Ep. 208: Simone Cimiluca-Radzins – Adventures in Cannabis Country

Few industries have a more interesting or infamous background
than cannabis. And from a management accountant’s perspective,
it’s a story straight out of the wild west of business. Simone
Cimiluca-Radzins, joins us to discuss her journey from Big 4 CPA
to bringing accounting and finance order to untamed business
territory through the CBM Network.


Connect with Simone:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bizwithsimone/
Simone's Podcast:
https://cannabisradio.com/podcasts/cannabis-business-minds/
CBM Network:
https://www.cbmnetwork.com/courses/startup


Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:



Welcome back to Count Me In the podcast that brings you inside
the fascinating world of management accounting. Few industries
have more interesting or infamous background than cannabis. From
a management accountant's perspective, it's the story straight
out of the wild west of business. Joining me today is Simone
Cimiluca-Radzins, a leading consultant in the cannabis industry.
We discuss our unique journey from a big four CPA to bringing
accounting and finance order to attain businesses in cannabis
country. Let's start the conversation.


Adam:



Simone, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm
really excited to be talking about cannabis and cannabis and
accounting and accounting in the cannabis industry. But to start
off, I wanna find out how did you get into this industry and
what's your story?


Simone:



I'm so excited to also be on. Thank you so much for the
opportunity. You know, I am an accountant by nature. I grew up in
a family where my dad is an accountant, a controller, you know,
did the whole kind of accounting route and it just was the thing
that just made sense going up in college. I was like, oh,
accounting's easy. Let me go do this. And then got recruited
pretty young in university to be part of PWC. And then it almost
felt like my career path was kind of just set, maybe luck, maybe
opportunity, you know, the combination of all of that. And I did,
I did a few different corporate accounting type of jobs. Got to
travel the entire world, which was amazing. Doing internal audit
for one of the large studios down in Los Angeles and then moving
to Paris for a few years and being able to do international
consulting.


Simone:



I've always focused on accounting, right? So internal control
development, processes, you know, process improvement. But it was
nice because at that point, at the very end of my corporate
tenure, I guess we could say it was an opportunity to really see
how I could truly be an advisor and truly implement things
instead of just telling people, Hey, you know what, you've got
all of these control problems and see you later. Here's your
audit report. And so that was a really nice kind of end towards
my corporate tenure. And yeah, I think you probably hear it often
that some people just get burned out and doing international
consulting. That's how I felt like it was, you know, and it's
funny saying it cuz it was such a dream when it was there, but
then at the very end, it was like two weeks in Paris, two weeks
somewhere else in the world.


Simone:



And you're battling jet lag. You're, you know, I'm in my mid
twenties at this point, almost like late twenties I guess. And
you're kinda like, well, hold on, I wanna hang out with people. I
wanna have friends. Like, this is so fun. But at the same time, I
feel like there's something more. And, you know, I decided to
quit my job and I lost my visa living in Europe. I lost my visa
and I went back to the US and started freelancing from one of my,
you know, previous jobs. So it was a really great freelance gig
and that started to get me into freelance and understanding,
well, okay, this is really cool. Like, I have to do my
deliverables and I can kind of just maybe build something on my
own.


Simone:



And that's when I think the entrepreneurial bug started where I
was like, Hmm, you know, I think that there's something more, but
I didn't know what that more is. And in the end, I think I'm just
getting there, right? And so that's like, oh, this is a while. So
I guess to any listener who's feeling that it's okay to feel like
you might not really know exactly what you want, but that there
is something more. And freelancing, it was just a great
opportunity. I can make great better money than I was making in
my corporate gig. And I had just moved to LA and so I got a
subscription to magazines. I don't know if if if people still get
that, but when you move into a new place, you can get all these,
these magazines. And I got this one.


Simone:



There was on the front cover, women in the marijuana industry.
And I was like, what? Now I'd been in Europe, I'd been in finance
I hadn't thought about, and it was marijuana then I call it
cannabis now. It's, you know, the real term that you wanna use. I
hadn't thought about weed, cannabis, marijuana since I was in
high school. And I was like, Hmm, this is interesting. And I
started really diving in into what is this industry? And at that
time it's 2015. And so if we just roll back, there's not even two
states that have legalized adult use and some obviously have,
have legalized medical use. But, so it's all brand new. I'm in
California, which is the Wild West, which is the biggest market
in the entire world. And I just started doing this research about
like, what is, I'm an auditor.


Simone:



I was like, okay, let me understand the ecosystem just like I
would a business. I was like, okay, let me understand the
players, what is happening? Like what is the supply chain and all
of that. And I just thought to myself, okay, I think this is the
industry that I wanna be in. And before I even got on my own, I
thought, okay, but how do you really learn it? You learn it
through the numbers. Just like I learned every other business,
right? Like, you can understand numbers, you can understand how
everything works. So I approached a CPA firm that was very
cannabis, like, it was very clear they were working in the
cannabis industry, which is not, you know, was not at that time
something that you would promote. And I said, Hey, I can help
you. I can help you with your sales, I can help you, you know,
build, you know, a better process. And I had a year, a little bit
less than a year working with them until I felt really confident
that I could just go out on my own and start kind of building my
own business and start kind of working on different projects in
the cannabis space. So that's how I got in.


Adam:



Wow, that's amazing. So when you got in, it was still largely a
cash industry, right? So I can only imagine how crazy that was
because everything is digital currencies and all that stuff and
the world of business today, even in 2015, it still was. And now,
and in that time, how did you manage that?


Simone:



Well, so the interesting thing is, so there's twofold. There's, I
got 80% of businesses still lack banking today in 2022. So you
really have to have a good set of internal controls. And working
with those businesses even in 2015, you know, you could just
spoil it back to the basics. But what's fascinating is that
they're, you know, there's almost something that you could call
legacy industry, meaning operators that had been in the business
before it was quote, unquote "legal" in that state. Right. So had
probably got involved in, you know, if you think about
California, there was an ability to truly build a business, even
though it was a cooperative model starting in 1996 when there was
the fi...