AcumatiCares
CHALLENGES
When Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, a group of investors obtained
a license and built a 45,000-square-foot facility in Gloucester where they cultivate and extract
cannabinoids and manufacture, distribute, and sell cannabis-based consumer packaged goods
under the Happy Valley brand.
The team had ambitious plans to become a vertically integrated company that grows its own
products and sells them through its own and other local dispensaries. Once they’ve honed
the state-based business, they plan to expand into other states. Since cannabis can’t be sold
across state lines, they may strike licensing deals for the brand, products and/or formulas.
“For a long time, we weren’t viewed as a legal industry,” says Sean Corrigan, Vice President of
Operations. “There are ton of challenges operating in the cannabis industry. The supply chain
has been a huge challenge for us, and so is tracking our inventory and our labor. I don’t think
many have a true understanding of what their costs are.”
With more states legalizing cannabis and more companies entering the industry, cannabis
prices are falling, which makes it that much harder to make a profit. Thus, executives are driving
as much efficiency throughout operations as possible. “Anything that we can do to make our
products more efficiently to being organized with everything we do, is going to drive our costs
down, and we want to be able to pass that savings along to the consumer,” Corrigan says.
In 2020, Happy Valley opened a retail dispensary on site in Gloucester. A second dispensary
opened the following year in East Boston. During those first years, the company began
wholesaling products to other Massachusetts cannabis retailers. “We started generating
revenue in the first quarter of 2020 through wholesale sales, and then followed with the launch
of our retail store, and just fought our way through the craziness of that Covid year,” says Kai
Earthsong, VP of Supply Chain Management
Basic Financial System
Happy Valley began on QuickBooks, an entry-level financial-only package. As it built out its
processes, executives created spreadsheets for inventory management, production planning,
management and tracking of consumables, procurement, and cataloging test data from
independent third-party labs, among other operations.
“You name it. We had a big complicated workbook for it,” says Earthsong. Adds Corrigan,
“We had 50 different Excel spreadsheets that we used to operate this business. The challenge
was that none of them talked to each other.”
Peter DeRoche, director of finance and one of two people operating in QuickBooks, tried to
reconcile siloed spreadsheets with financial data. “Visibility and tracking transactions were very
difficult and very manual,” he says. So was reconciling invoices to what Happy Valley actually
received. They tried to track costs of goods sold, manage inventory, and track purchasing on
separate spreadsheets.
“We didn’t have a receipt system before to prove anything,” he says. ”When we got an invoice,
it was approved, and we paid it.” Only later when they ran out of something did they learn they
didn’t receive the full amount. DeRoche wasted a lot of time signing in and out of QuickBooks
to manage various organizational branches, which was frustrating at month’s end, he says.
ERP Consideration
“In 2020 and 2021, we didn’t have insights,” Earthsong says. “We were just trying to keep
the ship running, track essentials, and make sure that our books were reconciled. More
sophisticated and ambitious aspects of information tracking and analysis—like tracking cost
actuals or doing runway analysis—were all just kind of sparkles in our eyes.”
With information in silos, Happy Valley found it challenging to understand what its inventory
levels were or what was on order, he says. Adds Corrigan, “We had an idea, some back-ofthe-napkin kind of math on our costs, but to really understand and to record our labor and get
down to the penny on everything that we do is really what’s going to help us drive our business
into the future.”
Happy Valley first considered deploying an ERP in mid-2020. “We had ambitions to have
thorough data capturing and an aggregation engine. We wanted to leverage the power of
data that would come from scaling the brand and manufacturing base,” says Earthsong.
“We also recognized that data, if collected and maintained properly, was value additive to
the organization.”
