How Thrive upgraded 6 dispensary locations and 350+ employees to Flowhub Maui™
6+store expansions on Maui
About Thrive
Thrive Cannabis Marketplace is the largest independently-owned cannabis company in Nevada. Since its inception, the multi-location dispensary business has completed over 5 million sales transactions.
While expanding to multiple store locations, Thrive’s team has approached decision-making with the mantra “if it feels good, it is good,” meaning money isn’t the only motivator for the business.
Instead, Mitch Britten, Thrive’s Managing Partner & CEO says, “Sometimes you have to make a choice because it feels like the right thing to do, either for your employees, your customers, or the community as a whole.”
In a time when many businesses are fighting to make it in the cannabis industry, Thrive has found longstanding success and peace.
“In my opinion, we’ve reached success. We don’t have any debt or conflicts — which is unique in this market. Just staying the course we’re on is an incredible achievement.”
Mitch Britten
Managing Partner & CEO at Thrive
Since 2018, Thrive has partnered and grown with Flowhub, but the most important point in the partnership came during their transition to Maui, Flowhub's brand-new dispensary management platform.
In this story, Thrive's team shares their experience onboarding and utilizing Flowhub Maui across all their dispensary locations.
From two retail locations to eight
After being among the winningest applicants in the Nevada dispensary licensing round, Thrive went from being awarded two retail licenses to eight. Six of these dispensary locations are operational today and two more are on the way.
Mitch and his team needed a point of sale they could trust to support their rapid growth.
"We had a list of non-negotiables related to POS functionality and as we demoed all the systems out there, we realized some of our non-negotiables didn't exist anywhere. What set Flowhub apart was their willingness to refine Maui and add what we needed to the product."
One of these “non-negotiables” and a favorite feature of John Erminio, Thrive’s Director of Growth & Strategy, is Maui’s Global Product Catalog, which centralizes product information across all Thrive locations.
“With the Global Product list, we're able to categorize products across all of our stores instead of individual locations. That's been a big help for us because we don’t have to input product information six times at each location.”
John Erminio
Director of Growth & Strategy at Thrive
Success rooted in compliance and efficiency
With many of Thrive’s locations staying open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there wasn't much time for extra employee training. Staff needed to be armed with software that was intuitive, easy to use, and most importantly — compliant.
Mitch noted, “The frontline workers in our industry outnumber backend employees three to one.” As an enterprise dispensary business with over 350 employees, Thrive needed a POS solution that was especially easy for front of house employees to learn.
Luckily, Maui's ease of use made onboarding a breeze for Thrive’s budtending staff.
Mitch found "Maui is a lot more user-friendly on the budtender side of things. It was important to have a seamless transition from the old system to the new system for the majority of our employees, which were the budtenders and the cashiers. Not having to retrain the bulk of our employees was very valuable to us."
Alongside its ease of use, Flowhub Maui is 20x faster compared to the previous system. When budtenders use a faster POS software, dispensaries typically see a shorter average order time — which has also been true for Thrive.
"Maui is just running faster. Budtenders using Maui are able to complete transactions more quickly, which is paramount for our customer experience."
Mitch Britten
Managing Partner & CEO at Thrive
Finding inner peace with Maui
It’s easy to see cannabis retail software as a crucial, yet boring necessity — like going to the gas station. Mitch even said, “A lot of point of sale systems are pretty much just a repackaging of the same thing with a different appearance.”
But Mitch and the Thrive team are excited by Flowhub Maui. The platform’s intuitive design doesn’t just make it stand out, it has the functionality to offer them peace of mind, which is unheard of in the cannabis space.
"I truly think Maui is unique. Its reliability is what really wowed me. We all sleep better at night knowing we don't need to worry and if there ever is a problem, we're gonna have a quick solution."
John Erminio
Director of Growth & Strategy at Thrive
Perhaps the biggest test of the year came when Thrive was preparing for 420. The anxiety that comes with this massive sales day isn’t something new to him. Thankfully, Maui nipped his worries in the bud.
"We spent close to three weeks leading up to 420 just building redundancies in our stores because I've always had some sort of system failure on our busiest days over the past 10 years. Flowhub Maui ran flawlessly on our biggest day of the year. I'm grateful we switched prior to 420."
Thank you to the entire Thrive team! We’re proud to be your software partner and look forward to your continued success.
