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to craft a retail experience that caters to your clientele. Standing out from the crowd is a good thing. Cannabis retailers are creatively branding themselves and stitching themselves into the fabric of their neighborhoods. 3. Power your cannabis real estate strategy with software. After payroll, real estate is often the second larg- est expense for many organizations. The same is true for cannabis retail- ers. However, real estate can also be a revenue center. So, ensuring every storefront you open is profitable is critical. Lease management software enables your real estate and finance teams to track rent payments, rent

escalations, and additional expenses to ensure your monthly storefront spend has a strong ROI. Don’t take the forthcoming retail cannabis market for granted. You’re still operating in a regulated industry with varying application procedures and conditional use permits per market. From marketing to real estate, all your strategies will be informed by this fact. However, technology can help navigate your proposed sites for cannabis sales. Start capturing the data if you haven’t already, get the right lease management system in place to ensure your team never misses

opportunities, and think more strategically about where you open your next storefront. Take a page from Starbucks and McDonald’s, two companies that are more real estate companies than peddlers of coffee and burgers. They know where to open their next storefronts, and it all comes down to consumer and real estate market data. •

Matt Giffune is a co-founder at Occupier, a lease management software platform helping commercial tenants and brokers manage their real estate footprint and

comply with lease accounting standards. Before working at Occupier, Giffune held leadership posi- tions within commercial real estate and technology sales. He’s currently based in Boston.

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