Shanon Jaramillo said she felt like a lot of other people who were seeking a job in New Mexico’s emerging cannabis industry over the last decade.
“Oh my gosh, should I be a budtender,” she recalled thinking.
Rather than start at the ground floor, Jaramillo leveraged her background in recruitment to launch Cannabis NM Staffing in 2017. But she soon found dispensaries faced huge gaps in how they trained and certified employees to state standards.
So, in 2020, Cannabis NM Staffing turned into SeedCrest. The software-as-a-service company acts as a virtual compliance officer to standardize workforce training in the cannabis industry.
Jaramillo, who is also CEO, said the company’s ultimate goal is for the software to be contracted out to cannabis control agencies, much like how BioTrack is enlisted to implement seed-to-sale protocols for numerous states.
“We know that around the country, there’s the need to oversee this type of compliance training,” Jaramillo said. “When we originated the plans to develop our software, we developed it around the gaps we were seeing in the Department of Health’s inability to oversee the industry.”
In addition to offering training programs to business owners and workers in New Mexico, SeedCrest recently started selling its program in Missouri’s medical market through a staffing company.
To keep pace with demand, the company is currently transitioning from being self-funded to seeking a round of pre-seed venture capital funding.
“We just see a real opportunity to expand nationwide,” Jaramillo said. “But our feet are here. The whole creation was to create a legacy for New Mexico and create an even playing field for New Mexicans.”
Dan and Anna Novak, owners of Albuquerque-based dispensary The Bad Company said each of their 12 employees has gone through SeedCrest’s cannabis establishment technician (CET) program, since they opened for business on April 1, 2022.
Dan said utilizing the software was a no-brainer because it ensures the company has met all the necessary requirements in case it is ever audited by the Cannabis Control Division, which took over regulation of the industry from the Department of Health in April of this year.
Ana added the self-paced curriculum allows employees to complete the program during their down time in around three to five days.
Jaramillo said rather than corner the market, she’s interested in building a pathway for other companies by acting as an advocate for cannabis policy reforms.
“A lot of people like to create monopolies here and there,” she said. “What we’ve done is opened it up for other educational providers to come in.”
