The Security Advantage: How to Integrate Security to Give Your Cannabis Business a Competitive Edge
Written by Matthew Riley
With marijuana legalization attracting new businesses into the marketplace, navigating specific and detailed government regulations can be a daunting task for ownership; never mind planning for security issues including theft by employees, robberies at brick-and-mortar locations, and fraud involving delivery and transportation of stock and cash assets.
Despite common concerns and security challenges facing cannabis businesses, taking a programmatic approach to security services can improve onsite operations and provide competitive value to ownership, helping owners move beyond strict compliance towards security as a differentiator.
Fostering a Security Mindset
From lessons learned in other innovative industries such as technology and application development, fostering a security mindset and integrating strategic decisions from the inception helps avoid potentially costly changes closer to business launch. Identifying regulatory requirements and discovering operational vulnerabilities early on supports:
Development of critical security culture in all staff & management
Key team members aware of security concerns affecting building design & operations
Reducing security system design costs
Reducing intrinsic business, operational, and security risks in the organization
Engaging a professional security partner even at the earliest stages of the conceptualization and licensing process enables “cultivation” of a customized security operations strategy, incorporating all regulatory requirements while seamlessly integrating into retail or grow operations. Developing strategy behind general security requirements, limited access areas, security systems and alarms, transportation and delivery, incident reporting, training and administration, and overall building design can drastically lower security costs if accomplished later.
An efficient risk management process can help facilitate the early detection of potential weaknesses and problems needing addressing before they turn into regulatory and operational challenges.
Gather Requirements Early
Gathering unique operational requirements is a critical path determining the entire journey from licensure to retail kickoff. An engaged professional security partner will aid management in answering important questions such as:
What will retail flow in my establishment look like?
What special measures, if any, should I consider on the property?
How will I handle sensitive data?
What will operational security systems look like?
How will I secure deliveries and transportation of marijuana stock and cash assets?
How will I interact with law enforcement?
How will I manage onsite incidents?
How do I manage offices, inventory, sales spaces, stock areas, parking lots, growing areas, and staff activity?
Identifying risky areas and unique challenges your organization faces reduces potential vulnerability while ensuring operations remain innovative and efficient. Developing a base security strategy helps tackle future security-related issues and is also an effective way to strengthen the overall security posture of the marijuana establishment.
Continually Evaluate Security
As conceptual designs come closer to fruition, professional security partners should continue performing risk analysis to identify regulatory and operational loopholes impacting the business at a later stage. During the security system design, I recommend completing the following:
Threat Modeling: Threat modeling gives solid insight into the retail or cultivation/manufacturing environment’s changing threat landscape. Taking a transparent look at potential security risks will help monitor the effectiveness of security initiatives, architectural designs, and operational procedures.
Controls Analysis: Continual analysis of planned security controls determines whether designed measures align with industry best practices and regulatory requirements, while sufficiently mitigating risk. For example, through continued controls evaluation, a determination that a new wall on architecture diagrams requires adjustment of surveillance systems.
Continual design analysis enables management staff to evaluate innovative technology used in regular operations. Merging operational innovation and advanced security techniques undoubtedly provide the edge over the competition.
Include Security Within Regular Training
Company culture and employee training are undoubtedly among the most critical factors contributing to a competitive and successful marijuana operation.
When developing staff operating procedures, it is vital, including role-based security training, as part of overall organizational training.
Recommended topics include:
Regulations and security risk management
Site design, workflows, and procedures that reduce security risk
Customer service training and diversion/prevention strategies
Incident management and reporting responsibilities
Proprietary role-based training
Deploying and Maintaining Security Operations
While planning and designing security operations is exceptionally essential, actual deployment and maintenance of systems and processes is crucial to marijuana retail and grow operations’ ongoing success. Once security systems are installed and active, the professional security partner should continually analyze strategies from a real-world adversary’s perspective to determine emerging weaknesses and how systems would hold up against an attack.
As part of this analysis, overall business operations should be reviewed and potentially restructured to mitigate security flaws or areas where regular operations attain efficiency modification. The continual review ensures that the management process is maintained, efficient, and embedding all staff members’ security culture. Lastly, the constant assessment provides maintenance of any emerging regulatory requirements in this growing industry.
What’s Next?
Is your cannabis business prepared to meet complex regulatory requirements and implement industry best practices regarding security? If so, well done! There is, however, room for improvement. If not, don’t fret, as Windwalker Group can help navigate the security environment. For over 20 years, Windwalker has provided expert security services in the Federal, State, and Commercial sectors, including expert design and consultation services for cannabis retail and manufacturing/cultivation businesses.
Windwalker practitioners have held responsibility for some of the United States’ most sensitive infrastructure, including developing and executing programs to advance and protect it. Our staff of former command and executive-level managers, who have successfully operated in regional, state, and municipal law enforcement and corporate security organizations, seamlessly bringing our experience into the cannabis industry.