It’s a familiar story: Black woman disrupts an industry advocating for equality, creating business opportunities and forging new solutions to old problems.
The newest disruptor: Q Nicole McNair.
McNair is the owner and curator of WH Farms, a five-acre, three greenhouse licensed hemp farm located in Eastern North Carolina. Her latest invention, the CBD Business Launch Kit, is not only helping others to create, launch and sell CBD products—it’s also helping her fulfill a personal mission of demolishing industry racialism.
A corporate real estate executive turned CBDpreneur, McNair learned early in the game that, although she appreciated the structure and perks of working in corporate, she wanted the freedom to be herself and do something that would offer her fulfillment. This lesson came to the University of Maryland College Park graduate while sitting under the leadership of successful, high-profile white males. Realizing early on that her name, skin tone and ambition would be hindrances in attaining the success they modeled—McNair walked away from the corner office, car allowance and successful position to build her own.
With a keen intellect and years of experience in real estate, McNair zoned in on potential markets to invest her time and money in. After being diagnosed with delayed PTSD following her father’s passing in 2013, she chose medicinal cannabis to address it and fell in love with the way it helped her regain her sense of calm and grounding. Continuing to educate herself on the benefits of the leaf and noticing the 2018 Farm Bill allowed for industrial hemp growth (which is a version of cannabis), she saw her way into the legal cannabis industry.
Upon relocating to North Carolina, McNair started identifying farming opportunities, investing in a farm operation and converting that to a cannabis growth operation. Today, in partnership with a minority co-op of African-American legacy farmers, McNair’s growing farm extends more than 200 acres. The operation provides space and opportunity to cultivate all hemp products in-house and uses organic crop practices to protect the harvest’s integrity and deliver top-of-the-line goods.
Conscious of the cannabis industry’s domination by white men, McNair is working diligently to deconstruct institutions and demystify stigmas negatively associated with the plant. It’s a fact that Black people have been disproportionately and negatively affected by the war on drugs, something McNair knows about personally. Her brother is currently serving an exaggerated federal prison sentence on marijuana drug charges, causing her family to have to deal with the long-term effects of seeing their loved one fall victim to the criminalization of people of color.
Plus, with industry-specific obstacles like lack of banking access, punitive tax codes, restrictive land-use laws and high license and permit fees in place—it can be challenging for us to become equity stakeholders. But McNair has a solution for that, too.
“I’m providing an access point for my people to have a piece of this cannabis market through the paths of CBD,” she explained. “As I noticed the wealth shift that was about to take place, I knew I wanted to create a solution that gave us a level playing field and a chance to build an empire through something meant to destroy us.”
It’s no secret that the United States’ $16 billion cannabis industry is big business. Investment bank analysts are already predicting that within the next decade, the CBD beauty market could go on to generate $25 billion in revenue globally in a decade, representing 15% of the $167 billion skincare market. Through WH Farms, McNair is helping people get a piece of that pie by offering big profit options like “white labeling”—a process where she and her team provides high-end, luxe CBD products for someone else to distribute or resell.
Her CBD Business Launch Kit is another option. The kit includes a strategy guide with 10 ways to earn $25,000 (average yearly income from a part-time job), tutorials, e-courses to learn about the process, the plant, the legality and enough CBD extract to include about 2,000 25 mg products. Get a sneak peek inside the kit here:
“My mission is to educate, empower, and mobilize Black and brown people to understand the power of CBD both medically and financially. I want to help them spread the magic of CBD worldwide while providing flexibility and stability, all from the comforts of their home and kitchen.” And sis is doing all that and then some.
To learn more about WH Farms and how to get started in the cannabis industry, visit their website or connect with them on Instagram.
