Image: Trevor Nichols
Left to right: Chris Williams, Stefan Sarachie, Norton Singhavon, and David Lynn of GTEC Holdings
A pair of professionals who both held high-level positions at SunRype insist there’s no conspiracy to woo people from the food and beverage company to the cannabis industry.
Really, they say with a chuckle, it’s just a coincidence.
But while it’s mere chance that former SunRype CEO David Lynn and Stefan Sarachie (the company’s former food safety and regulatory affairs specialist) now work for GTEC Holdings, their pivot to pot follows a trend of top-level talent going green.
With legalization mere months away millions of dollars have already poured into the Okanagan’s budding pot industry, leading some to compare the situation to the early-20th-century Texas oil boom.
With so much money flowing in, companies like GTEC are hungry for experienced managers. However, they also want to avoid people connected to black-market pot and this means cherry picking professionals from other, more established industries.
‘Quite a few phone calls’
Norton Singhavon is the chairman and CEO of GTEC, which is based in Kelowna and specializes in high-end craft cannabis.
He said it’s incredibly important to him to find talent not connected to black-market pot but that it can be tough to entice professionals away from more traditional industries.
“A lot of people still have that negative stigma. They may worry about what the other parents at the school think, what people at church are going to think,” he said.
He said he convinced both Lynn and Sarachie to join his company after finding them on LinkedIn and essentially cold-calling them.
“It was quite a few phone calls, quite a few meetings in person,” Singhavon says.
‘Go with our gut’
Singhavon pointed out there’s no roadmap for how to run a legitimate cannabis company, so CEOs like him need to “go with our guts” and try to build a team that brings in enough relevant experience.
“People are trying to find the right mix, they want to balance out the skill sets—so they’re bringing in food and beverage people, they’re bringing in pharma people, they’re bringing in people with cannabis experience and trying to create the right mix of skill sets,” Lynn says. “None of those people on their own are the be-all or end-all, but if you get the right mix of skill sets it really works.”
This same puzzle has been playing out in companies across the Okanagan. Lumby’s True Leaf Medicine recently announced Dr. Chris Spooner would head up a medical advisory board. Kelowna’s fast-growing Compass Cannabis Clinics, meanwhile, was founded by a couple with significant experience franchising fast-food operations.
‘I couldn’t pass that up’
Lynn, who also worked as the CEO of the Canada West Ski Areas Association, has a resume that allows him to be picky about where he works.
He says he stayed in the Okanagan because his kids love it and that he had been casually looking for new opportunities when Singhavon first approached him. He says he liked Singhavon’s approach and vision for the company, so he signed on.
Because of his experience in both the food and beverage and alcohol industries, he says he thought cannabis would be a good fit.
Sarachie, meanwhile, says he eventually left his eight-year tenure at SunRype because he liked the idea of working for a young startup.
“The opportunity is huge and for me to be able to work with a company from the ground up, it’s amazing,” he said. “You suddenly have a chance to work in a company from startup, so you get to have an input into how things are designed.”
Sarachie said it was tough to leave the safety of a more established industry, but that he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get in with a cannabis company on the ground floor.
Now, he says, he feels energized every day when he comes into work, while almost entire days can slip by without him noticing.
“This is a very exciting time,” he says.
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