IAM1182- CEO Helps Companies Enter the Medical Cannabis Market

Dr. Jon Thompson, Founder and CEO of extraktLAB, is a separation scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He received his Doctor of Chemistry degree in 2001 from the University of Minnesota and has since worked on everything from secret projects with NASA to helping companies enter the medical cannabis market. His company helps people find success in the business of pharmaceutical-grade botanical extraction and refinement. Dr. Jon guides his businesses through ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) policies and believes we all deserve a sustainable future.

• CEO Hack: Getting up early
• CEO Nugget: Be careful who you are and who your business partners are
• CEO Defined: Responsibility, leadership, and caring for those around you

Website: https://extraktlab.com/

Educational guides about the hemp industry: https://extraktlab.com/guides/

Mini-courses on Business Management, hemp extraction, Delta 8, and much more: https://extraktlab.com/courses/

Podcast: extrakTALKS with Dr. Jon

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/extrakt_lab/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/extraktlab
Twitter: https://twitter.com/extraktLAB
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/extraktlab/

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gretchen from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dr. Jonathan Thompson of Extract Lab. Dr. John, it's great to have you on the show.

00:58 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Thanks for having me.

00:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, super excited to have you on as well. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Dr. John so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Dr. John a founder and CEO of Extract Lab, is a separation scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He received his doctorate of chemistry degree in 2001 from the University of Minnesota.

And has since worked on everything from secret projects with NASA to helping companies enter the medical cannabis market. His company helps people find success in the business of pharmaceutical grade, botanical, extraction, and refinement. Dr. John guides his businesses through ESG, which is environmental, social, and governance policies, and believes we all deserve a sustainable future. Dr. John, love everything you're doing. We had lots of great laughs before I hit record. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:47 – Dr. Jon Thompson

I'm ready. It's going to be a good time.

01:48 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And so to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on it a little bit. I hear a little bit more about what I like to call your CEO story. We'll let you start with all the awesome work you're doing.

01:59 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Yeah, I mean, basically our business, what we do, and what we've really accomplished in extract lab is we put people into the processing business. So we help people take their biomass and bring it all the way into medical products. We do that around the world. Do that basically in Canada, in Europe, South and Central America, and also in Africa, in the Far East, Middle East. We pretty much have a global footprint. We focus strictly on the medical side of it, the science side of it if you will.

That makes us have less of a market presence in the US markets. But we know that as the US starts to grow up into being more scientific in the way they do things, our company is going to really be propelled into the number one spot. So we're really focused on what they call GMP solutions. That's really what we do. We've had a great time building that company.

02:53 – Gresham Harkless

You touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to drill down a little bit more. Could you take us through a little bit more on how that process works? How do you work with your clients? How do you serve them?

03:00 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Well, okay. Yeah, no problem. I mean, typically we get client inquiries from all over the world all night long. Okay, my my, I have my noted notifications that literally, and there's a little thing on there. So I'm kind of going crazy because all night long, it's been ding, ding, ding, you know, from a new lead coming in. It's pretty cool.

But I've talked now to people all over the world and typically what we do is, you know, they'll look at it from a medical standpoint. Okay, we would like to create a product we're going after this particular indication or this type of particular disease or whatever, and we need help getting up and running.

Sometimes they don't know what they don't know. First of all, you know, is this business right for me? There are a lot of people I just talk to right out of the business. It's what you don't have, you don't get it. Okay, you don't have the money, you don't have the license, you don't have the technical basis, but I know someone over here who can help you. So I put them together.

And the other things for the people who do have the requirements, in other words, say, here's what we're going to do, and we have the money, we have the license, we have all the know-how and everything we're going to go and we got the business plan for it.

We typically help them with the layout of their building. We give them all the equipment. We help them do all the cost calculations. We help them do their business plan actually from the standpoint of the pro forma. We do all of that also for them. And then we commission everything, get it all into their facility. We do facility designs. We commission everything, meaning we're getting them up and running. So really what we're helping them do is reduce risk. So investment risk, as you have, okay, I'm gonna put $10 million into a facility.

Well, okay, if I have people who haven't really done this before, it's a high-risk venture, they hire a company like mine, and all that risk goes to 0, we've done it so many times before. And you can actually come to our facility in Wisconsin and see an operating facility anytime You just come in, knock on the door, we'll let you in. In fact, I'd probably give you a tour myself. So you can come and see what you're gonna buy.

And a lot of it is try before you buy. So the risk really goes out of it. We're also helping our customers traverse all the compliance issues. There's a lot of them. And not only from the standpoint of a medical product but also from the standpoint of local codes associated with how you would go about processing.

So we just over the years, we've kind of like, oh, we got to have that, oh, we got to have that, oh, we got to have that. So we come up with these large requirements documents. We make drawings for people, designs, and then we really shepherd them through a process where they're not compliant. When we start with them, they don't have any clue, and we actually see them develop into a compliant organization. It's really cool. And we do that over the process of 3 months to 6 months to a year, depending on how fast they're moving and what jurisdiction they're in.

So we help them traverse the compliance question mark, and then we also reduce the business risk. We also have a tremendous amount of value and use that we give to our clients. So when they institute our solutions, they're going to have the most environmentally small footprint of anybody out there. And we always encourage them to use that in their branding because people care about that.

And if you're going to, you're gonna try to save the planet by making plants and bringing them out and selling natural solutions to people who would rather have a natural drug than a pharmaceutical drug. A lot of times you want to make sure that you have all the, everything all put together. Okay. So we really help them figure out all of those items. Yeah.

06:39 – Gresham Harkless

What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself personally, the business, or a combination of both. What do you feel kind of sets your part in making?

06:46 – Dr. Jon Thompson

It's easy. It's easy. Blood, sweat, and tears. Hey, you got to donate. Okay.

06:55 – Gresham Harkless

Seriously.

06:56 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Okay. If you're not that guy, you're not going to make it in the startup world. If you're not that guy, you're not a startup CEO. Okay, so really, you know, it may be that as you grow up, you know, obviously, you need to run your business from a process standpoint, you're going to layer in strategy as you go along, you're going to have to you're going to have to grow up, but you still need the core team of someone who's gonna push things along.

We've all seen large companies, or whatever, they lose their ability to innovate, or they lose their ability to be the inventive cutting on the inventive cutting edge or they lose that ability and that's because they've lost the people who are giving blood. Okay, in other words, this is my life work and I really like that and this is what's going to happen. We're going to build it up and it's going to be really big. So the culture that you need to foster within your company would be one that rewards the people who are doing that kind of work.

Why are they there? Well, are they there because of the 20% raise that they're going to get? Are they there for the end goal? Yeah, probably they're there. But for that, they're also there independent of any of that thing because they believe that their mind, it's their mindset, it's the company values, okay? So once you get a bunch of those people that are all kind of think the same, they become a culture. And this is how we operate. And that those, that's really where that is really the secret sauce.

That's the secret sauce. So get the right people that are all aligned with your values. Now your values can change from company to company. But you know, like one of our core values is we deliver the wow. Pretty simple, right? Okay, if you're not delivering the wow, you don't really, you're not kind of not fitting in. Okay, that's okay. Maybe your job is not to deliver the wow, but we want people to deliver the wow. Okay.

We also deliver the next. Okay. What does that mean? Well, we have to we have to innovate to deliver the next thing for our customers. You know, those are the types of things if you're not involved in that if you don't embody those, you know, it's not that you don't fit. But maybe you go to corporate America where they don't, they're not really worried about that, right? Maybe they're more interested in maintaining something, You know, you want to build, build the next, right? Build the next.

I think that's our core value. So it's kind of the builder mentality, right? Oh, we're building something. We're going somewhere. So getting that, getting those people who are all willing to give, you know, the blood, sweat, and tears. If you have those people on the bus, you can really do a very, very good startup. You know, and that includes your financial people, by the way, not just your entrepreneurs, but the financial people, you know, The financial people always want to say to the entrepreneur, well, where's your skin in the game?

And my answer to that is, are you kidding me? We're spending our entire lives just up early, up late at night, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're not sitting here just taking a check from you. Okay, we're, we're, we're going forward. We're moving somewhere. In 3 years, we're going to be a, you know, $120 million company with us with a 40% bottom line, would you believe it 40%? Okay, How are you going to get there? Okay, that's the vision that you need to have. You know, and people, there's movers and shakers, and then there's just people who want to ride along. Those are the guys you gotta not have around or otherwise they're gonna ruin your company.

10:28 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:37 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Getting up early and doing some exercise. I think that's a big thing. And it just helps everything. And I think that's, I've been doing that now for many, many, many years. You know, I've had, I've had my sense where I stopped doing it to get too busy, but that's, that's something that, that, that I think is really extremely important to be effective.

11:01 – Gresham Harkless

And what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget, which is a little bit more of a word of wisdom piece of advice? It might be something you touched on. You could tell the client this or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your business self.

11:13 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Be careful who you hire and be careful who your business partners are. Okay, so if you look at the end of the day, if you have a business, you got to really make sure that your business partners are kind of aligned with your values, okay? And where you see the company going, if they're not, they're going to make your life a living nightmare. And so they may even make it a legal nightmare, in fact, or they may continuously hamstring your company for the rest of your time. So make sure that you pick your partners. Don't be so Cavalier.

11:45 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Dr. John, what does being a CEO mean to you?

11:58 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Well, I guess it means a couple of things. First of all, responsibility and leadership. Obviously, responsibility because you are responsible for not only the well-being of the people that work with you and your partners and all the employees and everything, you're responsible for that. So it's a huge responsibility. 2, I think that if you see the CEO position as merely a financial position, I think that that does not do it justice.

So it's much more than that. It's learning and caring for those who are around you and helping them all go together, creating a future almost together. So that's what a CEO means to me. And the leadership there, you don't always get it right. You might make the wrong move. You might, and it might cost you either financially or maybe even people in your company.

They all want an idiot. You know, you made the wrong financial decision. You made the wrong move there and now we're paying for it. Yep. We're probably all paying for it together. No, that happens. You can kind of understand who your friends are in those instances, right? And don't run your business with hubris. That's the other thing. So just be very humble about it as much as you can. Listen to people around you get, you know, and you know, those 2 things are really what I, you know, really what I really think of as a CEO.

13:27 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I love those 2 things, the responsibility and that leadership and leadership are not perfect. I think understanding as well too, we will make mistakes, but making sure that you have the leadership to sometimes stand up and say you made the mistake, but on an even deeper level, continue to lead even when things don't go, according to plan is absolutely huge.

So Dr. John, truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. No problem. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best I can get hold of you, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

13:57 – Dr. Jon Thompson

Oh yeah. Okay. No problem. Well, look, If you are all thinking about getting into the wonderful world of hemp and hemp-based products or botanical or even this healthy living category that a lot of everybody's talking about, that particular category is growing 20% compound annual growth rate. It's got billions and billions of dollars left to harvest. You know, there's this old old saying where it goes, all boats are rising with the tide. Well, that's true.

You know, get out your surfboard, you'll find it out. Okay. Because there's a lot of really great opportunities here. And what's awesome about it is that it's restricted enough now that there are a lot of opportunities for small businesses to get involved. So tremendous proliferation of small businesses. So just some advice for young aspiring entrepreneurs, There are a lot of ways you can get into the business. And when you do, we can help you work on that.

We can help you, you know, we can help you raise money actually even helping with your business plan. But, you know, get it going and look at those markets that are really growing and have a long runway of growth. And those are the those are the ones that you really want to be looking at. So people can get in touch with us by going to extract lab.com extra kt lab.com la V.com.

And there's a resources page slash resources on there. I tell you there's tremendous we do a tremendous amount of industry education. We have many courses that are free. We have podcasts, we have calculators, we have downloadable guides. We have all of those things that are available. We were number one in education in this industry. No question about it of all the vendors that are out there. We are number one. So yeah, look us up on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn, pretty active on there. So happy to always talk and if you have some ideas for podcasts and stuff, shoot them my way.

15:49 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Dr. John, truly appreciate you for sharing your expertise, your zone of genius, and all the awesome things that you all are doing. Of course, take some time with us today. We will have the links and information in the show notes, but like I said, I'll re-enter it again, a lot of times to see further. You have to stand on the shoulders of giants. So thank you for being a giant and providing so much information and knowledge as you did today. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:10 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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