We learned this the hard way.
You shouldn't have to.

Welcome to Field Notes. We named this the way we name most things around here, plainly and with intent. These are notes from the field, written by the people who actually run the businesses. Not a marketing department, not a ghostwriter. When you read something here, it came from someone who was on the grow floor, behind the counter, or in a hearing room earlier that week.

So for the first one, it makes sense to tell you who we are.

American Fiber Co. is a vertically integrated cannabis company in Delaware. We grow it, we make it, and we sell it ourselves, under three brands. Valor Craft is our cultivation and manufacturing, grown right here in Delaware. Field Supply is your friendly neighborhood dispensary located on Kirkwood Highway, selling cannabis and provisions. Levitate is our THC beverage line, sold in retail stores in DE, NC, and IL and available online nationwide. We own every step from the seed to the shelf, and we hold a hard standard on quality, on compliance, and on how we treat the person standing at the counter.

That is the company. The more useful thing to tell you is how we got here, because the road is the whole point.

A long way around

I did not start with an officer's commission or a business degree. I started as an enlisted Marine, a helicopter crew chief working on Cobras and Hueys. I earned my way to the Naval Academy from the ranks, something the Corps allows for only a small number of Marines each year, and came out the other side an infantry officer.

What followed taught me the things that turned out to matter most in this business, none of which have anything to do with cannabis. I led 200 Marines in combat in Iraq. Some of the most important work we did there was not the fighting. It was rebuilding: standing up the local government, putting infrastructure back together, and handing security over to local forces so the place could run without us. You learn that building something and making it able to stand on its own are two different jobs, and the second one is harder.

When I came home, I became the first executive director of the Travis Manion Foundation. I built it from the ground up alongside the Manion family, during the hardest years any organization has, and over four years we grew it roughly sixfold, earned its first four-star charity rating, and put systems in place that the foundation still runs on today. Turning a family's grief into a lasting institution teaches you that mission and operations are not opposites. Good intentions do not survive contact without good systems behind them.

Then the work took me further than I expected. I spent a year in Medellin, Colombia and in Ontario, Canada on the founding team that built Nusierra, which became Colombia's first fully organic certified medical cannabis operation and one of the region's larger employers, paying above-market wages to people who needed the work. I helped secure the licenses, stand up GMP manufacturing and CO2 extraction, raise the Series A, and build out the export capability. That is a fast way to learn that the plant is the plant everywhere, but the business is never the same business twice.

I brought those lessons home and started American Fiber Co. Since then we have won and perfected competitive cannabis licenses in Delaware, Michigan, Missouri, and New Jersey, and we built and sold two retail stores in Michigan. Every state writes its own rulebook, and a competitive license goes to whoever reads it closely enough to win on the merits. Building two stores and then selling them whole taught me the other half of that lesson from Iraq, which is how to make something that does not depend on you to keep standing.

None of that was a straight line, and a good deal of it I learned the hard way. Which brings me to the reason I am writing this at all.

The backbone is outgunned

Here is what I believe. Independent operators are the backbone of this industry. We hire local, we serve local, and we pay local taxes, and the money we make tends to stay in the towns we live in. That is worth protecting.

But independents are outgunned on exactly the things that experience teaches. The large multi-state operators have whole departments and outside consultants for licensing, facility buildout, compliance, cultivation SOPs, retail operations, and fundraising. The independent operator has himself, usually at two in the morning, trying to work out why the state portal will not accept an application that looks fine to him.

I have been that person, in more states and more situations than I care to count. So American Fiber Co. does two things at once. We run our own vertical here in Delaware, and we put everything we have learned to work for other independent operators across the Mid-Atlantic. We call it managed services, but really it is hard-won experience made useful to someone else: licensing, buildout, compliance, cultivation SOPs, retail operations, and a fair amount of "how do I not lose my mind" along the way.

We know the plant. We know the business. We do it ethically. That last part is not a tagline. It is the filter we run decisions through.

It is also why I started the Delaware Cannabis Industry Association. Independent operators needed a table to sit at and a voice in the room where the rules get written, and no one was going to build that for us.

Why help the competition

People sometimes ask why an operator would spend his time helping other operators, a few of whom compete with us directly. The honest answer is that a healthy independent sector is the thing that keeps this industry worth being in. If the only companies left standing are the giants, the plant loses, the customer loses, and the places we call home lose. I would rather build something real alongside other people building something real.

That is who we are, and that is what these dispatches will be about. The work, the wins, the regulatory fights, and the occasional hard lesson we would rather help you skip.

If you are an operator trying to build something honest, I am always happy to connect.