How Garden First saves 15 hours a week managing their grow with PlanaCan
Introduction
When Oregon based cultivators Garden First Cannabis were first introduced to us, they had a problem: They built a successful business.
Utilizing a combined 30 years of experience in the industry, the team had worked hard since obtaining a license in 2017 to become one of the top cannabis grows in the state a few years later.
A big part of their success was their close knit owner-operator team, and a rigorous cultivation method, allowing them to consistently hit 3 pounds per light of top shelf bud. But that success came with a price.
Growing pains
When Garden First saw their bottom line rise, they decided to do what any business would do: they expanded canopy, doubled their total output, and hired a full-time 17 person staff. That’s when their issues started.
As owner-operators for the first few years, they had an small team where everyone did everything. As they scaled however, operations became segmented, while the number of daily tasks in cultivation doubled at the same time.
Over the next year, this new scale of production started to consistently lead to more missed work, incorrectly done treatments, frustrated employees, and eventually, lower yields.
Garden First's solution
Fed up with their current scheduling process, consisting of a combination of whiteboards, notebooks, and a shared excel doc, Andreas Hero, co-founder and Director of Operations, started trying to figure out a better way to do things.
Referred by another grow, he discovered PlanaCan. At PlanaCan, we’re obsessed with providing the easiest to use, purpose-built software for commercial cultivators to plan, schedule, manage, and analyze everything that happens in their grow.
Snap to four months after they signed up, and Andreas and his team had ditched the whiteboards. Work was getting accounted for, everyone knew what to do every day, and most importantly morale and accountability was up. But, how did it happen?
Growing is difficult, so planning is essential
Cultivating cannabis is hard. Doing it scale is harder. Getting consistent high yields like Garden First, with top shelf quality, is almost impossible. That’s why, at the core, Garden First’s biggest advantage – their detailed and unique plant treatment – was also the first hurdle they had to overcome.
So, how was Garden First planning their schedule when they met us?
“Before PlanaCan, my master schedule was in a handwritten notebook I’d been carrying around with me since I started Garden First. To share the schedule, I’d manually copy it over to our shared excel document for each harvest, then also put the day’s tasks on a whiteboard each morning."
As Garden First onboarded PlanaCan, the first thing they did was digitize and define every task in their meticulous plant process – adding SOP’s, notes, and videos for each task where needed, and store it as one of PlanaCan’s custom Templates, to be referenced for each harvest.
“Having one place for our Grower’s Bible was so important for us. Everything we do has to be done a certain way – an example is when we top/upskirt a plant, it needs to be done the right way. With PlanaCan, I filmed a video of me doing it, also created a written SOP, and added it all to that event in the Template. Now every time that task shows up in our schedule, our team can watch the video if they need a refresher on how to do it right.”
The takeaway? From day one, PlanaCan gave Garden First the peace of mind that they knew exactly what should happen and how, from day zero to harvest day, every single time a batch of plants moved through their cultivation.
Once you have a plan, you need to communicate it
It’s nice to have a beautiful and effective cultivation technique, it’s another to actually schedule it out efficiently, and communicate it to every employee in the cultivation, each day.
Before he started using PlanaCan Andreas said he spent “6 to 8 hours a week personally making sure that everything in the grow was getting scheduled and communicated correctly”.
With PlanaCan, instead of tracking work for each harvest manually, Andreas added a new harvest in PlanaCan with a start date, and automated his entire step-by-step treatment onto our interactive calendar instantly with a few clicks.
After a harvest had been scheduled, Andreas could go in each Monday, see every task associated with each harvest that needed to happen for the day or week, specify who should do it, and where.
"I love being able to open up the app, and seeing everything that will happen week to week. I can make sure we don't overload labor hours on weekends, and can schedule things like room flips when I know we have our key personnel in the grow."
Your entire schedule, at your fingertips
Everything scheduled in PlanaCan’s Web app is also updated and viewable in the Android and iOS apps, so all each grower needs to do is flip open their phone to see what needs to be done next.
Having the cultivation schedule on-hand at all times minimizes face to face check-in’s with each employee, and eliminates the dreaded what am I supposed to do next that is so common with so many cultivations.
So, what was the short term result? After six months, Andreas claims the time he directly spends scheduling has gone down from 8 hours, to 1 hour a week. Based on feedback from his team, in total, the cultivation saves 15 payroll hours, each week.
Just as important as the time saved, is Garden First’s peace of mind. They know they can trust that everything is accounted for, and that there’s full visibility for each of the 17 employees to know what they need to do as well.
Garden First was back on track, but what's their real ROI?
Scheduling, and communicating everything that needed to happen in the cultivation day-to-day was the main crux of Garden First’s issues. Once they onboarded PlanaCan, they were able to clean up operations within the first three months:
“We got rid of any of the missed work that was killing us. Overall, my employees were happier because they knew what was expected of them, and I was less stressed out because I wasn’t obsessing about what needed to happen next”.
But, that’s not where the real value showed. Long term, each completed harvest’s data stored in PlanaCan gave Garden First a better understanding of what was going right, and wrong with each batch of plants.
For every Harvest, he’d generate a report, filtering by employee, room, or harvest. Looking at this information, he was able to see if it took one person longer to flip a room vs. another, or if a certain flower room always had lower yields. Lining up that data has helped Garden First make better labor decisions, and fix any lurking issues with environmentals.
“Our leadership thinks of PlanaCan like a safety blanket. We know without any doubt that everything we need to do is accounted for months in advance, and we also know that everyone will see what needs to be done the day of.
But, what’s been really powerful is seeing the trends for certain flower rooms, or certain employees over time. By seeing how long it took for our growers to do something vs. what we expected, or how many plants were destroyed in a certain batch, we can adjust accordingly, and streamline our labor practices across the grow.”
Scheduling with PlanaCan
Interested in finding out more about PlanaCan? Schedule a call with us below. We love meeting growers, and seeing how we can help your cultivation.
