space? So they retain model does allow us to really get to know the candidates, not just professionally and financially, but personally and understand what is driving them. Why are they interested in this opportunity? Do they just want to be a part of the cool kids club by working in this industry? And there's no real singular right answer.
[00:12:21] There's a couple of wrong answers, such as, well, you know, again, I think it'll be fun or cool, but understanding their why? And are they passionate about the industry because of what it's doing for patients and consumers alike or, you know, the business opportunity, the opportunity to build an industry for what some might be the last time in many of our lifetimes? I'll be a part of something as special as that. Right. So it's a lot of the why. And really, honestly, making them fight for it a bit there. There should be a cost of entry. It's a special industry to be in. And there is very high turnover not only at the staff ranks, but at the executive ranks, because a lot of times for the optics of hiring top talent, there are very quick hires made where it looks great on paper, but the person is not right for the industry because they don't have those past experiences or those soft skills. And it's a shame because they are challenging enough to operate one of these companies without self-imposed hiccups as well, such as heavy turnover. Right. Your officer ranks. He was a lot of momentum and other middle managers.
[00:13:25] How how much have you treated these searches as similar to any, you know, executive search that you would do for a company of these sizes? And, you know, at this gross edge and how I guess what's what's different for you in terms of when you're dealing with a cannabis higher cannabis company and looking for an executive hire. What's unique about the process or you have to change about the process because of the nature of the industry, is anything anything you notice that is is similar and then anything you notice particularly difficult?
[00:13:54] Well, yeah, from the first call. So assuming we're speaking to a professional, looking after the industry, there's from the onset at that that that hello, really there's there's an education that is typically not needed, certainly not in the depth that we perform. So introducing a professional to the industry the proper way. You know, there's there's not a lot of great media or certainly not a lot of mainstream media coverage of the industry. It's a very, very dynamic industry if you're on the outside looking in. It's it's difficult to have really your finger on the pulse and understand the dynamics of it, certainly from market to market level. So we educate heavily on the on the industry itself and then on the players in the industry. So different if you're recruiting someone from Coke to Pepsi, you know, they've been in the beverage space for a while. You know, they know the landscape, that segment. So there's there's that a lot of conversation around. Well, you know, we're not a federally legal industry at this time. Are you certain that it aligns with you and your family? What will your loved ones what will your your rabbi or your priest say about this? Is there anything in your background that will prevent you from passing the level to background check? You know, because we do have to pass that, whereas you're probably not dealing with that. Or, you know, maybe if you have a green card or a work visa status, you have to talk about how that might be impacted by entering the industry. So, you know, a lot of personal factors. There's, I think, any recruiters doing right by their client, regardless of industry. They're vetting for culture fit and the soft skills to succeed in a role. So I'd say maybe just just magnify that by some. When recruiting for entry of the cannabis industry, but that should be a constant regardless of your client and industry.
[00:15:36] You know, for folks that are kind of listening to this, that are in adjacent industries or other industries that have, you know, thought about kind of dabbling or getting involved in cannabis and anything, any kind of rules of thumb heuristics, pieces of advice that you typically give folks at the executive level who are thinking about coming into it in terms of the heads up or things you need to be aware of or things that questions you need to really answer your answer, you know, discuss with with whether it's your family or colleagues to really make sure you're going to be successful in the industry. Any advice you give them?
[00:16:05] I think you really think about what have they done in their past that is aligned with creating something, whether from scratch or tearing something down and rebuilding it, be it a a system or a team, a process or a set of them. So thinking about, you know, am I am I truly a builder? Will I be comfortable working in a in a startup industry regardless of the size of the cannabis company and if they're publicly traded or not? These are all startup companies that are standardizing that or creating and trying to get exponentially better every day.
[00:16:42] This is not simply let's go from good to great. This is just really we're still in build it up mode. So challenging. I'm comfortable with being tasked to build, to create, to do something special. Have I done this before? Thinking about how they deal with change? Just being true to themselves for for their sake and for casual hiring companies sake. What is their comfort level with operating heavily in the grey area, having to develop their own intel or insights and data in order to make a decision? Because there's it's lacking largely so, you know, basically being able to operate on the fly. Can you be confident, courageous and humble and hungry to get knocked back every day and get back up? And why do you think that? Have you been a part of that before? What unique special new things have you done before? And if you've not done any of those things, I would not say to rule yourself out. But then a further consider really what is my passion around this and how do I learn more about the industry to measure if I'm a fit? And I suggest attending events there. As we all know, there's plenty of industry events of which, you know, many maybe 20, 50 or $100 to bypass and sit in on sessions and see who you can speak with and just get into the cannabis community itself and feel it out.
[00:18:00] See a grand suggestion. And I think it gives you a huge insight into the kind of dynamic and the culture and just kind of the diversity of the cannabis space, because it really is.
[00:18:08] I remember going to my first, you know, sort of bigger, bigger event. And it was it was a little overwhelming, but it was really Δg and just the characters that I met, you know, the things that people are talking about. You know, the people are getting involved. It's really it is it is fascinating.
[00:18:22] It cares about, you know, you're kind of personal journey on this as you know, as you chose to get into the cannabis space. I guess what kind of reactions did folks have?
[00:18:31] You know, either colleagues, you know, fellow recruiters company, you know, people used to work for family, friends. What was what was the kind of reaction to folks when you sort of announced or you went more kind of open about getting involved in the cannabis space?
[00:18:45] Well, minus one very there was always one of ours. There's always one overwhelmingly positive. And it is it is sort of a funny thing. We we do we do mention at times to do a new hire in the industry, as you might want to hold off on sharing this exciting news with all of your family and friends. You might want to hold off on updating your LinkedIn profile because there's there's always some some bad with the good.
[00:19:12] You know, it's exciting to many what's going on in the industry, whether people are all the way forward or not. It's exciting. And when you are in the industry, you're automatically an expert on all things cannabis, though, right?
[00:19:25] You're automatically an expert on all the today I take for this or that.
[00:19:30] And where should I take and and I invest in. And can you get me a job? So for us, it was dealing with becoming significantly more like playgrounds.
[00:19:44] And oh, and of course and you also you always have cannabis products on you when you work in the industry or what state area or what is are people always expect that you've done something right.
[00:19:54] You must at some you work in the space. Why?
[00:19:56] How can you not have your or your client products? I know. I just find it fascinating. I remember going from there. I would say not. I had some kind of questions from relatives and friends and things like that. You know, years ago when I started doing some work with cannabis companies, you know, and now everyone comes to me jobs and wants to figure out where to invest and where they get just the transition over the last five, six, seven years has been being quite fascinating.
[00:20:21] Yeah. And the you know, be careful with what what investment advice you get, if anything, because.
[00:20:27] But he is. Cannabis company is looking to build out their leadership team, their executive team. Their middle management are thinking about doing a retained search, you know, pick for their key senior folks. What do you need to do to kind of both prep for that? You know, make that as successful as possible. You know, before you start the engagement and then during the engagement, how do you how do you get the most out? How do you work best with a retained recruiting engagement? Give us an insight or give us some suggestions on how you can make the most of that.
[00:20:57] Definitely. So many, many executive roles today in this industry still are newly created roles. There's there are there are now more examples of replacement hires, but many newly created roles. So I do like to work a lot of thought with let's let's align on what this whole description is. We can all agree this person will do more than what's on paper. We want someone who's not going to speak the words. That's not of my job description, but let's do the best of our ability. Define the role defined the lane that it's going to evolve to a kind of an inch wide, mile deep. I guess, you know, stance within. Best we can. And let's also agree on an appropriate compensation package that matches the profile companies should align on who are their internal stakeholders who will be a part of the process and to keep that team consistent. How will they measure the talent that is evaluated through the selection process? I'm a fan of creating a feedback form so that everyone is consistent with what questions they have to answer about their interactions with the candidates and how we're ranking them. They should look at what the candidate experience is is going to be like based on the process that we can outline. In other words, let's deliver a great candidate experience by understanding that we want to have a tight, buttoned up process. So defining that is important and being careful about the selection of your recruitment partner. Of course I'm biased. I'm a fan of companies going outside for key hires. But, you know, run a selection process for your recruiter.
[00:22:33] Don't just hire a recruiter that someone says is good and certainly don't hire based on just the economics. Work with recruiters, have them deliver, you know what their successes are, what their unique value proposition is. Why work with them? You'll get an understanding if you feel like you align with them culturally and certainly. And I'll back up a lot. Now, as a hiring company, I feel like you can clearly define what your culture is and have your team of stakeholders aligned on what is the culture that we're presenting to the talent pool. Let's be aligned on it, but also truthful with it because that person hopefully is landing in your company and staying for a long time. So to be transparent with that is huge. And also to have someone internally going outside to a search firm is great. And if you don't have a V.P. of H.R. or a chief human capital officer, otherwise I'd say even if you're a three to nine person company, the best you can hire an H.R. coordinator or someone in-house that is going to also own the fielding of those interactions, kind of liaise between a search partner, because, you know, when the CEO is running a search and doing his or her job and. Right. That's where, you know, sometimes the process gets sideways and we have to operate at the pace of business. But, you know, if we're going to partner up to win talent, let's set a process and adhere to it to the very best we can and an extra help internally.
[00:23:56] Here's another role playing, you know, the last six months, four months. What are some of the areas that you see particularly kind of challenging or competitive? You know that that is in kind of strong demand for companies now in the cannabis face, any any levels, any kind of functional areas. Anything that you see in that has really gotten hot or or dramatic need over the last six, four months.
[00:24:19] Yes. The the biggest needs for our clients and other companies we know of at the director, vice president, officer level are in the fields of marketing and finance. Those are really every every role in this industry is very challenging. But yeah, if you're a if you're a finance or marketing leader in this space, you really have to be on top of your game. And I mean, we we joke. You probably want someone with a JD in either of those roles on top of the MBA and all of this.
[00:24:50] So, so much of this is impacted by regulatory issues and legal issues, you know, making sure that you're safe, compliant and you're not running amok. Nrama What you can and cannot do and what you can and cannot say different places and different and different media makes sense.
[00:25:04] It's a complete landmine and the location of those landmines are being moved around.
[00:25:10] David Geography's you know where we're in this funky situation where, you know, every state is this kind of his own own market.
[00:25:16] You know, some states have been doing this for a while. Some say so of just coming online. Some are, you know, embracing adult use. Some are just staying medical. What did you notice in terms of, you know, which states are kind of heating up or, you know. Frances, that you notice in the talent market from state to state. Any insights there?
[00:25:32] Well, with Colorado loosening up the laws against companies, cannabis companies, that is the rules against going public and M&A activity in the industry. That loosening up in Colorado has shown us a very strong uptick in executive hiring outside of the network. There's been a very nice, I guess, increase in capital coming those organizations, which is increasing the need for human capital at the executive level. The media needs up and down the California coast have been strong. They've softened up a bit, certainly compared to the East Coast. So we've seen a lot of activity from companies we know of in New York and Massachusetts. There's there's a lot of scaling going on there. And again, with our focus on executive placement. You do have a lot of companies headquartered in those cities. So in or in those geographies, rather. So Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey. And I think then second for that coming up, strong is soil and OI has been quite strong. But in the Midwest, we're seeing a lot coming out of Michigan right now.
[00:26:41] Anything on the international, if not a sea there in North America? You know, Canada or Mexico or some of the other continents, things that that you've seen or at least has impacted, you know, finding talent, you know, where talent demands are. It's just the international side of this is interesting. I'm curious if you're running in anything there.
[00:26:59] Yeah. We see a lot more conferences sprouting up outside the US. There's loads of them in the E.U., U.K. and further off the you know, for us, we've seen more more j.b.'s, more partnerships being established. Right, between North American cannabis companies and those outside the U.S.. So we've had an opportunity to help those companies vet that leadership. So, you know, that's that's another service your recruiter should be able to provide if you're looking at a merger or acquisition or what is a partnership to leverage their talent, evaluation skills. And if you've partnered with them deeply and they understand your culture to have them, you know, get a team for that M&A or Javy. So we've seen an increase in cross-continental partnerships, which we expect in 2020 will lead to a lot more hiring for us in the space outside of North America, which has been a little bit light for us. Just think about our experience. Certainly Canada, as we enter as we approach Canada 2.0, yeah, there's been an increase in executive hiring there. Everyone's ramping up, but we're also seeing a leveling where, you know, Excel and some others and can trust in the news. Recently north of the border, they've they've had to look some setbacks, as we say.
[00:28:15] Yeah.
[00:28:15] So there's there's a leveling and then that and then, you know, and then again, that just that that creates another challenge for your hiring team and your talent acquisition vendor to answer those questions to talent coming in, because they're watching it, they're investing in it and they're worried if you dispute or reduce 25 percent of your headcount and then go out and say, well, come join the company in this growing industry. You know, there's increased hesitation. So we've been engaging in more of those conversations. Again, it's education about, well, this is sort of a leveling. And, you know, some company more runway than others because of whether it be their approaches to compliance or corporate governance or or just strategic long term picture approach to.
[00:28:58] It's been great. You wanna find out more about you, about Hunter and Esquire? What's the best way to get that information?
[00:29:04] Our website is w w w dot hunter h UNSCR Esquire. Yes. Q U i r e dot com. We have a presence on Linked-In. Of course they can reach out to me directly at by bryan@hunteresquire.com or we have the contact us link right there on the Web site and we will get right to our in the show notes so people can click through to get that information.
[00:29:30] Brian, this have been great. I think this whole talent space talent issue on the cannabis faces an interesting one. I think it's just going to get more and more challenging as the industry grows, as we need more, more people, you know, and certainly as this whole industry matures, you know, finding people who can can really run these businesses in a strategic, you know, highly well-run, well executed way is gonna be key. I'm curious to see how this plays out. Really appreciate the time. I think it's been a good conversation. I think we had a lot of good, good takeaways for folks here. So thank you for joining me.
[00:29:57] Yes, sir. I appreciate it. And I wish everyone well, you especially Bruce. Thanks again for having me.
[00:30:05] You've been listening to Thinking Outside the Bud with Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt to find a full list of podcast episodes. Download the tools and worksheets and access other great content. Visit the Web site at thinkingoutsidethebud.com. And don't forget to sign up for the free newsletter at thinkingoutsidethebud.com/newsletter.