We recently connected with Ryan Dills and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?

Customers, who are facing challenges related to epilepsy, specifically seizures, have returned to a normal day-to-day with THC/CBD therapies. Children experiencing countless seizures per day are now seizure-free and can do normal daily activities, from merely going to school, driving cars(for those age appropriate), and eating more traditional foods.

To help families with these daily challenges is highly rewarding, thus why one of the key components of our business is the education side. Raising awareness towards more holistic, preventative therapies is essential in assisting our bodies operate more sustainably as we combat the endless environmental and mental strains.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Ryan Dills and I was born in the mountains of North Georgia, and grew up there as well as central Tennessee and Western North Carolina. Having spent many years out west as well, I travel often to mostly stay connected with my tribe who are spread all over this fine planet.

My background is finance and health/fitness, and about 5 years ago-myself and a childhood buddy started a hemp company, The Georgia Hemp Company, based out of Atlanta Georgia. Core to its mission is education/awareness for an industry wrought with stigma. We promise customers label accuracy as well as a diverse product offering in order to help them achieve their health goals. www.thegeorgiahempcompany.com

Along with an array of cannabinoid products, we promote hemp foods, hemp goods, and are starting to offer some mushroom solutions as well. We value customer service and employee retention, and maintain a strong presence with applicable lobbyists and legislation.

As we like to say, ‘we don’t sell CBD, but we have CBD for sale.’ Meaning, it’s not like an used car salesman approach. We don’t push the sale of any product. We exist to answer any questions people might have, to create a space that’s not intimidating or unapproachable, and to provide products with labels that match its contents, as regulation is currently limited in our industry, and we take quality control very seriously.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

As fate would seemingly have it, my business partner(Joe Salome) and myself were brought together by a bus route at the start of 7th grade. We were both new to the area, and being the start of middle school, most kids were meeting new kids anyway due to the convergence of several elementary schools.

We happened to share a bus, as well as a ‘team’ in 7th grade, as this school separated 7th grade into 4 different teams, which each consisted of maybe 5 different classrooms of students. Ours was 7D.

Our story started on a basketball court during gym class, and initially we weren’t fans of one another, as we were the smaller, trying to be funny, type kids and our maturity levels couldn’t conceive a world with room for two of these sorts of personalities.

We worked through it with a failed alley-oop that he threw me off the back board, which never had a chance of success but just the attempt of it seemed to balance any prior tensions. His dad coached several of our baseball and basketball teams, and his mom would soon be making me the first sandwich during late night nintendo sessions.

Our lives took us to various places with paths crossing again in 2017. Both being at a professional crossroads, we joined forces down a fitting path for us both and now here we are, approaching 50 employees in a company that offers healthcare and 401Ks. We simply do the best we can with what we have each day, then repeat the process. Our employees are due much of the credit.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

We were contacted by the New York Times early in 2021. They were doing a story on Delta 8 THC and since we were selling products containing the substance, they wanted to get some thoughts and insight. My business partner did the interview and then we basically forgot about it.

On Saturday February 27th, Joe called me to let me know he was disabling the website temporarily as it seemed we were hacked. There were 100s of orders flooding in, and at the time, we were doing about 5 orders/day online, so 100s during the first few hours on a Saturday was of course alarming.

We had our IT/Website team trace the origins of these so-called orders and it was a NYT article. So it seemed they had published that article that morning without informing us, and furthermore- the story hyperlinked our website seemingly by mistake.

That day the website took in $125K worth of online orders. The next day $130K. Things of course leveled off but it catapulted our online sales that have maintained a healthy level ever since as many of those non-local customers have stuck with us. We were able to survive the online onslaught without too much hiccup due to our amazing manufacturing partners and incomparable staff.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thegeorgiahempcompany.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/moments88
• Facebook: facebook.com/rdills88
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ryandills
• Youtube: youtube.com/user/rdills7

Image Credits
Drone Jones Media