Zach McInnis and Laura Beohner founded The Healing Rose in 2016. The company is named after the family dog, Rose, who the pair rescued from a difficult puppyhood; the spirit of family, community, and giving back runs strong at The Healing Rose. 

As COO, Zach looks after business operations, from marketing to inventory. He’s also a hands-on leader who knows how crucial dogfooding is when growing a business. “​​It’s super important to be a consumer of the product that you’re selling and to really understand the nuances of what people are looking for in the marketplace,” Zach counsels.

In this conversation, Zach shares what brings him meaning as an entrepreneur in cannabis and co-founder of The Healing Rose. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. What do you do on a day-to-day basis at The Healing Rose?

As COO, I handle the operational aspects of the business. I look after manufacturing, including making sure all the equipment is working and ensuring we have the special ingredients to make our products. I work on our marketing and sales, too, handling the setup and scheduling for the brand popups, and managing our social media. In a small business mindset, you have to wear so many different hats. 

Your founding story has been shared in the press. Can you share more about how you and Laura decided to start a family business together?

We both had entrepreneurial aspirations. My father owns a screen printing company. I grew up watching my father run his own business and seeing the kind of freedom and flexibility that came with it. I just knew that’s what I wanted, too. 

I was in the workforce from 13 years old or so all the way up until we started The Healing Rose. I’ve always been in that grind, and I knew that I inevitably wanted to own a business. We tried a few different things before The Healing Rose: a food truck business, and even a ham radio supply company. 

Then cannabis was legalized in Massachusetts in 2016 and that bill also had the requirement for MA to create a state hemp program. While we at first thought we’d be able to launch a cannabis topicals brand to the market in 2017, we quickly realized it would be sometime before MA created the regulations for the cannabis program in the state. We immediately saw creating non-THC products using Full Spectrum CBD products as our avenue to build a strong brand. 

Today, we have a strong brand presence, and that’s how it all started. 

What was your background with cannabis before The Healing Rose?

My background with CBD was limited prior to 2016, where most people only knew about the cannabinoid THC – myself included.  I used cannabis causally prior to then and only associated the plant with people getting high. I didn’t think about it as medicine whatsoever – that wasn’t until I started dating Laura (our CEO) in 2014. Laura has been a medical cannabis patient since the MA Medical Marijuana program started in 2013. 

I’d heard of CBD, but I thought it was like some cheap thing you get at the store to kind of get a fake high. I didn’t take it too seriously. She had a very medicinal mindset towards cannabis, something that hadn’t really been introduced to me. That’s when I started exploring all the other cannabinoids and understanding CBD as something that can be incredibly helpful for people for a plethora of reasons. I realized that I was using it as medicine prior, and not even understanding nor appreciating the amazing properties of the plant.

​​It’s super important to be a consumer of the product that you’re selling and to really understand the nuances of what people are looking for in the marketplace.

Beyond your relationship with CBD, how has becoming an entrepreneur changed you?

It’s given me a lot more confidence. I would say I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but always you have self-doubt. Always. 

Can I do that? Is that going to be too much work?

Once I started getting into it and really feeling the flow for it, I really realized that I have the potential to unlock all these different aspects of myself. Socially, personally, professionally. I realized that I can do this. 

It’s really interesting: you can step into all these different mindsets like a marketing mindset, a sales mindset, a compliance mindset, a legal mindset, an accounting mindset. It can be exhausting, but it really helps you learn a lot about yourself. When you push yourself out of your own comfort zone – that’s where true personal growth happens.

Taking a bit of a step back in time, tell me about the moment The Healing Rose first appeared on store shelves. What was that moment like?

The first storefront we were in was Cambridge Naturals in the Summer of 2017. They are a health food store in Cambridge, and they were founded in 1974. A great history there that is family owned and multi-generational. They are incredibly entrenched in, and loved by, their community. 

When we first started making products in our kitchen, we were making batches of around ten products for a skew – super small time. It was really cool to see where it went from that first wholesale order. 

On the flip side, it was equally as cool to get into our first dispensary. Those shelves were prohibited for so long – until 2021 – and that was a marketplace that we wanted to be in so desperately because we are so connected to it.

Being shut off from that was really, really challenging. We knew it would be such a big boon to our revenue and our brand presence. When we first got into this dispensary – it was Calyx Berkshire – that was an incredible feeling. That was, “Wow, we’re a cannabis company now.”

What has been the most meaningful part of growing The Healing Rose team?

It’s the connections you make with people over the years. We’ve had a lot of great people at The Healing Rose, and we’re really selective about who we choose to bring in.

Culture is just the most important thing to us when it comes to hiring. You’ve got to fit the culture, and if you don’t it’s just not going to work out. We have a culture of making everyone feel like a family – we’re all friends here. We’ve all known each other for a long time – with our longest employees being with us for 4+ years. That’s really important. But we also make sure that when new team members join, they feel welcomed and supported.

If you have happy employees, there’s no reason for them to want to leave. We feel that we’ve captured a really nice culture within The Healing Rose.

I remember our first employee that we ever hired: she still orders our products. A lot of our former employees still order from us. So we see them picking up products or ordering and it’s such a special connection, knowing that they helped us build this as well. It wasn’t just me and Laura; it was our team along the way that helped us get here. 

The Healing Rose has more than just an audience or a customer base – it’s a community. What is a favorite customer story you keep coming back to?

One of our customers has been ordering for their loved one, who is severely autistic. They were told by doctors they are non-verbal, while they can get physical with others and have outbursts. Their parents reached out to us and we produced a special formulation tincture with a custom blend of cannabinoids – specifically CBC, CBG, & CBN.

Their lives have been dramatically improved by using the special, custom tincture formula. It isn’t a miracle that fixes everything, but that isn’t the goal. The goal is to help improve the quality of life of the loved one and the family. We are limited on what we can share about the outcomes but they’ve been ordering this product for a couple of years now. Stories like this are really impactful for me.

There was another woman who was in the later stages in her life – late 80s, early 90s.  We met her when we had our office in Andover. She came over and she actually met Rose. She was so sweet with her and gave Rose a special blessing for a happy, long life. She was a very religious woman, and she was a nurse so she had a very matter-of-fact mindset about the pain she was living with. 

She started using our products, and it totally changed her pain management. Previously, she was on a bunch of pills, and had tried other methods to deal with what inevitably was just excruciating pain. When we linked up, she used our products for four or five years until she passed away earlier this year. That was a somber moment; she was this kind of grandmother figure in our lives, and she was just so sweet. We talked to her all the time, and of course gave her heavily discounted products because she had very little money.

Those are the stories that stand out as the most impactful and are our motivation for why we do what we do. We are very mindful to make sure all customer feedback is shared internally with our team. We get reviews weekly that make our team feel incredibly fulfilled and feel that our hard work is able to make an impact on our world and community. 

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