We are coming up on a year already since we officially kicked off Elevated Gatherings. It’s hard to believe! We came up with the idea in late 2023 and started filing paperwork in early 2024, but our first dinner was, fittingly, on April 20. I’m pretty sure everyone in the cannabis space hopes they can time a milestone to coincide with 4/20 but not everyone makes it happen.

Anyway, I knew I would learn some lessons as a small business owner, but I’ve been surprised by the lessons I have learned. I don’t know what I was expecting, but most of these weren’t it. Here are a few of them:

Business degrees don’t make you an expert on running a business.

It’s true. You spend all that time, all that money, get the fancy letters after your name (yes, I have MBA after mine, although I don’t often throw it around at people because it’s obnoxious to do so) and you’ll still find yourself wondering what you should actually be doing, more often than you would like to admit. You’ll also get all kinds of interesting surprises when you find things you didn’t know you were supposed to be doing. And don’t get me started on filing taxes!

You get to work harder than you ever have for less money than you’ve ever made.

Yeah, this one hurts a little. I didn’t expect to make millions in our first year but the balance on the spreadsheet at the end of 2024 did not compute to an hourly rate I would have settled for anywhere else.

There is no one as excited about your business as you, and most don’t care much at all about what you’re doing.

This was a bit of a surprise. Naively, I expected that as soon as we launched, people would be lining up to hire us. How could you not want to hire us? This is a great idea, and I would hire us if we weren’t us. I also wasn’t prepared for the number of raised eyebrows, funny looks, and holier than thou comments I received. I should have been because this isn’t my first time in the cannabis industry, but I guess I still keep hoping people might get more open-minded about things with each passing year. We’re not there yet. Many are, but still too many are not.

You will receive more offers to optimize your website’s SEO and Google ranking than you thought possible.

I’m not kidding. I get at least five of these a week. First of all, how are there this many people all offering the same services, and how are any of them making any real money? I wonder if it’s just like five people using hundreds of aliases hoping they can wear down a few people here and there until they give in. And second, if my website doesn’t show up on Google, how did you find me? I know how, because my website does show up on Google. I’ll be marking these emails as spam for the rest of my days, I just know it.

You have to spend money to make money, but it’s not that simple.

I’ve heard that my whole life, you have to spend money to make money. That is true. But spending the wrong money doesn’t make you any money and you end up with a balance sheet full of red numbers. We definitely spent some “wrong money” at the beginning of our journey. I bought a top-tier website plan and didn’t end up using any of the features. I signed up for QuickBooks even though we didn’t really need it. We hosted a big ribbon cutting party that yielded no business. This year I’ve already had offers to spend some wrong money, but so far I have stayed strong and said “no thank you” to all of them.

Not every job is the right job.

When we were first getting started, I got two inquiries from people I knew, looking for us to do things that are outside of the scope of our business. One was for a bridal shower at a banquet hall, and the other was for some drop-off catering at a fundraiser. These are not what we do. But, I knew the people and didn’t want to say no before we had made any money. The bridal shower job, I worked so hard figuring out the logistics of how we would make it happen, put together a menu and quote, and then didn’t hear a thing back. Weeks later, the person let me know they were going to hire someone else. The drop-off catering, we ended up doing it and while I know the food we dropped off was good, we never got any feedback from the client. Not a “thank you,” not a “your food was terrible,” not a peep. I emailed her twice to ask how it went, if it didn’t go well how could we improve, all of that, and never heard a thing. Almost a year later I’ve still not heard from her again and like I said, I know (knew?) this person. If either of those jobs came across my desk today, I’d politely decline to even quote them, and I should have done that in the first place because it was nothing but a pair of headaches.

The people and the connections make all the difference.

Every success we have had so far has come from a personal connection we’ve made. Whether it’s a farm we work with recommending us to someone, people we already knew hiring us, someone I met who asked about why my shirt says “we’ll take you higher” on the back, or a random Airbnb host that I reached out to for a partnership, so much of it comes from meeting someone, making that connection, and moving forward. We get it. We are coming into your house to cook you food and get you high. There is a lot of anxiety that comes with this proposition, and we don’t take that lightly. We know that we are going to serve you a delicious meal and you’re going to have a great time. But you might not know that yet, so if you know someone who knows someone who knows us, you’re more likely to dive in and hire us. It’s a small world and whether you know it or not, you already do know someone who knows us.

On the good days and the bad days, I own something cool and no one can take that away.

It’s been much harder than I thought it would be. There have been successes and disappointments. There have been days when I wanted to give up, and I know there will be more of those. But in the end, this is mine and Clint’s business. No one else has a piece of it, no one tells us how to run it, and anyone else who comes after us doing cannabis-infused meals around here will just be copycats. Every day I get to wake up and say, “I’m Kira, and I own Elevated Gatherings. We are a private chef service that comes to your house and does cannabis-infused meals for you and your guests.” Some people are impressed and some aren’t. Anyone who doesn’t think this is cool, that’s their problem. Because it is fucking cool. And it’s all ours.