A cannabis executive named four specific moves in a 2021 podcast interview. Every one of them arrived.
In July 2021, Everett Smith sat for a twenty-two minute podcast interview and did something operators in this industry usually avoid. He named specific states. He gave a timeline. He described products that did not exist yet.
Five years later, the record is unusually easy to check.
He said Presidential Cannabis was moving into Oklahoma, targeting late in the third quarter. Oklahoma arrived, and it is now one of the brand's largest markets by licensed retail count.
He said Nevada and Arizona would follow. Both arrived.
He said new formats were coming, including minis. Mini blunts and mini pre-rolls are in the catalog.
Four specific commitments. Four delivered.
The reasoning, which is more interesting than the forecast
Ask most executives why they picked a market and you get a slide about total addressable opportunity. Smith's answer in 2021 was his business partner.
John Zap has roots in Oklahoma. There were existing resources on the ground. That was the reason.
It is a more honest account of how cannabis brands actually expand than the industry usually gives. Federal prohibition means there is no national distribution, no interstate commerce, and no way to enter a market from a distance. Every state is a separate build. The map follows the relationships, and the operators who admit that tend to be the ones who execute.
Nevada followed a similar logic. Smith is from Las Vegas. His mother ran the Las Vegas Convention Center for more than two decades. Arizona was the natural extension.
Three states, three reasons that had nothing to do with a spreadsheet and everything to do with knowing the ground.
The read that started it
The more instructive part of the interview was Smith's description of what the California shelf looked like in 2012, when Presidential began.
Products in tubes or bags. Avery labels. Very few infused items on the market at all.
Three decisions followed from that observation. They secured access to white-label infused product in a category that barely existed. They invested in professional colour packaging built around flavours. And they moved into pouches earlier than most of the market — a format Smith says they were among the only California brands running for a long stretch.
None of that was a manufacturing breakthrough. All of it was reading a shelf correctly. The bet was that a category with no visual standard would reward whoever set one, and it did.
Marketing a product you are not allowed to advertise
Cannabis brands operate under advertising restrictions that would be unrecognisable to any conventional consumer-goods company. Smith's response was to treat the store itself as the channel.
In-store activations. Promotions. Samples. The premise was direct: if someone tried the product, particularly on promotion, they would come back and bring someone with them.
He is candid about the cost. Presidential has given away a significant volume of product over the years on the conviction that a first trial converts into a long-term customer.
When multi-store operators consolidated the retail landscape, the approach scaled rather than changed. One relationship with a group could place product across an entire state.
Through the pandemic, when in-store work was frequently impossible, the single-serve formats carried it. Pre-rolls and single-use items suited the moment. The company ran promotions with strategic retailers, worked with delivery services, and kept the name moving on social.
Moon Rocks, and restoring a category
Smith describes moon rocks as a category whose quality had slipped before Presidential entered it.
The correction was unglamorous and entirely operational. Partner with quality growers. Use top-shelf flower and concentrate. Package it like a national brand rather than a local one. Make consistency of raw goods the central focus.
The collaboration model followed from the same principle — take award-winning cultivated flower, infuse it, and build moon rocks and blunts from it.
His stated rule is worth quoting for its plainness:
Nice packaging can get someone to try it once. Only quality brings them back.
That sentence explains the last five years better than the expansion map does.
The athlete's frame, applied literally
Smith spent his twenties chasing professional basketball and reached it, playing in Germany, where he negotiated three contracts himself without an agent. He describes that as the beginning of his business education rather than the end of his athletic one.
The transfer he claims is not motivational language. It is specific. In basketball he read box scores to understand why teams won or lost. In business he reads spreadsheets and profit-and-loss statements the same way, looking for the point of weakness and the point of strength.
The early years were, by his own account, unpolished. Door-to-door sales. Being mistaken for law enforcement and shown out. Not yet having the right vocabulary. What carried it was the same thing that carries a season: stay in the game, adjust, keep working.
He is direct about what he considers essential to the company's survival — a partner who holds you accountable. He describes himself and Zap as an odd couple, one setting vision and the other keeping the company profitable, and treats that imbalance as the reason it worked.
The other rule he names: do every job in the business. He and Zap rolled joints, packaged product, made deliveries and sold. Touching every part of an operation is what keeps a founder grounded in it.
Two quotes he builds on
Smith credits his college coach Gary Gardner with the first: it is not what happens to you, it is how you react to it.
The second is Bruce Lee: simplicity is the key to brilliance. Strip it to essentials. Start simple. Grow from there.
Both show up in how the company operates. The 2012 packaging decision was simple. The in-store strategy was simple. The quality rule is one sentence long.
What is still running
The interview also described a longer horizon — roughly twenty states, flagship locations, and a brand built on the model of companies that outlast the people who found them. Smith named Hershey's and Coca-Cola.
Presidential is carried in six states today with two more opening. The horizon is still ahead of the company, which is what a horizon is for.
The consumption lounge project he described is a separate ambition in Los Angeles, aimed at building a physical space rather than a distribution footprint.
And the version of the industry Smith said he was waiting for — headquarters, trucks moving product across the country, cannabis operating like conventional consumer goods — does not exist yet. Federal prohibition still makes interstate commerce impossible, which is why a national cannabis brand today is a collection of state operations rather than one company.
He described that destination in 2021 knowing it was not available. The company kept building toward it anyway.
Reading it back
Public forecasts from operators are usually worth less than the reasoning behind them. What holds up here is both.
The reasoning was sound: a category with no packaging standard, a product type with little competition, a market where advertising is closed and the shelf is the only channel that works.
And the specific commitments were met. Oklahoma, Nevada, Arizona, and the smaller formats — named in one interview, all four now in the market. The current catalogue and the licensed retailers carrying it are listed at presidentialmoonrocks.com.
In an industry where announced plans routinely outrun what gets delivered, that record is worth noting.
Everett Smith spoke on the podcast "From Pot to Popular — Bringing an Athlete Mentality Into Cannabis Entrepreneurship," published 7 July 2021.