Episode 236 - Jeremy Ortiz, Cannabis Insurance
Episode 236 is the 34th episode of Season 4.
We're joined today by Jeremy Ortiz, a cannabis insurance and risk management specialist and Ganjier Product Specialist based in Connecticut who works with license holders across 27 legal states. His focus is property and casualty, everything from the building itself to what's inside it, with a team behind him covering employee benefits and ancillary coverages.
Jeremy came up through sales. He graduated from UConn in 2005 with degrees in economics and sociology, rode the mortgage boom and moved into financial services in 2009, then joined a Connecticut agency where he spent eleven years under a mentor who pushed him to think for himself instead of taking orders. When a larger brokerage acquired them in 2019 and asked him to pick a specialty, he looked down the list of verticals, saw cannabis and never looked back.
The plant had been in his life long before the industry was. He grew his first crop at nineteen from seeds his friends brought back from Amsterdam in their socks, following an Ed Rosenthal book step by step and hauling five-gallon buckets out into the wetlands in waders. He is passionate to this day about glass and sun-grown flower.
We discuss what risk management actually looks like for a cannabis operator, why he thinks the industry's hard-won knowledge stays trapped inside individual states and how a lunch in Vegas surrounded by attorneys and bankers with almost no license holders in the room turned into a run of events built the other way around. We also get into why he doesn't carry business cards and what he means when he says your network is your net worth.
Find Jeremy on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jeremyportiz
Enjoy the show!
