The fact that pharmaceutical guys said it was a cosmetic product and the cosmetics guys said it was a pharmaceutical product. No one was playing in that space. It was a small niche, but Bio-Oil went right through the middle of it, basically disrupted both of those categories.

We built a machine. The execution entailed finding a market where you are not in or one that you think is going to be a success. Then go and find a partner who we think is a market leader and work with them to put this thing into the market.

The skill I hope to bring to the table - now that we've got the product range - is really about sticking to our knitting and staying focused. I saw with Bio-Oil how critical that was to the expansion. We only scaled as quickly as we did because of the simplicity of the business model. So what we need to do at Goodleaf now that we have the products, is build out the team, the systems, the supply chain, marketing, the operations, and then stick to it and scale it. 

We don't only want to play in the cannabis space. We want to go into the wellness space and be a holistic wellness business and that category is big.  But our ambition is to take a real plant-based functional product and go straight into that wellness sector and really see if we can add value in it.

It is difficult for a new business to figure out at what point to go and pitch to those big businesses. I don't know if there's any real right answer to it. You see the dollar bills, but the reality is it can quickly break your brand, it really can.

I think we are very lucky and we are positioned very well to take advantage of this burgeoning market. If you look at our climate, our soil, our labour costs, our low cost base and our proximity to Europe, Africa as a whole should be taking a lion's share of this category. 

Getting the right people in place, the right systems in place, the right partners in place that enable the core management team to hopefully focus in on the strategy, the direction where we're going, route to market, all the issues that we're having to grapple with in this crazy cannabis industry.

We don't have the scale at the moment to create separate packaging for the two markets. So we try to create packaging that covers both. Also we are navigating regulations that actually the regulators themselves don't quite understand.

You end up with eight or nine or ten different revenue opportunities out there. Trying to keep all those balls up in the air takes a lot of time and distracts you from what you want to do. It's a recipe for disaster.

Entrepreneurs must decide where in that value chain their passions lie, where their skill sets lie, where they can add value, and then find out who the players are in that space.