Brett Gelfand's Linkedin Analytics

Cannabis companies would rather risk a $50,000 loss than pay $150 for credit checks. It’s like cancelling health insurance to save $200 p/m. Sadly, the chances of someone stiffing you in cannabis are WAY higher than your chances of needing that hospital visit. Yet most operators treat credit checks like an unnecessary expense. Look, when you're focused on survival, anything that costs money upfront feels like a burden. And if it gets in the way of a “sale”, I can see why you’d resent it. But let's talk real numbers. Cannabiz Credit Association costs around $150 per month. A bad debt from a major customer can cost you $50,000 to $100,000 (or more). Plus all the time, energy, and damaged relationships you'll deal with trying to collect. The companies doing credit checks avoid losses and build stronger customer relationships from the start. When you set clear payment terms based on actual credit profiles, you prevent problems instead of fighting them later. I’ll keep making this point for as long as I have to. If we can all accept that there are bad actors—some intentionally so, others just over their skis—surely the only logical approach is to ensure they don’t owe you a lot of money. And the only way to do that is to only extend terms AFTER you’ve checked their credit history. Otherwise it’s COD. If you're not running checks on new customers, you're gambling your cash flow on complete strangers.

If you think brands have a tough time with AR right now, marketing and SaaS companies are in a collections nightmare. They're dealing with the hardest collection cases I see because a lot of what they deliver gets disputed. It's not like selling flower, which is “I gave you product, you give me money, done.” With tech services, clients can claim "this software wasn’t good" or "the marketing didn't work" and suddenly you're fighting over a 12-month contract. These companies are stuck in an impossible spot. If they’re not mission-critical—like POS system, for example—they have relatively little leverage to get paid. Cannabis companies can survive without a marketing platform or data analytics, so these services get axed first. I see this pattern constantly, specifically with annual contracts on monthly billing. Client stops paying after six months, claims the service didn't meet expectations, and now you're battling over the remaining payments. Your contract says they owe you, but they're disputing quality and results. A brand can cut off a dispensary when someone doesn't pay, but service companies typically can't create that same pressure. Cannabis operators know they can dispute, delay, and drag things out while focusing on keeping their core business alive. If you're running tech or marketing services in cannabis, this is probably your daily reality. If this sounds like you, give me a call. CannaBIZ Collects works on contingency and might be your best chance to get paid.

What do you do: a new dispensary chain moves into your state and is asking for $50K in product on 30-day terms. They seem legitimate - they wouldn’t be expanding if they weren’t successful…..right? But how do you weigh this up if you don’t have historical sales data on them? This scenario has been on my mind because I just lost a Cannabiz Credit Association member who said, "We'll just use our own sales data." But….you can only see how customers pay YOU, not how they're treating everyone else. It's like a bank only checking if you've defaulted on THEIR loans before giving you another one. The cannabis industry is drowning in receivables because we keep making the same mistake. We extend credit to new accounts with zero visibility into their actual payment behavior. When that Massachusetts operator canceled, I asked, "What about new business?" Silence. Internal data is useless for evaluating new accounts. Meanwhile, our database tracks which companies have been sent to collections. We know which dispensaries consistently pay late across multiple vendors before you ship them a dollar of product. We provide unlimited user access and 30-minute onboarding calls to ensure your team can implement this seamlessly. You get clear A-B-C-D risk ratings, not complex data that requires a financial analyst to interpret. For less than $200 per month, you get visibility that could prevent a five-figure default on your very next order via CCA. The choice is simple: complete industry payment visibility or flying blind with new accounts. What will your CFO say when that exciting new account ghosts you on a $50K invoice?

Thanks for having me and shedding light on this critical topic of credit and collection issues plaguing our industry MJBiz. I see so much blame thrown around and it’s time operators wake up to understand best practices around credit/collections if they decide to ‘act as a bank’ and extend any type of credit terms to customers.

extremely well said.

If you're not in survival mode, now is the best time to focus on rebuilding internally. Every cannabis company I talk to is exhausting themselves fighting against the tide. They're pounding on doors, chasing discounts, trying to force sales that aren't there. When you're scrambling to survive, you can't think beyond next week's payroll. If you’re fortunate enough to be profitable today, this is the moment to step back and fortify your business. Trying to force growth when conditions are this tight will burn your team out. But if you're in the black, now's the time to take a hard look at: — Systems — Processes — Product This is what we’re doing at CannaBIZ Collects and Cannabiz Credit Association. We're improving the plumbing that supports the companies, and the product that we sell. (I've got updates on changes we've made coming really soon!) If you're fortunate enough to think beyond survival, use this slower buying period to prepare for the next phase. When the market improves, who's going to be ready? The companies that spent months chasing reluctant prospects, or the ones that used this time to regroup and prepare for scale?

We’ve just made a huge update to the Cannabiz Credit Association: it's now way easier for you to search for companies. And to know who is who. Previously, if you'd search for a business you’d get, for example, "Speedy Weedy" in one place and "Speed Weedy" in another. This was a reflection of how things were reported from a member’s QuickBooks. Most entries had no addresses, no license info, nothing. And the amount of naming variations and DBAs made this a puzzle. Users had to figure out if they were looking at one company or three totally different ones. So we spent six months completely reconstructing this. Now companies map to an actual license number and you can search by state, license, or location. We got over 80% of addresses filled in and have a “north star” through intensive data hygiene. This goes way beyond just cleaner searches. We rebuilt the foundation for pulling credit scores - you gotta know exactly who you're dealing with before you can figure out if they'll pay you. But what I'm really excited about is what we can build next: — Real partnerships, integrations, and APIs based on coherent data We can add license status, license types, news about companies, all of it. Everything builds from having this foundation right. For our users, this means no more guessing if "Green Leaf Co" and "Greenleaf Company" are the same business. No more wasting time on searches that go nowhere. You can finally trust that when you pull a credit report, you're getting info on the right company. What other updates would you like to see us tackle in future?

MJBiz asked me guest feature for them on the state of industry AR in a recent article. Here are the high(low)lights from the article: — California leads the crisis with $777M in AR — Followed by Michigan with $231M — And Massachusetts with $144M Some states are seeing more than 30% of all receivables past due. While 46% of cannabis AR remains current (0-30 days), 24%—more than $529 million—has aged beyond 91 days. 91 days is significant, because the chances of collecting *plummet* after that. The best and cheapest way to stay out of this mess is to run credit checks. Companies that do this are 60% less likely to end up in collections. And if it wasn't clear from the data, this problem is getting WORSE and SPREADING. -- I honestly hate being the bearer of bad news all the time... I'm actually a very positive person, I promise! But I won't stop waving a red flag about these problems until we can start to meaningfully clean this mess up as an industry. I'm very grateful to MJBiz for giving me the opportunity to share what Cannabiz Credit Association is seeing out there. This affects every single cannabis company, directly or indirectly. Full article in the comments. There's a lot more info in there for you.

"But you guys are going to take your fee which will hurt our margin." I hear this objection all the time from cannabis companies with aging accounts receivable. Let me be absolutely clear: — There's NO MARGIN if you can't collect — 25% of $0 = $0 50% of $0 = $0 100% of 0 = $0 When your invoice hits 90+ days past due, you've crossed into a different financial reality. What started as a potentially profitable sale is now a rapidly depreciating asset. Every day that passes drops your probability of recovery by approximately 1-2%. Yet cannabis operators keep dedicating sales reps, finance staff, and even executives to fruitless collection calls. These resources aren't free - their time represents a significant opportunity cost to your business. The expense of chasing debt for months exceeds any contingency fee you pay. So the rational question becomes: — "Is something better than nothing?" — CannaBIZ Collects brings specialized tools that dramatically increase recovery odds. The most financially disciplined cannabis companies establish clear escalation thresholds. And they know when to stop fantasizing about preserving margin and start maximizing cash recovery.