Improving wellness and quality of life
around the world
Ecopharm Biosciences SAS
Medical Cannabis Industry
Ecopharm is a vertically-integrated biopharmaceutical company devoted to improving wellness and quality of life around the world. This company has 50 years of experience in delivering trustworthy and high-quality services to thousands of patients across Latin America. This endeavor began in 2017 with the legalization of medical cannabis in the Colombian territory. We as pioneers were one of the first companies to obtain all licenses and start operations with an exclusively medical approach leveraged on years of experience in Botanics and alternative medicine. Thanks to the incredible team and effort done in the last 3 years we have accomplished significant milestones that ranked us today between the top 15 best Colombian cannabis companies.
Role
As Project Director and Co-founder of Ecopham, I had the responsibility to set the bed-grounds of a rapidly growing medical cannabis startup. In the early stage, conceptualizing the business idea, creating the business plan, submitting all licenses, building the financial model, structuring the core team, were some of the first activities I performed. Later on, after a few milestones were accomplished, I actively participated in the fundraising and rock show of Serie A, securing $2.6 MUSD needed to develop the initial stage of the project. From that point, I assumed the responsibility to execute the business plan approved by the BOD, defining and supervising the construction of 18ha of state-of-the-art cultivation and extraction facilities as well as defining and establishing operational protocols to enter into the production stage. I also led the development and formulation of our first cosmeceutical cannabis-based brand called "Xoi Botanicals", together with an e-commerce platform as the main channel to distribute our products. Additionally, I was also in charge of creating financial and operational quarterly reports and have direct contact with investors as well as manage a team of 24 people between administrative and operational personnel.
Challenges
During this endeavor, I was challenged to build a company from scratch and setting up the bed-grounds of a corporate company flexible enough to adapt easily to a new emerging industry and the fast-growing market, together with a fresher and sketchy legal cannabis framework with multiple gaps and loopholes. This level of complexity demands the implementation of agile project methodologies in order to rapidly meet market constraints and needs. The biggest constrain experienced during this project was the extra-time spent during the licensing and regulatory stage which directly implied overflow overhead and extra operational expenditures. For that, I personally utilized vast knowledge in project management to precisely control and planned each activity and resources deployed together with precise personal management, budget forecasting, and timed fundraising. To keep track of every expenditure, we designed an integrated dashboard with the use of Business Intelligence (BI) tools that tracked the overall project execution and resources deployed every week. This tool was the best ally to decide and structure the following funding series and also reduce the pace and quickly regain momentum when needed.
Outcomes
We have created a well-know cannabis-based company with significant research and medical expertise that easily step aside from the common industry approach of massive cultivation capacity and stock exchange heat markets. We, as differentiators have focused on adding the maximum value to each step and process across the entire operation, from the seed selection and pathologies correlation, until the best agricultural and medical practices applied to maximize the efficiency of our products and patients treatments thanks to multiple strategic alliances with top-tier medical centers in Colombia. We are proud to say we have built a company with the potential to improve wellness and quality of life around the world. Today, we have the ability to produce 1.9 tons of dry flower per year, thanks to 9 fully-certified non-psychoactive strains and an incredible agricultural team. Ecopharm is currently evaluated on a pre-operative stage with an EV of $8.6 MUSD, we expect to increase that value 3x once we reach the commercial stage in the upcoming years, accordingly, we are currently closing Serie B in order to move towards the commercial ramp-up.
