Leading in Crisis: An Interview with Shawn Cutter, CEO

GreenScreens CEO, Shawn Cutter, shares his perspectives on company culture and how it relates to leading a promising cannabis tech start up through a global pandemic.

“We’ve definitely looked for ways to make it fun,” says Shawn when describing his leadership approach during the COVID crisis.  

This statement tracks accurately with what you’d expect from the culture of a company whose founders describe themselves as a “group of passionate thrill-seekers who want to positively impact their community”.

GreenScreens is a cloud-based platform that offers a wide range of retail solutions for cannabis dispensaries by utilizing strategically placed digital screens on and off the sales floor.  Their product provides incremental revenue growth that makes a big impact on a cannabis retailer’s bottom line. By picking up the slack that is created (and all too often goes unnoticed) when a team of busy staff members are faced with a demanding customer base, GreenScreens is dedicated to transforming the retail experience in the cannabis industry by focusing on customer success.  

There’s more to it than fun, however. Shawn believes in there is virtue in simplicity.

“Really when this whole thing [the COVID crisis] started I was looking at some of the core principles; how do you distill down to the team? What is our focus going to be? And it’s got to be simple, you know, get it to be a simple concept so it’s easily understood. And people can always be guided by it, because we’re disconnected and we need to figure out how to work together.”

With essentially the entire U.S. ordered to shelter in place and non-essential businesses closed, Shawn faces a set of challenges that a lot of people are trying to navigate currently, but with its own complexities.  

Working from his home in Florida, Cutter must handle the needs of his team that works out of GreenScreens headquarters in Denver, and a small team in the Pacific Northwest, all while continuing to build on a the momentum of a business that is operating “in a different world than it was even a month ago”.

Coupled with that, many jurisdictions the U.S. have deemed cannabis businesses as essential.

“We have the unique opportunity of being in business and serving an essential business, and so we can theoretically still grow,” Shawn notes.

How do you keep a team on track and equipped to handle the demands of such an endeavor?  To find the answer, Shawn looks to the core value of GreenScreens, which is to help their customers.

“Everyone [on the GreenScreens team] says the word ‘helpful’. I know I use it talking about what we do day in and day out. It demonstrates that this is who we are. And when you are operating in that fashion, you can operate with such efficiency as a team. People start understanding where they can fit, where they need help. You just end up moving as one group.”

Shawn Cutter is an entrepreneur with a passion for building solutions that change the way people work.  He has developed crucial technological advancements in the oil and gas sector and now spends most of his working hours helping startups solve scaling challenges with his technical insight.  

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