Roberta Bain had a profitable business with her hair salon and fell in love with being an entrepreneur. She sold her business to go into a joint venture shortly after marrying her husband, a horticulturalist. Their start-up company of micro-greens was successful and their product was distributed across Canada. Roberta loved the culture that she was building with her team – a culture that supported a sustainable food product and a culture that supported the core values of the team. It was exciting to be part of a company providing a sustainable food product.
Then, overnight, it became legal to grow cannabis. Having all the growing infrastructure made it easy to transition to growing cannabis. But Roberta found this change very difficult. It changed the way people thought about her (not everyone agrees with cannabis), it changed her marriage (not easy when you are the COO and your husband is the CEO), and it changed the culture of the team (culture is the most innovative part of business growth).
Roberta talks about all these changes, how she had to get back to doing what was important to her after losing herself, and how difficult it was for her to get back into the workforce when she wasn’t the leader.