BRIAN HOLLER / THE ARCHIVE
Brian’s POV
Reporting, observations, and practical ideas from business, cannabis, media, culture, and the places they meet.
Before You Make the Introduction, Give It a Job
A practical way to make business introductions useful: relevance, permission, a clear reason to talk, and a manageable next step.
Your Point of View Is a Business Asset
Expertise is what you know. Point of view is the recognizable pattern of judgment you apply to it—and public work turns that judgment into evidence.
The Retail Partnership Starts With a Launch Plan, Not a Purchase Order
A practical shared brief for brands and retailers: availability, usable assets, a clear path to purchase, and follow-through after launch.
High Five Revisited: What I Got Right, and What I Would Add Now
Brian Holler revisits an earlier High Five profile and grades his own thinking on cannabis, opportunity, newcomers, lessons and legacy. The point is not nostalgia; it is intellectual…
The Campaign Report Should End With a Decision
A useful campaign report starts with the decision, separates observation from interpretation and ends with an action, owner, review date and reconsideration point.
What Hip-Hop Taught Me About Voice, Remixing, and Originality
Hip-hop offers a useful model for originality: acknowledge the source, understand why it worked, transform it through your own judgment and build a voice from accumulated choices rather…
Bring a Story to Media Day, Then Make It Easy to Follow
A practical preparation brief for founders and operators meeting journalists: a clear angle, useful evidence, available people, and respectful follow-up.
Why Being Interesting Is a Business Skill
Being interesting in business is less about performance than specificity, genuine curiosity and enough range to create memorable conversations and useful pattern recognition.
Give Your Best Content a Maintenance Schedule
Maintain content by consequence: prioritize high-value pages, assign owners, define review triggers, test the reader journey and document consequential revisions.
What Sports Teams Understand About Roles That Companies Forget
Talent is not enough. Strong teams need clear ownership, complementary strengths, visible handoffs and accountability aimed at improving the work rather than assigning blame.
The Coolest Things in Cannabis Happen When People Stop and Look at the Bigger Picture
Serendipity is not a business model, but you can create more surface area for useful collisions through curiosity, proximity, generosity, white space and disciplined follow-through.
A Partnership Announcement Needs an Operating Plan
A partnership announcement is only the start. Define the customer problem, handoffs, ownership, escalation path and review process before the work gets complicated.
The Thirty-Second Check Before You Send the Email
A short final review for business outreach: the right person, an honest premise, a clear reason to write, and one manageable next step.
Taste Is a Strategy, Not a Vibe
Taste is selection under abundance: the ability to compare acceptable options, explain the standard and edit toward what actually fits.
2026 Is Not About Who Is the Biggest. It Is About Who Is Moving Together.
Cannabis makes collaboration practical: complementary capabilities can reduce the need to rebuild everything internally, but alignment only works when the operating structure is clear.
If One Number Is Your Whole Product Story, You Have a Messaging Problem
A practical messaging exercise for brands whose product story has been reduced to a single specification, rating, or price.
The Case for Having More Than One Lane
A professional can have more than one lane when depth, range and clear epistemic boundaries are connected by a recognizable way of seeing the world.
The 90-Day Plan After the Handshake
A practical sequence for turning event conversations into useful follow-up, clear next steps, and a pipeline you can actually manage.
Attention Is Rented. Trust Is Owned.
Attention creates the opening. Trust changes what happens the next time your name appears by carrying credibility and useful expectations across interactions.
Relationships Are Infrastructure
Relationships are business infrastructure. Trust reduces friction across introductions, partnerships, sales and problem-solving—and becomes more valuable as outreach gets cheaper.
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