I've stood in all five rooms.
Sara Connolly — full end-to-end cannabis supply chain operator, founder of Backbone Operations, and the person your team will actually be working with.
Los Angeles & Nashville
Fifteen years building the parts nobody sees
I've built and run all five core cannabis verticals — cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. In each one I built the teams, stood up the systems, and carried the P&L.
Across eleven years in cannabis I've operated in fourteen states, running sixty-seven dispensaries, thirty-two of which I opened from buildout through opening day, and launching brands into those markets under both medical and adult-use regimes.
Most senior operators came up through one vertical and were promoted above the other four without ever running them. That gap is where operational failures hide, because a problem that surfaces in one vertical almost always originated in another.
My specialty is commercialization and structure: walking into operations that have outgrown how they were built, and installing the processes, systems, and accountability that let them scale. Often that has meant building the function before the function existed — procurement, S&OP, regulatory compliance and security, human resources, business intelligence, and program management, each stood up from nothing.
Three companies, three outcomes
MedMen
I ran operations from the company's earliest days, standing up every operational department from scratch. I owned the retail footprint I opened alongside five production facilities spanning cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, and distribution, through the 2018 public listing on the CSE at a $1.6B valuation. My scope narrowed to production and brands only as the company continued to scale afterward.
A regional retail chain
I rebuilt the operating model — store process, inventory, vendor management, weekly reporting, and a hiring structure that let new units open without each one running differently. Revenue went from $7M to $30M and the business exited at $56M inside eighteen months. The infrastructure was built deliberately for that outcome.
Residential solar
Before cannabis, I helped grow a residential solar company from roughly a hundred employees into the eighth-largest residential installer in the country, acquired by NRG. Same shape as cannabis would turn out to be: regulated, permit-dependent, field-heavy, and scaling past its own infrastructure.
Four things worth weighing
I diagnose upstream
A stockout at retail is rarely a retail problem. Having run all five verticals means I look for the origin rather than treating the symptom competently and expensively, forever.
I've built toward exits
A public listing, a $56M sale, and an acquisition by NRG. Infrastructure built for a specific outcome looks different from infrastructure built to survive the week, and I've done both on purpose.
I operate outside cannabis too
I continue to work alongside consumer brands in categories where mature operational benchmarks exist, and I import those standards back into an industry still setting its own.
I execute rather than advise
I build the distribution network, design the workflows, write the SOPs, and run the operating cadence. If the engagement ends with a document and no working system, it failed.
Structure first, speed second, both always
I take two to three clients at a time and no more. Embedded work only produces results when the person doing it has enough context to make real decisions, and context doesn't survive being split eight ways.
Engagements run on a fixed weekly cadence with written reporting, because operational trust is built by being predictable rather than by being impressive. You'll always know what I'm working on, what moved, and what's blocked.
Based in Los Angeles and Nashville. Primarily remote, on site when it matters — and for facilities work, it usually matters.
Find out where it actually started.
Most operators know something is wrong. Fewer can name which vertical it originated in, which pillar failed to catch it, or what it's costing them per month. Start there.