Advisory Service

Before you open, make sure you’re ready.

The decisions made before opening are the hardest ones to undo afterwards.

Costs worked out before you commit and contracts read before you sign, because a business can be well run and still fail on terms that were agreed in the first six months.

The expensive part

Some decisions you can undo. The ones that matter, you can’t

Opening is a sequence of commitments, and they don’t all cost the same to reverse. Changing your signage is cheap. Changing the lease you signed, the loan you took, or the build-out you paid for is not. The trouble is that the expensive ones tend to come first, at exactly the point when you know the least and everybody around you is telling you to move.

So the work here is order. What has to be decided now, what can wait, and what gets read carefully before anybody signs it. That means the numbers worked out before you commit rather than after, and the big contracts read against the profit and loss statement they’ll be paid out of.

A worked example

This one we know from the inside

144 Bleecker Street · January 2023

Roland opened the second legal cannabis dispensary in New York State. The state needed stores open to hit a number, so he was pushed to open as a pop-up in a few weeks instead of waiting for the build to finish. That one decision came with costs nobody put in front of him first.

The money that was supposed to come on one set of terms came on much harder terms, over a longer period, and put him on the hook for expenses he never negotiated and mostly couldn’t see. Two years later the loan behind the business had put it in default.

He had been running businesses for fifteen years before that. The gap wasn’t ability, it was that cannabis was a new industry with things in it nobody had told him about, and there was no one in the room whose job was to say wait a minute. The full account is on the About page, and it is the reason this service exists at all.

What gets looked at

The four things that go wrong before anybody opens

What the opening actually costs
Not the budget you were given, the real number, worked out against the money that has to service it. Rushed openings cost more than planned ones, and the difference usually shows up in month seven rather than month one.
What’s in the contracts
Read before signing, against the numbers they’ll be paid from. Where a contract needs an attorney, it goes to an attorney. We work out what the terms mean for the business, not whether they’re enforceable.
Who you actually need around you
Getting open touches legal, accounting, tax, finance, compliance, insurance, real estate, construction and technology. Nobody is all of those. We work out which ones your situation needs, in what order, and who is qualified to do each.
What happens if the timeline slips
Because it usually does, and the plans that survive are the ones that were built knowing it might. A date you can’t control is not a plan, it’s a hope with a deposit attached.
No, but it changes the job. We work out which commitments are genuinely locked and which ones you still have room on, and we sequence around what’s left. Knowing which is which is worth having on its own.
No. We are not a licensing consultancy and we don’t file applications. Where that work is needed we say so and help you work out who should do it.
Then this is the right time to be having the conversation. Most of what goes wrong at an opening was decided months before it, which is the whole point.
The other five

If this isn’t the one

All advisory services
Business Diagnostic & Strategy AssessmentWhere most people start Business Stabilization & Operational ImprovementWhen it’s already tight Owner & Executive AdvisoryThe ongoing seat Special Situations & Strategic ProjectsOne defined problem Cannabis Retail AdvisoryOur named practice

If you haven’t opened yet, this is the cheapest work you will ever do.

Everything is still reversible right now. That stops being true on a date you can’t pick.

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Scope, deliverables and timing are determined by the problem RCAG is being asked to solve. Every engagement is defined in writing before work begins.

Roland Conner Advisory Group LLC provides business advisory and consulting services. RCAG does not provide legal, tax, accounting, or investment advice. Submitting information through this website does not create a consulting or advisory relationship.