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When we first started producing pre-rolls, I was behind a knockbox myself.
As the president and founder of a friends-and-family-owned cannabis company, that was just part of getting the business off the ground. When something needed to get done, the executive team did it.
At one point, I could knock out close to 1,000 pre-rolls an hour.
But I also knew that wasn’t a business model.
You can’t build your production plan around an owner working at full speed every day, and you certainly can’t expect an employee to work with the same urgency as someone who has their life savings and years of work tied up in the company.
Eventually, you have a decision to make. You either keep adding people to a manual process or you find a way to automate it. For us, that decision came very early.
We joke that our third employee was essentially our pre-roll machine.
We Had to Get a Lot Done With a Little
We are a Class I cultivator in New Jersey and have been operational for about two years. Our entire company is roughly 25 people, including our executive team.
That’s a small group for what we’re doing.
We operate a 42,000-square-foot climate-controlled greenhouse. We have 15,000 square feet of outdoor cultivation, with another approximately 40,000 square feet coming online. We produce flower, vapes, cured resin, liquid diamonds, whole-flower pre-rolls, infused pre-rolls and other products.
Our goal has always been to give our wholesale partners a diversified menu rather than rely on one or two categories.
That’s particularly important in New Jersey— a densely populated market with a growing number of dispensaries, brands, private-label products and larger operators competing for attention. Smaller companies like ours aren’t going to win by trying to outspend an MSO with a massive marketing budget.
We have to be really good operationally. That means constantly asking where our people add the most value and where a repetitive process is taking them away from something more important.
Pre-roll production made that question pretty easy to answer.
Founders Shouldn’t Be the Production Plan
In the beginning, members of our executive team were helping with production because that was what the business required.
But every hour I spent behind a knockbox was an hour I wasn’t working on sales, growth or the next major decision the company needed to make.
The same was true for our other executives. We had people responsible for finance, cultivation, sales and operations spending time on tasks that eventually needed to become repeatable production processes.
There is nothing wrong with doing that at startup. In fact, I think founders should understand how the work actually gets done. But at some point, staying in that role starts hurting the company.
We knew pre-rolls were going to be an important category for us, and one of our early production investments was a Hefestus automated pre-roll system. For a company our size, it was a significant decision, but the alternative was continuing to rely on founders for production or steadily adding labor as demand grew.
Automation gave us a more practical way to build capacity while keeping the team lean.
Automation Didn’t Shrink Our Team. It Helped Us Keep It Lean.
That decision also shaped the way we think about automation more broadly. In a lean operation, we are always looking for repetitive, labor-intensive processes where technology can create more capacity and give our team more time for work that requires judgment, experience and problem-solving. Those decisions have helped us add capacity without having to increase headcount at the same pace, and they’ve become an important part of how we think about scaling the business.
Today, we’re producing roughly 10,000 to 15,000 pre-rolls per week, and one trained operator can handle our current needs.
When the system is dialed in, we’ve seen production around 1,500 pre-rolls per hour. On a normal day, we’re still changing strains, loading material and handling all the other things that happen in a real production environment, but one person can accomplish what would otherwise require a much larger manual operation.
If our demand grows significantly, we don’t necessarily need to build an entire second pre-roll team. We can add another shift and another operator. That’s a very different labor equation.
Our philosophy has never been to automate someone’s job and send them home. We want to keep the people we have, make their jobs easier and give them opportunities to do higher-value work as the company grows.
Cannabis companies have already seen what happens when organizations expand headcount too quickly and then have to pull back when margins tighten.
I’d rather be thoughtful about where we hire from the beginning.
Speed Isn’t the Only Reason We Automated
Throughput gets most of the attention when people talk about automation, but it wasn’t the only issue we were trying to solve. Consistency matters just as much.
When you’re producing pre-rolls manually, there are a lot of variables. Weight can fluctuate, you can get bent necks, and the pack isn’t always identical. One joint may pull beautifully while another doesn’t.
When you’re selling a half-gram pre-roll, it needs to be a half gram. When you’re selling a one-gram pre-roll, it needs to be a one gram. Customers notice the difference.
Pre-rolls are one of the products we’re most proud of. We use whole flower rather than treating the category as somewhere to put leftover material, and we’ve expanded into live rosin-infused and liquid diamond products as well.
If we’re going to put our name on that package, we want the product inside to look good and smoke correctly every time.
As our volume increased, repeatability became just as important as capacity. A more repeatable process has helped us maintain the finished product we want across a growing number of SKUs.
For us, that consistency is part of protecting the brand.
Know What You’re Actually Trying to Scale
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned building this company is that growth does not always mean more people.
Sometimes it means better processes, sometimes it means better equipment, and sometimes it means getting your founders and senior employees out of tasks they shouldn’t still be doing.
Every cannabis operator has to make those decisions differently. There are positions where we want experienced people and don’t want technology replacing their judgment. There are other areas where asking a skilled employee to repeat the same physical process thousands of times isn’t the best use of that person.
The important part is recognizing the difference early. For us, investing in automation was one of those decisions because it allowed a very small company to grow an important product category without building a massive production team around it. It gave our executives time back when that time was incredibly valuable. And as our volume has grown month after month, we haven’t had to rebuild the production team around that growth.
Our third employee may have been a machine. But the real value was what it allowed the rest of our employees to go build.
Article by Aleksandr Kleynshvag, President and Founder of North Lake Supply, a veteran-led, friends-and-family-owned cannabis cultivation and manufacturing company in New Jersey. A U.S. Navy veteran who served as an HM3(FMF), Kleynshvag is also a longtime entrepreneur, legacy cannabis operator and real estate developer with more than 20 years of experience as a business owner. He has led North Lake Supply from its early development through the buildout and operation of its 42,000-square-foot greenhouse and processing facility, helping establish the company as an independent cultivator and manufacturer producing a diverse portfolio of cannabis products for New Jersey’s adult-use market.
