They Built One of Michigan's Largest Cannabis Operations. This Is How the Math Actually Works.

In the winter of 2020, two men with almost nothing in common started growing cannabis in Michigan.

One had spent 13 years in the plant. He started as a budtender in 2012, worked his way through every role in the building, from garden operator to lead grower to cultivation director, and carried dirt under his nails as a credential. The other had spent two decades in boardrooms. He had an MBA from Michigan Ross, a career at Cargill, a CEO title at a $1.5 billion agriculture holding company, and had done business in over 50 countries.

Corey Lord and Joseph Gordhamer were not an obvious pairing. But what they built together over five growing seasons would become one of the most significant outdoor cannabis cultivation operations in the United States, and a case study in what happens when agronomic intensity meets institutional-grade operational thinking.

This is the story of Grip Cannabis. And of what came after.

The Operator

Corey Lord did not come to cannabis through a business plan. He came through the plant.

In 2012, the cannabis industry barely existed as an industry. Medical programs were fragmented. Legal infrastructure was thin. The people doing the work were growers, not executives. And Corey was one of them. He worked as a budtender, then moved into the grow. He held roles at New Millenium, Elevate Cannabis Co, and BMB before landing at what would become Grip. Each stop taught him something the industry would later need: how plants actually behave under stress, how facilities fail before anyone notices, and how the gap between what a grow can produce and what it actually produces is almost always a people problem, not a genetics problem.

By the time he took on the title of Director of Cultivation at Grip Cannabis, he had already built the pattern recognition that separates operators from managers. He understood VPD. He understood DLI. He understood cost-per-pound at a level where decimal points matter. What he needed was a partner who could match that operational depth with the kind of strategic infrastructure that most cannabis companies never build.

The Executive

Joseph Gordhamer's career reads like it was designed in a different industry, because it was.

After earning a BS in Economics from Brigham Young University and an MBA in Strategy and Marketing from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, Joe entered the corporate world at KPMG as a consultant. From there, he moved to Cargill, one of the largest privately held companies on Earth, where he served as Global Strategy Lead and Global Trading Manager. He led corporate strategy across aquaculture, edible oil, steel, energy, and bulk port terminals. He ran M&A execution across South America, Europe, and Asia. He developed and implemented Cargill's energy, transportation, and metals marketing strategy for the entire Asia Pacific region.

Then he went bigger.

As CEO of Al Dahra ACX, a subsidiary of the $1.5 billion Al Dahra Holding, Joe oversaw 11,000 acres across three farms in Imperial Valley and Arizona. The operation produced 850,000 metric tons of forage annually and served markets across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. He signed global distribution partnerships with some of the largest feed and nutrition companies in the world. He managed a fully integrated agricultural supply chain under international regulatory frameworks, across time zones, across languages, across governments.

By the time Joe entered cannabis, he had already operated at the exact scale and complexity that the cannabis industry claims to aspire to but almost never achieves. He did not need to learn how to run a large-scale agricultural operation. He needed to find one worth running.

He found Grip.

The Build

Grip Cannabis started in Arlington Township, Michigan, in the winter of 2020. Corey and Joe began building from the ground up. Not from a template. Not from a playbook. From soil.

The operation started on a single site. Year one was about learning what the Michigan climate would and would not tolerate at commercial scale. What strains finished before October frost. What pest pressure looked like on 10 acres versus 10,000 square feet. What happened to a fertigation schedule when a storm system parked over Southwest Michigan for a week.

As the operation outgrew Arlington Township, they moved to Cass County, where the acreage could match their ambition. That is where Grip became Grip.

By 2025, the operation had grown to over 100 acres of active outdoor cultivation spread across three farms. 60,000+ sqft of greenhouse and indoor canopy supported propagation, veg, and environmental buffering. The production target exceeded 600,000 pounds annually. The operation spanned over 102,500 plants per cycle.

These are not theoretical numbers. These are METRC-tracked, CRA-reported, harvest-weighted figures from a licensed Michigan cultivation operation that has produced at commercial scale for five seasons.

And three of those seasons tried to kill them.

The Compression

To understand what Grip survived, you have to understand what Michigan's cannabis market did between 2020 and 2025.

When adult-use sales launched in late 2019, wholesale flower was selling for over $2,200 per pound in some markets. Retail ounces exceeded $400. Margins were enormous. Licenses were unlimited. Everybody with access to capital rushed in.

By 2023, the average retail ounce in Michigan was under $90. By early 2025, it had fallen below $66. Wholesale pound prices dropped to roughly $1,042, a 28% decline from the prior year. Michigan had become, by most measures, the cheapest legal cannabis market in the United States.

The mechanics were simple. Michigan issued cultivation licenses without a cap. Growers produced far more than the market could absorb. By the end of 2024, the state had nearly 2.8 million pounds of fresh-frozen flower in cold storage, a 228% increase from a year earlier. By 2025, cultivation license totals were declining for the first time as operators exited the market.

PharmaCann shut down its 207,000 square-foot Warren cultivation facility. Pincanna idled 31,500 square feet of grow space. Fluresh closed a $46 million facility in Adrian.

Corey and Joe had built on cost discipline.

While competitors folded, Grip re-engineered. They targeted cost-per-pound reduction through process improvement. They analyzed trim-line automation architectures. They built harvest process flow diagrams that tracked every touchpoint from cut to cure. They modeled space utilization across warehouse, cold storage, and trim room to identify capacity breaches before they became bottlenecks.

Grip did not just survive Michigan's compression. It expanded through it. And in 2023, it won the LeafLink List award for Fastest Growing Brand in Michigan and Top Product by GMV in the concentrates category, data-driven recognition based on verified wholesale platform performance.

That is not a marketing claim. That is a market signal.

The Realization

Somewhere between season three and season four, the conversation between Corey and Joe shifted.

They had spent years solving the same problems over and over: production planning, environmental control, fertigation optimization, labor efficiency, post-harvest workflow, cost modeling, genetics selection, IPM strategy, regulatory compliance, capital equipment ROI analysis. They had solved these problems not in a lab, not in a pitch deck, but across 100+ acres of active outdoor cultivation, in real weather, with real P&L pressure, in one of the most hostile pricing environments the legal cannabis market has ever produced.

And as they talked to operators in other states and other countries, they realized something that should not have surprised them but did: almost nobody else was doing this work at this level.

Most advisory firms in cannabis are built by people who studied the industry. Corey and Joe built one because they operated it.

That distinction is the entire thesis of Continuum.

Continuum Advisory & Innovation

Continuum Advisory & Innovation was not born from ambition. It was born from evidence.

Corey and Joe had already built the infrastructure: the production models, the cost frameworks, the process improvement playbooks, the yield optimization tools, the facility evaluation instruments. They had already pressure-tested all of it across five seasons of Michigan outdoor at scale. The question was never whether the knowledge had value. The question was whether the industry was ready to pay for it.

The answer, increasingly, is yes.

Continuum operates as an international cannabis cultivation consulting firm. It targets commercial operators, ownership groups, and investment entities who are running (or building) large-scale cannabis cultivation and need the kind of operational depth that only comes from direct experience at that scale.

The service model is built on specificity. Continuum does not sell generic strategy. It sells the exact operational playbooks that Grip used to scale to 100+ acres and survive three years of sub-$100 wholesale. Engagements are structured at a per-square-foot pricing model across four geographic distance zones, covering everything from initial facility assessment through long-term operational transformation.

Corey brings the cultivation intensity: plant physiology, fertigation, IPM, environmental control, GACP/GMP alignment, genetics selection, post-harvest optimization, and yield modeling. Joe brings the institutional architecture: strategic planning, M&A evaluation, cost structure analysis, supply chain design, team buildout, and global market positioning. Together, they cover the full operational stack that most cannabis companies try to solve with one hire or one contractor.

They are not trying to be the biggest consulting firm in cannabis. They are trying to be the one that actually works.

The Bet

Michigan's cannabis market in 2026 is defined by a single word: consolidation.

Cultivation license totals are declining for the first time. A new 24% wholesale tax is compressing margins further. The state's inventory includes nearly 240,000 pounds of flower at retailers, over 788,000 pounds at processors, and 251,000 pounds of test-passed flower still sitting at growers. Total annual revenue slipped from $3.29 billion to $3.17 billion despite steady consumer demand. The market is not shrinking. The pricing is.

In this environment, the operators who survive will be the ones who already know how to run lean. And the ones coming into the industry from new markets, in the U.S. and internationally, will need to learn those lessons fast or learn them expensive.

That is the market Continuum was built for.

Corey Lord started as a budtender in 2012. Joseph Gordhamer started at KPMG and Cargill. They met in a cannabis grow in Michigan and spent five seasons building something most people said could not survive. It survived. It scaled. It won industry recognition. And then they took everything they learned and built a firm designed to give other operators the same advantage.

Continuum is the latter.

Corey Lord and Joseph Gordhamer are the co-founders of Continuum Advisory & Innovation (continuumadvisory.xyz), an international cannabis cultivation consulting firm. They also serve as Director of Cultivation and President, respectively, at Grip Cannabis in Michigan.