Meet FloEnvy
Software for the cannabis industry is abundant – everything from seed-to-sale, track and trace, point of sale, learning management systems, the list goes on and on. St. Louis-based FloEnvy has just launched and their ideal customer is cultivation facilities. Owner Mike Steinmann wasn’t planning to start a new software company, after all, he was already the owner of a successful document scanning and conversion company, HITS Scanning Solutions, which he still owns, along with his wife Carol.
Back in 2016, Mike had just become a member of a group called Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and one of the requirements of the group was for their members to travel to another geography with others in their group and learn about a new industry and tour facilities and interact in a business community that is unfamiliar to them. As luck would have it, Mike’s first trip was to Denver and he was slated to tour cultivation facilities in cannabis. Remember that in 2016, Colorado’s cannabis business was still fairly new, and as Steinmann recounts, “I think they thought we were investors and they really gave us a true behind the scenes tour unlike any other.”
Touring the cultivation facilities, the people working were donning lab coats and purposeful, as we’ve come to expect when conducting facility visits, but what Steinmann and his group couldn’t help but notice was that employees were all using various old school implements – whiteboards, clipboards, paper – and immediately the opportunities for efficiency had him reeling. Others in his touring group noticed the same and were aware quickly that his wheels were turning on how to transform these businesses. So struck by the possibilities, Mike summoned his wife Carol to join him in Denver and they did the same tours together. Carol saw the same opportunities as Mike and as they began to brainstorm, the decision was made to launch something new. Their existing company had a proven framework and platform, which might be rejiggered to support the concept for the cannabis industry.
The Steinmanns knew of a long-time family friend whose little brother was in the IT development space and not only was he dynamic and smart but had been an intern for big names, like PayPal and others in Silicon Valley. Reaching out with the premise of what they envisioned, Michael Gu joined the team as co-founder and CTO for a yet unnamed company that was ready for the challenges inherent to cannabis businesses. Gu was going to build the new product from scratch – as the current platform they had was specific to healthcare, and while both are highly regulated industries, they needed a different and custom solution.
For the next two years, the team researched, brainstormed, and immersed themselves in the cannabis space and their new product. In early 2019, they acquired partners in Oregon who owned cultivation facilities and gave them a proving ground to begin testing and tweaking. The cultivation sites in Oregon gave them candid employee feedback, opportunities for improvement, as well as new ideas for software features they hadn’t considered. Fast forward to January of 2020, and a six-figure capital raise with a $10M valuation meant they were on the road to launch.
Today, FloEnvy has successfully launched and is onboarding a cultivation facility in Butler, Missouri with its platform as we speak. The FloEnvy model is unique in several ways. Among them, FloEnvy can operate in any state without a license. They’re a utility that works alongside existing systems in place for cultivators, including METRC. This powerhouse platform is all about productivity and employee performance. Production tracking enables a cultivation site to create schedules for their entire staff based on growing cycles. They provide custom equipment in the form of high-end mobile devices (not high end priced!) which are loaded with their product and cannot access ANY other non-business information.
Imagine a device placed in the hands of employees at the start of each shift that provides them the ability to clock in, see their assigned tasks for the day, and captures data for every single thing they complete during their shift. Which plants did they touch? How long did it take them to complete a given task in the workflow? If a site-wide and urgent message needs to be sent out – for example, a security breach – each device instantly receives that information. The devices are continually in sync for the operation and at any moment, the dashboard can show in real-time the production, profit, and efficiency for the entire grow.
In addition to making it easy to make data-driven decisions, this platform also provides performance management of employees, as well as illustrating their contribution to the business. The company is currently piloting employee rewards and recognition module, which they’re excited to perfect and launch in their 2.0 version, which is currently in progress – not too shabby for a company less than a year old.