We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sheva Pekar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sheva below.

Sheva, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Please tell us about starting your own firm and if you’d do anything different knowing what you know now.

I’ve been working in the cannabis industry for seven years. From the beginning I was in the operational leadership of getting other peoples brilliant ideas off the ground. I took their dreams and made it into dollars and value and quality. After many years of doing this, and recognizing that in the end, it was never helping me grow and supporting finding my place and my power in leadership, I had to walk away from those that took advantage of my raw talent and didn’t want to help me mold my own path. After a few months of feeling scared and very lost inside myself, I decided that I needed to start my own business so that the decisions I made affected the business I devoted myself to. It was slow to start. And yet, I had some deeply loyal colleagues who saw the raw potential in my vision, energy, and enthusiasm and gave their life blood to help me get started. Some of the key challenges in setting up my own practice was switching my mental habits from being operations and second in command to being CEO and first in command. That’s been taking me time to shift my mindset of scarcity to mindset of opportunity and abundance.
The only thing I might have done differently was choose services that are a little bit more accessible to the general public. What I offer is highly customized and specialized and unique and rare and while that gives me a lot of pride and self credibility, it’s tough and takes a lot of drive and effort and long game visioning to find the proper clients.
My favorite advice for a young professional is the absolute first steps to starting your own business is registering your LLC and building a business card one-page website. Those are the first two things you need and then everything is built on top of that. The second step is establishing your vision, your mission, your values, and your five-year plan. Once you have those first few things, it becomes possible to enroll others into building your vision with you. People need to see that you are committed to yourself first and only then will they jump on board to help you win.

Sheva, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into the industry very soon after my son was born in 2014 when I realized the kind of work I could do had to change. I’ve always loved how Cannabis helps with mental health and physical health and when a friend offered me a sales job for an edibles company, I jumped on board. Not only could I work remotely while still taking care of my infant son, but I had access to the entire state of dispensaries very quickly. From there I realized not only was I extremely effective at sales, but I really love helping people get where they wanna go in life. It was a really important opportunity for me to see my value very quickly. My second job was jumping headfirst with a brand new cultivator and helping him launch his wholesale program for his high-end flower around the state. Again, I traveled doing product deliveries, learned about my clients, all the dispensaries that loved our product, built deep relationships and became somebody people could rely on and trust. After two years with that company, I started working for a brand new consultant who was ready to expand his business into more of the service business side of cannabis and less plant touching product sales. We started by helping entrepreneurs in new states draft applications for license, train on metrc, develop plans and drawings for facilities, finding proper real estate, and developed new brand imagery, logos and style guides. This is where I learned how my ability to build long-standing trust with people and really develop long term relationships is what set me apart. I know that I am someone who is high in integrity, deeply trustworthy, and have a raw talent for humor and transparency in my communication style that clients and colleagues feel at ease around and love. I launched my own company early in Covid to continue the work I was doing previously to help and cheerlead and support and be unconditionally loyal to entrepreneurial opportunity for those that are deeply committed to themselves. I want to see local residents get a chance to get into the thriving emerging industry and have someone in the corner helping them get there. What sets me apart is that I’m really loyal to my customers and I take pride in how much returning work I get. I want people to know that they can turn to me for any business related questions they have and if I don’t have the answer myself, I know exactly who to turn to and I will get your answer to you in a reasonable time. My Netwerk of trust is very large and I lean on everyone Who specializes in an area that I don’t. As I’ve learned my whole life, if I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m in the wrong room.

Any advice for managing a team?

My favorite author and public speaker in the realm of this subject is Simon Sinek. He always talks about your team being your primary asset in your company. Surrounding myself with people who are hungry to grow, have a strong vision of where they want to go for themselves in the next five years so that I can be of service to helping them get there and those that see that my business as bigger than just me and the money we will make but more about the culture we want to create, a network we want to strengthen, a community we want to serve, and a vision for a world that is created by our service

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

One of my absolute favorite strategies for building clientele is developing deep relationships with other ancillary businesses in the industry. I love to be related to lobbyists, lawyers, accountants, tech companies. These people are not my competitors, they are my allies. If they help me secure a relationship with their client to do complementary kind of work, then they have a client who is doing better and that helps them in the long run too. The longer I build strong relationships with other people helping clients, the better reputation I can maintain.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://psycannadvisors.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/psycann/
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/psycannadvisors
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/psycann-advisors/
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/PsycannA