Sawadee Everyone,
For many years one of the top pieces of advice old dogs could give to the new pups arriving in Thailand was never to buy a beer bar in Thailand.
The main reason given actually made perfect sense. If you don’t have experience running a bar back home, you’re not going to suddenly become an expert in running a bar in Thailand. Liking beer is different than knowing how to sell beer.
Still the siren’s call is/was too strong and it is/was far too common to hear about some recent retiree that spent a bit of time in the bars and decided to sink their life savings into a beer bar.
Whether they lost money due to bad luck, theft, or just their own business incompetence, most would end up listing the same bar back on the market in a few years.
Some bars just became revolving doors where new owners would take over, lose money, sell the bar, the new owner would lose money, and they would sell it to someone else.
I think cannabis dispensaries are going to end up the new cautionary tale.
They share many similarities in that the startup costs are relatively low and people that are good customers of dispensaries think that qualifies them to be good business owners.
I’ve seen two dispensaries for sale just this week alone and those are just the ones openly advertising their availability. Plenty of dispensaries are quietly disappearing without even an attempt to sell the business, which should be an indicator of just how poorly they were doing.
Yet, I still see people posting in forums and in the r/CannabisThailand sub about opening up a dispensary or starting a grow operation with no prior experience in the cannabis industry or, in some cases, no experience ever running a business anywhere.
Owning a bar or a cannabis dispensary seems like a dream job. Wait, I can sit around and just smoke weed all day?
No, no, you can’t.
If you actually want to make money, if you want your businesses to survive and thrive, it’s way more than just sitting around and drinking/smoking all day.
And that’s where most beer bars and dispensary owners fail.
Starting any new business is far from being a passive investment. You don’t just hire staff and sit in the back and count the money.
I’ve always told people that come to me for business advice, “Unless you can do it better, faster, or cheaper than the competition, don’t waste your time or money.”
Obviously, that’s very generic advice and there are most certainly some situations where it doesn’t apply but it’s actually spot on advice for a business in an over saturated market.
If you can’t answer why your customers should pick you over your competition, neither can your customers.
Many of the most commonly recommended dispensaries on the subreddit are unlikely contenders. They’re not on the busiest street corner in a high traffic area, they’re not backed by tons of money, etc.
What they do have is something that differentiates them, that makes customers not only want to return but to recommend them to others.
Those businesses obviously figured out how to do it better, faster, or cheaper than the shops with 10x the resources and they executed their vision successfully.
Those will be the businesses that survive and thrive in Thailand.
Stay lifted and enlightened,
Don’t forget that we’ve partnered with some dispensaries for exclusive deals available to members of this newsletter and the r/CannabisThailand sub on Reddit. Just type “Dank Deal” into the comments of any post and the AutoMod will send you the current discounts being offered.
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