I'm not faulting your investment decisions or equipment in the least. On the contrary, it takes someone with not only the financial resources but the experience and know how to utilize this array of equipment to meet your goals. I can't tell you how may people I've run into who have plenty of money try to get in the game by throwing money at the project only to be disappointed with the amount of work it takes and the high risk:reward quotient. There are some dues to pay and it starts off by learning what works and what doesn't.
really? 23% on average? documented testing right? If you've posted them on RIU as before and afters I've missed them. repost if it's not too much trouble. With strain improvements like that I can see how the dispensaries would have shat themselves.
There is nothing wrong with lucrative. I recently had a client pay me $500.00 for a 30 minute consult. At the end he said I had saved him tens of thousands of dollars and untold time that would have been lost had the database been lost or corrupted. He happily paid my fee and commented that he's paying for what's between my ears not what is on my shelf.
But you still sell something. It is your work. Your knowledge, Your results. You set a price and people pay it, or don't. They buy what you sell at your terms and you enjoy what you do. You are able to tie in your altruistic gifts to indigent patients because you covered your expenses and made a profit. If on the other hand it was you who were the indigent patient you would be looking for someone just like you who applied themselves and learned your methods and techniques over time, made the investment over time, took the risks, had failures, spent hundreds even thousands of uncompensated hours trying different products out to realize their benefits or lack thereof, maybe got taken advantage of here and there, and so on. You do this first because of first it is your passion and secondly because it pays an income that allows you to most likely provide jobs to others and keep yourself in the standard of living you wouldn't have had as an automaton working 9-5 somewhere putting your 20 years in for the social security check that will never come. And for that you should be rewarded. I would not characterize that reward, be it large or small, as greed if there are those that value your work and are willing to pay your price.
Kite I'm not faulting you for your business acumen at all but let's take a second to compare this relationship you have with your dispensaries to that of the 'manufacturer' who sells a product with simply design obsolescence in mind which in today's throw away society is not considered unethical but the rule rather than the exception. Keep in mind that in this comparison I'm not talking about the 'manufacturer' who would deliberately mislead customers by misstating what it is their products can do, or attempt to deceive the customer through the use of cooked testimony, endorsements, graphics, or by demanding that the greatest crop returns come from relamping, ventilating, adding more lights, buying the latest technical breakthrough for your garden, etc etc. all the while charging usury prices to further compound this criminal deception.
What that manufacturer is doing when he provides a product with design obsolescence in mind is that yes they the manufacturer will profit but so will the stores and the employee's will have jobs and communities will get tax revenues and the customers will happily return to the shops to buy these products, oh let's just say we're talking HID lamps here, that have a life span of 20,000 hours but in a garden environment are being changed every 4000 hours. The customer pays this price, regularly, because they have factored the lamp as a cost of doing business. Every single person in this food chain wins except the patient. The hydroshop has a 'legitimate' solution to indoor garden lighting that everyone, ie experts, will attest to 'this is the way to do it right'. The other winners are the wholesale distributors that sell to all the hydroshops because they whip the marketing up to a frenzy which further reinforces the 'benefits' of these products. Call it success by association. The wholesaler makes their piece and they pay reps who in turn put pallets of this shit into the hyrdoshops where the lemmings lock step to the POS. This is all done because someone traded on their name and the products do deliver, to varying degrees, but at a cost. All these 'middle men' have created an environment where even the legitimate manufacturer will look to be 'creative' to satisfy the hunger of all those that stand between their manufactured products and the end user.
Your commission arrangements with the dispensaries is creative and you deserve whatever the dispensaries are willing to pay you for the value you provide them. And from what you've said you have given them and their patients that value represents enormous improvements in their meds. But your still trading on your work and the value is such that it's worth it to the dispensaries to pay you this commission which is a result of happy customers, regularly paying the dispensaries price. The weed, a product, is consumed thereby needing to be replenished meaning the recurring revenues, similar to that driven by design obsolescence, will pay dividends for you and those in that food chain long after your initial work has been completed.
All I'm getting at is that when you make these broad sweeping statements that accuse all manufacturer's intents and purposes to be driven by greed is myopic. Profits drive innovations. Innovations that actually work and make it better for the garden and the environment need to make it to customers without too many middlemen cluttering up the message.
Namaste my friend.
