Writing Cannabis License Applications

Your team has chosen its vocation wisely. When it comes to cannabis products, you’ve been passionately learning the trade—and harvesting strong returns. Now, as legalized cannabis rolls out from one state to the next, including the New York / New Jersey metro area where MarketSmiths is based, your team’s experience in this billion-dollar marketplace isn’t just lucrative—it’s scalable, seemingly overnight. 

Of course, cannabis is a highly regulated industry—one that requires being granted a cannabis license in your jurisdiction of choice. Before opening up your next dispensary or cultivation business, you’ll need to file a state or local license application that showcases an abundance of both competence and compliance against staggering competition. This entails formulating local operational practices before the business even exists—then writing about them in a way that’s crisp, clear, and compliant. It entails doing these things while running your existing business(es): producing often up to 300+ pages under seemingly impossible deadlines. 

How do you do that? 

Consider hiring our writing team to help with your cannabis applications. 

Benefits of a Cannabis Application Writing Team

Whether or not you retain a cannabis law firm to advise you, set up your entities, file your application, and more, it can be beneficial to work with an experienced content agency to produce each application. 

There are 4 powerful benefits to hiring a professional cannabis application writer. You’ll: 

• Be able to file the application on time, with ease—and with minimal involvement on your part (say: two hours or less per week). No need to dig up materials, hold extensive strategy sessions, and spend endless hours—and dedicate robust team members to—writing, rewriting, arguing over strategies, editing, and scratching your heads. Think of us like an EASY button for your license application. 
• Make the process efficient and cost-effective—at a savings of up to 50-60% less than lawyer and paralegal rates.
• Effectively demonstrate compliance with every legal requirement—increasing your chances of securing the license.
• Gain a compelling brand narrative—engaging regulators and optimizing success.

The information required for a state or local cannabis application includes: 

• What you plan to produce (or sell)—and the ways in which you’ll do so
• Who you plan to work with—including employees, suppliers, and vendors
• How you’ll find, hire, train, manage, and promote people—including ways to incentivize diversity and ensure fairness
• How your operations will proceed—including which inventory tracking systems, safety measures, and product preservation methods, etc. you’ll put in place  
• Details about your training plans—both initial and ongoing training
• Details on your facilities, such as infrastructure, security measures, inventory, and maintenance
• How you’ll keep customers safe and educated about products and their consumption 
• How you’ll record customer data, protect privacy, and avoid selling to minors
• How you’ll remain compliant with government reporting requirements 
• How you’ll market and promote products, facilities, practices, and services—and what you won’t do
• And much, much more 

Copywriting help with your cannabis application (vs. legal counsel)

A MarketSmiths client stumbled upon this copywriting specialty in the best way possible: through organic search. A client team (thriving cannabis cultivators) learned that our founder has a background in obtaining privileged licenses, as a former lawyer. For a midwestern state, they subsequently hired our writing team to prepare and write dispensary, cultivation, and infusion applications to be submitted for multiple regions. (In the interests of client confidentiality, we are deliberately obscuring their identity and omitting the name of the state.)

Our client understood that we don’t practice law—and are not licensed to practice law in the state in question (or anywhere, for that matter: we are a marketing and copywriting agency). This was great, since they had already retained a cannabis law firm to advise on licensure, define and form the entities, and walk the application in itself to file on the morning of the deadline. 

Together, we huddled on strategies and tactics: What was the best route to take for each kind of application? Which sections should be emphasized? What questions should we ask the licensing agency during the defined “questions” period? What should they name the new business? Who were our resources for discovering operational details? 

We assigned the task of naming the new entities to MarketSmiths’ naming team. Then, we settled into the months-long tasks at hand. 

It’s great how quickly intense work can make you a specialist. We put a small but dedicated team of application writers on the job for months. They got familiar with the relevant rules and regulations (to understand what each application required), then created applications that meet these—and are designed to optimize our clients’ odds. All told, they wrote about 700 pages—creating complete and compelling narratives, plans, and tactics, which then got customized across all desired locales. 

And in doing so, we saved our client tens of thousands of dollars. And to top it off, they received their licenses.

As is typical for MarketSmiths, we met all filing deadlines in plenty of time. We proved adept at understanding requirements—and using our understanding to draft strong, narrative-driven, and polished license applications under tight and stressful deadlines. And these licenses were just the beginning of a 70% track record in securing licensure for cannabis applicants in three states so far.

Interested in obtaining a cannabis license and want expert writers to make your application stand out? Get in touch with us.