Your best customer might be your biggest risk. They pay on time. Every invoice. Like clockwork.
In regulated cannabis, that consistency can be dangerously misleading.
Like the little pig who blissfully and confidently built his house out of straw.
Here’s what “current with you” might actually look like in the review mirror.
Current with you. Ninety days past due with every other supplier.
Current with you. Financed by alternative capital at rates that would make a pawn shop blush (if that’s even possible).
Current with you. Margins quietly ground down by wholesale pricing pressure, compliance costs, the illicit market,ever change rules, “ghost” delivery and the gift that keeps on taking, 280E.
You see a single sunny column on their balance sheet. The column where you live smells like roses (or maybe some 1987 “kind bud” from Humboldt). Everything else is faith and hope.
In any other industry, this would be called guessing. In cannabis, it’s called a “relationship.” Worse, a “homie”.
When your largest exposure is also your least understood, you’re not managing credit risk. You’re CONCENTRATING it.
Traditional credit scores were never built for this market. Cannabis operators rarely have the long financial histories and standardized footprints conventional models depend on.
So billions in trade credit move every year with minimal visibility into true creditworthiness.
That’s the gap we’re building Reklaim Credit Solutions to close.
A contributory network where operators share de-identified AR aging data (no one will know if came from you) and gives them back predictive credit scores, suggested limits, and full commercial credit reports built from trade data, public records, and state regulatory filings.
Because “they always pay on time” should be the beginning of your credit decision. Not the entire story.
If you’re extending trade credit to a cannabis operator, whether as a cultivator, processor, distributor, ancillary supplier, packaging supplier, hardware importer, factory or otherwise, how are you evaluating the real risk behind your trading partners today?
Give a holler if you’re interested. If you’ll be at IgniteIt Cannabis next week, let’s try to chat in person.
SAVING ONE BAD CREDIT DECISION PAYS FOR THE ENTIRE SERVICE FOR THE YEAR!