Interview with Matt Sibert, founder of CBD Business Accelerator

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

All right. Hello. I am here with Leafreport and we’re here with Matt Sibert. How are you today, Matt?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Good. How are you doing today, Kristin?

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

I’m doing well, thank you. So we’re going to talk with you a little bit today about your website, cbdbusinessaccelerator.com and I’m really excited to hear about this. So Matt, why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your journey into the CBD industry.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Sounds good. So I grew up in the cannabis industry pretty much. I grew up in Chicago in a Rastafarian neighborhood, and they took me in like family when I was a little boy. So I always grew up around cannabis and saw it as a healing, spiritual sacrament. So I’ve always just been around it and didn’t really pay attention to the laws honestly, as far as that was concerned, growing up in Chicago.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Then in 2012 I, I landed in California because I saw a documentary by a man named Rick Simpson and he has something called Rick Simpson Oil and he helped thousands and thousands of cancer patients and people with autoimmune disorders. And I had lost both my parents to cancer-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh wow.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And I was determined to help people with cancer so they didn’t have to suffer. So I moved to California in 2012 and opened up a dispensary out here, and it became the busiest dispensary in San Diego. It was amazing. We’re helping so many people. Unfortunately there was no licenses at the time, so we got shut down by the code enforcement-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh my God.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And then eventually they were giving out licenses. So we got one of the first licensed dispensaries. I was general manager of that one and it was attached to a pain management clinic, and the doctor that ran that clinic hates pills. So he was sending his patients to us all day, like people with multiple sclerosis and autoimmune disorders and cancer and things like that. So we were able to really help a lot of people.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

I saw CBD was getting more and more popular around 2015, yeah 2015. We were helping a lot of people with CBD. So I noticed that and I was like, “Oh, I see this industry is really starting to grow.” So I decided to shift focus over to CBD along with my partner Bee at the time, who’s my lady as well. She was running that dispensary with me, and so we decided to focus over to the CBD industry specifically. At the time, it was really new and it was growing, and so we saw it as a good opportunity, and we ended up launching our own brand Hemp Logica.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And within six months of launching that brand, we had three public companies offered to buy us out, and we learned a lot of lessons along the way and what to do, what not to do. We made a lot of mistakes. So that’s why I launched the CBD Business Accelerator because when I launched Hemp Logica, it was just a challenge figuring everything out, how to navigate the industry. [crosstalk 00:03:01] There was nothing out there, there was no resources of how to navigate CBD industry.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So now we have over 50 experts in the CBD Business Accelerator. They’re all vetted by me, that know what they’re doing, that actually get results, because there’s a lot of con artists in the CBD industry unfortunately.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh I’m sure. Yeah, it’s unfortunate.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, they make a lot of promises, and I’ve lost a lot of money in the past, hiring the wrong people and things like that. So we built this accelerator just to give people the resources they need to move forward fast and to get to where they need to go. And so that’s really what we’re focused on today, along with a lot of consulting work that we do with our company, Symbio Cannabis Consulting.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Okay. So I got a chance to look through the website and I thought it was really cool.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Awesome.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So I know you also have some partners, you have a couple of partners. Do you want to just tell me a brief history of them and how you guys kind of got to be together in this venture?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh sure. Yeah. So my main partner of course is my lady Bee, Dr. Bee-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Awesome.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

She’s Dr. Bee Thomas, and when I met Bee, she was a college professor, but she was getting burned out of teaching. And so I was like, “Do you want to run a dispensary with me?” And she was like, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

That’s so cool.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So she jumped into the business and now she’s really focused on helping black women entrepreneurs get into the cannabis industry, and so she’s really focused on that. She just finished a book and she’ll be launching that soon. So it’s incredible what she’s done with that, and so I’m excited to see that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Then one of my other partners, I have a lot of partners, Aaron Nosbisch is my other partner, he’s a marketing genius. I met him because I saw the CBD company on Facebook. They were getting tons of traction. I was like, “I got to meet whoever’s behind this.” And I tracked him down, and now we’re partners.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And Aaron, he took one company, Monq, it’s a terpene vape company from zero to $22 million in sales with his genius.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

That’s awesome.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

We’re able to hopefully do that for other companies, and we’ve been really successful working with our clients. So Aaron’s, he’s focused on e-commerce and direct-to-consumer marketing and Facebook ads, Instagram ads, influencers. Then we also have Stephanie Bernard. She’s our tech expert because if you don’t have a tech expert on your team, you’re going to have hassles.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

You’ll be like, “What?”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh my God. I was so slowed down when we had our brand Hemp Logica, because we didn’t have a tech person we could really rely on and just slows down. So Stephanie builds funnels, she does Facebook ads, she does email marketing, messenger bots, like all the different internet marketing things, and she’s a coder. She can build websites. So anything that breaks, I just send her a message.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, you’re like, “Hey, can you fix this?”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, because I’m totally not techie.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

All right.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And then there’s Morgan and Eric Hanna, our other partners, and they were actually clients of mine and we became family and they’re just like family to me. So we brought them in. They’re very successful entrepreneurs and they do a lot of different things in real estate and other ventures. So they also have a hemp CBD cigarette company or pre-roll company, Hempedics. So they do a bunch of different things, they’re like serial entrepreneurs. So that’s basically our team, and it’s really solid because we all balance each other out well and-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

It sounds like you have a good crew and the right kind of people to run a successful business. You have this person who does this, this person … That’s important.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, and then with our consulting company, we have Shawna [Kayson 00:06:47] who’s like our all around. She just does everything. Anything that we need, she can do it, it’s incredible. She just plugs in all the gaps, and anything that me and Aaron needs, she just makes sure it gets done. It’s like we wouldn’t be able to run the company without her because you get overwhelmed and there’s only so many hours in the day. So it’s important to have the right team on your side for sure.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So important, yeah.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

You can’t do it all yourself.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

No way, and if you try, you’re going to end up pulling out all your hair, you know? Something like that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, I tried before and I did get burned out.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

I could see that. I could see that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So I know you talked a little bit, do you want to just tell me the name again of your website and a little bit what it was like to get it up and running?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, it’s a cbdbusinessaccelerator.com and it took us about five or six months to get it up and running because there’s a lot of content in there. There’s hours and hours of content from all of our different experts. And we add … We just launched it last Saturday, but every week we do at least two interviews with our experts, and then there’s a Q&A at the end, so our members can ask the experts questions. Like last week we interviewed Brandon Bahr from Soothe CBD, which is a very popular up and coming CBD company.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So, not only do we interview internet marketing experts, we interview CEOs of CBD companies that are actually in the trenches and they give up tips and advice of what’s working for them and things like that. But yeah, it took a while to really build out the framework of the site and make sure that it was good, but we launched last week and we already got a ton of new members.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

That’s so awesome.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So it’s a work in progress. We’ll keep tweaking it and adding things as we go, but yeah, I like where we’re at so far though.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, that’s why I wanted to ask that, because when I was looking through the website, I was shocked and really impressed at how much content you guys had. So I was like, “This must’ve taken a while.”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It did. Thank you very much.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, really, really cool though.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, and we have inspiration. I’m a member of a membership site for people who run membership sites. It’s called The Membership Guys, and they’re great people and they teach you how to build out a membership site and all the things you need to do. And it’s been a great resource. So shouts out to The Membership Guys and Membership Academy.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Very cool, very cool. So why don’t we start talking a little bit about the site, and I know a lot of these answers can be found on there and hopefully everyone watching this will go check it out because it’s really cool. But who is your website for? Who is this for?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So it’s for CBD brands that want to launch or scale their brands. So either one, if you’re just starting out and you just like, “I have an idea. I want to start a CBD brand, but I don’t know what to do though.” That’s perfect. Those are the people we really like helping because we want to help people from the foundation, because usually 90% of the time, when people come to me and they already have built out their brand and everything, I have to tell them to do it all over again unfortunately.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

I have a branding background as well. I worked for a branding company in DC for a few years and really learned a lot about the foundations of building a strong brand from the ground up. And a lot of people don’t understand those things that you need to do. So it’s great that we get people from the beginning, but even successful brands that are doing well, we can help them as well.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Like some of our clients are already doing, when they came to us, one of them was doing 12 million a year and now we’ve doubled that.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh wow.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So yeah, it’s like we work with startups all the way up to some of the biggest companies in the industry, and they can all benefit from being members of the Accelerator and helping each other out. I’m all about sharing and community and not hiding your secrets. I don’t knock that. There’s companies out there that don’t want to give up their secrets and things like that, that’s cool, but that’s not what the Accelerator is all about. It’s about companies that want to help each other grow, because I feel like there’s enough to go around for everybody, as long as you have a strong brand.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

For sure. Yeah, as long as you have a strong brand, and I love what you said about building a strong foundation. I feel like that’s so important for everything in life.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

I mean everything you do. You have to make sure you’re solid, you’re ready, you’re built, and that’s really awesome that you guys do that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, and we’re really big on mindset because the cannabis and CBD industry is constantly changing and moving. It’s a moving target basically, so we’re huge on mindset. I used to work for a company, Nightingale Conant in Chicago, and their motto is, “You become what you think about,” and I really believe that. So I’m all about positive thinking and visualizations and manifesting what you want out of your life. And most people, they don’t … If you ask 10 people on the street, what do you want? What are your goals right now? Eight of them probably won’t even know. “I’m just trying to survive.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right, right.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

People that know what they want, the more specific you are, the more likely you are to succeed. So we really help people their goals and target them and make sure they’re on track, and of course it changes all the time. Like I was just telling you before our call. I’m selling a lot of etho-alcohol and hand sanitizers these days because of the corona virus, which I never would have thought, but it’s just how the industry goes. The CBD manufacturers right now are making hand sanitizers. So it’s just, it is what it is, and so you have to be able to pivot fast in this industry.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

I remember talking to a guy. He came from Red Bull, he was a higher up at Red Bull and he transferred into the cannabis industry and he was like, “Man, and I thought it was fast at Red Bull.” He was like, “This is crazy Matt.” I was like, “Get ready. Buckle your seatbelt buddy.” It’s a very fast industry, and so having the resources, that’s why I built the CBD accelerator to give people the resources so that they can move fast along with the industry because otherwise you’ll just get left behind. And I see it happening all the time.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Now there’s a lot of companies approaching me wanting to sell their companies or liquidate their inventories because they just can’t figure it out, and they ran out of money unfortunately. So I’m starting to see that unfortunately.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it’s good, I think it’s really cool that companies have someone like you to come to for help. I mean, every industry needs this.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

I know, right? And I think, yeah it’s just very specific to the CBD industry because their [crosstalk 00:13:26] is, even just getting a merchant account is really hard in our industry, and I have multiple connections with that. And just anything … I have the largest network in the CBD industry. There’s nobody that has a bigger network than me. Not to knock my own horn or to [crosstalk 00:13:40], but it’s the truth and I’ve worked hard to build that network up of people that you can trust. So it didn’t come over night for sure.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right. So I know your site is a membership based site, but when I was looking through, I also saw that there was a good amount of information for non-members, for someone that just wants to go and check it out. So, what kind of a few things do you think would be on the site, just if someone wanted to go look? If they’re looking at it for the first time, what can they find out before they join?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh yeah, there’s a ton of free content if they go to the homepage and we constantly update that as well. We even give clips of the interviews that we do with our experts.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh wow, that’s great.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So if the interview’s 45 minutes, we might share a five or 10 minute clip of that interview that has a valuable piece to it, just to show people what’s inside of the Accelerator. But we have free articles on SEO, on how to build a CRM system, branding articles. Like one of my partners, other partner is Paul Booth. He’s a branding expert and we create brands together for CBD companies, and Paul has created multimillion dollar supplement brands and things like that. And we always talk about audience message product, that’s the AMP.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So if you can figure out your audience, who are you selling to, which a lot of the CBD companies, they think they can sell to everybody.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Everybody, yeah.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It doesn’t work like that.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right, right.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

You could have done that maybe six years, five, six years ago, but not anymore in this industry. You have to be very targeted, and then with your messaging, you have to be able to speak directly to that audience in the way that’s going to sink in with them and words that resonate with them, and then the product has to be a fit for that audience. So we really dial that in, and then we’re really big on packaging and just standing out with your packaging and also giving back.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

If you have a CBD company, it’s almost a prerequisite in my opinion, that you give back to a cause of some sort, that you make an impact with your company. And not only are you helping people, it helps with the marketing honestly. So, when we had our brand hemp Logica every bottle we sold, we donated CBD oil to a child with epilepsy and we gave away 4,000 bottles in six months or something. It was crazy, and it went viral. So yeah, it’s just a different things like that, just finding a cause to give back to. I’m really big on that. So we teach different things like that, but if you go to the homepage of our site, yeah there’s tons of free-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, I was shocked at how much information was already there. I’m like, “Oh, I’m not even in this site yet? This is crazy.” I was like, “It’s crazy. There’s so much.”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Hopefully people will join and not think that, “Oh, I got enough info off the homepage.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right, no. I mean, there’s info there, but yeah, I mean I was blown away.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It gets a lot deeper when you get inside the group of course, because you get to talk to the actual experts and pick their brains and have that access. And inside the membership, there’s actual listing of all the experts, and you can pair it down by whatever you need. Like, “Oh I need an email marketer.” Then it will only show you email marketers and things like that.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Well great. Yeah, I wanted to start talking about the membership portion. So I thought that was super cool how you have your section of experts. I know you said you personally vet all the experts and that was going to be one of my questions and it seems, I mean you already answered it, but you have a lot of knowledge about this industry. You’ve been in it for a long time, but is there anything else you want to say about how you vet that? Or A little bit more about who these experts are, et cetera?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah. So they’re all experts and I always say I don’t want to be the smartest one in the room. So all of these people are way smarter than me in whatever area they’re experts in, and they’ve taught me a lot, and they either, when I had my own company, Hemp Logica, they either showed me results when I paid them or I’ve seen them get results for other people, like my partner Aaron Nosbisch. Then when I vet them, it takes time. I don’t just meet one day and then they’re, “Hey, you’re on board.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Okay, come on.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So it’s like building a relationship with them. I’m really big on relationship building and so it takes some time and just seeing them get results for people. Sometimes I’ll just see … Like Ace Ready is one of our experts. I just kept seeing this guy, Ace Ready’s name pop up everywhere. All day long people are shouting him out, how great he is and how he’s helped them get their eCommerce store going.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So I was like, “Let me reach out to this guy.” And he was already friends with one of our other experts, Shawn Kemp. So I asked Shawn about ACE and he was, “Yeah, Ace is awesome man.” And then we clicked, and that was how that happened, because when you see somebody like that, that gets like literally hundreds of testimonials from people, you’re like, “He must be doing something right.” And then when you meet, you click. So that one happened fast, but then he had the vouching of one of my other experts too. So it just depends kind of, and I might not always be right, but hopefully I will be. So far I’m doing pretty good.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So far you are. Cool.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So yeah, and it’s just important to have that network. All of our clients and people that have worked with us, they say because of the network that we have, they’ve been able to get to where they need to go way faster and they didn’t make certain mistakes. Anybody in our membership can pick my brain or Aaron’s brain and say, “Matt, I’m going to do this. What do you think?” And I can say, “No, don’t do that.” Or, “You’re right, that’s a good idea.” So we’ve saved people a lot of money by telling them, “No, don’t do that.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Oh my God.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, a lot of people, they just have the wrong idea about things and they want to put money into the wrong areas. So it’s you got to go through the things that are going to generate your site traffic, and you have to have a website that’s going to convert that traffic too. So it’s just all these hundreds of little pieces have to fit together in order to make it work.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

And it sounds like you have it figured out. I’m so impressed.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, we have a system in place, but even when you do everything right, sometimes it just doesn’t take off for whatever reason. So even then, it’s not a guarantee when you have it. I’m not the kind of person, “Oh yeah, if you work with us, you’re going to make millions of dollars guaranteed.”

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right, right. Guaranteed.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

But it does usually work very well. Like one of our clients right now, they’re really targeted, like I was saying. They have CBD patches, they have different ones and they’re targeted to women and they have a PMS patch. They also have an anxiety patch. And because of everybody being at home recently and the anxiety has gone up, I’m sure with a lot of people, they’re getting almost six times ROI on their Facebook ads the last few weeks.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Wow.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So it’s just crazy how the results we can get for our clients. That’s really good results, but usually, we’re getting our clients, two times ROI once we get their Facebook ads up and running. So I mean if you could put in a dollar and make a dollar, that’s not a bad business.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, not a bad business at all. Can I sign up?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, let’s get you a brand. Come on.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So I also noticed in the member section you have a little a tab for buy and sell. What is this and how does this work?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, so I have a free group that everybody should join. It’s on Facebook, it’s called CBD Business Success. I think there’s about 6,000 members now in there, and it’s very active, but it was about when I created that, it was just a place for resources to help each other out. I didn’t want it to be about selling products, but people don’t listen to me, so they always try to sell products in there, but I approve all the posts so they don’t get shown and there’s thousands of people. So I was, that was another reason when I created the accelerator, I was, “Oh, this could be a place where people can actually sell their products.”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So say, one of our members might be a CBD retail store owner, and they may want to buy from one of our members who has a CBD brand, so they might want to buy bulk from them. Or we have members that own extraction labs so they can sell bulk product, like kilos of oil or distillate, things like that. Or we have farmers on there that can sell pounds of flour and things like that. So just a place where they can sell and buy with each other.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

There’s two places for that. There’s on the website, we have that, and then we have a private Facebook group where they can buy and sell as well, and talk amongst each other, but we just launched so it’s still just building up. It’s getting crazy though.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

I’m sure, I’m sure. I saw this, I was like, “This is going to be amazing.” I’m sure you guys are going to have a ton of members.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah. We’re already getting a lot of good feedback from our initial members from our launch last week and they love it. So yeah, we’re just going to keep on adding new content every week and new courses, many courses and we have two-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, I was going to ask about that next actually in the next section. Excuse me. The CBD courses, I saw that section. So yeah, tell me about that. That’s really cool.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So we have, How to Launch a Successful CBD Brand, that’s for beginners and it’s a 12 hour course and there’s eight modules in there and me and Dr. Bee, my lady created that one. And like I said, she was a college professor and I used to do a lot of business consulting. So, it’s really well put together because Bee did a lot of the work on it in just making it formatted, like an actual college course. So there’s homework in there and things to do, so it really helps get that foundation down.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Then there’s another course by Shawn Kemp who writes copy for multimillion dollar supplement brands and he teaches you how to write the copy for your website, your landing page so that it actually sinks in. And he shares tons of resources that he uses when he writes copy. He just actually showed his whole process of what he does, and Sean gets paid a lot of money to do what he does. So he’s such a good guy. He just shared his whole routine and all the resource that he uses to write copy. So anybody that wants to learn how to write copy for their landing pages, they can check out that course.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And then, right now we’re working on two more courses. So we’ll be adding courses. I’m working on a course on How to Build Your LinkedIn Presence. I think I have a 17,000 people on my LinkedIn and 15,000 of those are in the CBD and cannabis space. So I’ll teach people how to build their LinkedIn like that, and how to reach out to people and get a following built up on LinkedIn.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

And then we’re also doing a course on how to build a funnel and a website in just a do-it-yourself type of thing. And Stephanie, my partner is going to do that and just show an over the shoulder. She builds amazing funnels, so she’s going to show exactly how to do it. So anybody in the Accelerator, if they have a do-it-yourself kind of attitude, or if they have a maybe a bootstrap budget, then we’re going to show them over the shoulder exactly how to do everything. So if you’re motivated and you have a bootstrap budget, you’re going to do well because we’re going to show you how to do everything exactly over the shoulder.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So that’s the two courses, then we’ll be adding more and more courses. And then of course, like I said, every week we go live with two of our experts at least, so we do at least two interviews per week. And then at the end of the interview there’s a Q&A, so they can just pick the experts’ brains. Next week I have Mario on, he’s a trademark attorney that specializes in cannabis brands. So people should definitely protect their brands because I’ve seen some nightmares before.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, that’s so important. My God.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh my God. My good friends, they built a brand in the THC side of things and they got into hundreds and hundreds of dispensaries. It was going to be the biggest pre-roll brand in California or one of them. But the name wasn’t trademarked, and a cigarette company had trademarked that name and the company sent them a letter and they said, “Guess what? We’re partners now and guess what? We own 80% and you own 20%.” So my friends were like, “No way,” And they just had to cancel the whole company and start a whole new brand, just because they didn’t have the trademark. So we teach people how to avoid things like that in our interviews.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Wow, it’s invaluable. I mean it’s amazing. Okay, so you talked a little bit already that you have private Facebook groups for your members.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh yeah. So we have the free group, CBD Business Success, and then the paid group is the CBD Business Accelerator. So anybody that joins the accelerator website, they get access to that private group, which is going to be just really communicating with each other and helping each other, and that’s where the live interviews go in the private group.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Okay, okay.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

But yeah, the free group is amazing. I can’t tell you how many people are in the free group and they tell me they learn so much because we give a ton of value in there as well.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

It’s really cool that you have all that. Matt, you have a section, I believe that says Resources in the members only section. So what’s in there? Give me an example of what I would find in there.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh yeah. So we’re just building that out right now. It’s in the beginning stages, but it’s just different software that we use or things like that, like click funnels or email marketing software, active campaign, things like that. Just all the tools that we use to run our businesses. Just so if somebody is like, “Oh, I don’t know which software to get,” well we recommend all those different types of software or even plugins for their website that worked well, like Yotpo for reviews. So we’ll be adding on to that, it’s just work in progress and just all the resources that they would need.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

That’s all stuff that you’ve tried and you used and you like?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, we’ve tried it all.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, I think that’s the best. I mean, you know from experience, so you know what works, you know what you like, you know what works well for you or what might work well for somebody else. So that’s great that you have all that there.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and of course with software there’s always glitches and things like that, but we still recommend all the ones that we put on there, even though some of them have slight glitches, but that’s just how it is.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right, you’re just, “Yeah, it is what it is. It still works. It happens.”

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It gets the job done.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

I know you have a webinar section as well. So you said that the weekly interviews you do will be posted in the Facebook group. Are the webinars the same or is that something different?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It’s pretty much the same thing, but we will be doing more traditional webinars as well with some of our joint venture partner. So I have friends that have followings and big lists and so we’ll be doing joint venture webinars on different topics with those people as well. But yeah, those question and answer interviews will be in there as well.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

And then I noticed also a section that said calendar. What is this for?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh, so that’ll be … Hopefully when all this blows over, we can put events in there and different trade shows-

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

That’s what I was going to ask, if you guys are going to do live events, et cetera? Trade shows?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Well yeah, we are eventually going to do a higher level mastermind, like a yearly mastermind group with really high level people that want to make deals with each other. So that’s going to be our next project that we’re working on. But yeah, and then that calendar was just going to be to list, like some of the trade shows that are out there that maybe we’re not even involved in, but just, “Oh, you should check, you should probably go here, different events that are worthy to attend.” But we’ll have to wait and see obviously right now.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, see how things go and what that all turns into.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, we just did a mastermind, a virtual mastermind last Saturday and we had a great attendance and it was really good feedback. So we’re just adapting to whatever we can do to get the word out and help people.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

So tell me, I know we didn’t go over this yet, but for the membership, what would be the membership price and what are the terms? Is it like a yearly, monthly, et cetera?

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Oh, cool. Yeah, so we have, it’s 147 a month, so 147 a month, or you can pay yearly, it’s a 1,197 for the year and we even have a lifetime membership that’s 1,997, so 1,997. Yeah, it’s a great deal to snag up the lifetime membership.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, I mean wow. It seems like there’s so much stuff that you guys are teaching people how to do, that that’s like a steal.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It is.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Really.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

I mean for two grand it’s yeah. I charge a lot more for our … We have consulting services too, and you’re getting a lot of value just by joining the Accelerator and that’s way cheaper than our consulting services.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, I’m sure.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

It’s a great deal, and just to be able to get in there and you get instant access to not only me and my team, but all the 50 experts that I work with and we’re always adding to the vetted experts list as I find new people that can help in different areas. There’s a few areas that are probably missing out of it there, so I’m adding, plugging all the gaps in, and just making sure that when somebody joins they just can have any question, answer that they need.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Right. And is there anything else out there like this? I’m going to have a sip of water too. Pause.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

No, not that I know of. I’ve looked around. There are CBD business courses out there and things like that, but there’s nothing like an actual accelerator with access to all these experts and things like that. There’s definitely not. And I think the other companies that have launched CBD courses, they don’t really have the experience that we have. Just me and my partner Aaron alone, we’ve done over a hundred million in cannabis sales in the last year, five, six years. So I doubt.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, you’re not going to find that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

But I don’t believe in competition though. I just say don’t compete, just create. So everybody can do what they want to do. We do our thing, and we love just serving people. Like I said, I lost my parents to cancer and my sister unfortunately passed away from Oxycontin at a young age. So that was my whole family, and so I just really wants to give back and help people create strong brands. And that’s another thing.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

We have access to some of the best manufacturers in the country and it’s really hard to find a solid manufacturer. So we have multiple options with that where you’re actually going to get a product that is what it says it is, and I’m proud of that. Our brands have been, or some of our clients brands have been third party tested by websites out there. They’ll just grab 20 brands and, “Let’s see what’s in it.” And ours come out right exactly what it says on the bottle every time, and other companies fail sometimes.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Yeah, wow.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So yeah, we’re all about just really giving them all the resources that it takes to create a brand from the ground up. And really, the farmers, if you’re listening, I really want to work with the farmers more than anything. Unfortunately, farmers have the worst brands by far because they’re farmers. They’re on the farm out there. They’re not out there on the internet and stuff and branding and all that.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

So I really want to be able to help the farmers from the ground up, create strong brands because they just deserve it. They work so hard out there and I know I’ve been a cannabis farmer myself and I know that what it takes. So reach out to me cannabis farmers and hemp farmers.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

You hear that farmers? Reach out to Matt.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Yeah, and then, just the general people that are launching CBD brands. That’s our expertise, just mom and pops and people that are internet marketers that want the edge up. We’re definitely here to help all those types of people.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Awesome Matt. Well, I want to say thank you so much for your time. It seems like you just have the best intention. You have so much expertise behind you and I think that you’re amazing. I love what you’re doing and I wish you the best. Thank you so much for telling us a little bit about what you do, and a little bit about yourself.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Thank you, Kristin. I really appreciate your time and yeah, just reach out to me, anybody. You can find me on Facebook, Matt Sibert or matt@sagelogica.com. S-A-G-E L-O-G-I-C-A dot com.

Kristin Harrison – Leafreport.com:

Awesome, I love it. Thank you Matt. Take care.

Matt Sibert – CBDBusinessAccelerator.com:

Bye everybody.