Today we’d like to introduce you to Yuong Lam.

Yuong, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?

My humble beginnings started as a pharmacist for a large corporate chain. I worked from the bottom as a pharmacy technician, a pharmacy student, a staff pharmacist, then became the Pharmacist In Charge in my own store. Pushing Big Pharma.

I thought that this job would be my first and last. I chose a career, and I thought I would stick to it until I retire. But COVID changed everything. In 2020, the world was different. When businesses shut down and we were socially distancing, I had a lot of time to myself to evaluate what life I was living and what life I wanted.

I have to give a lot of credit to the pharmacists working the in the community for large corporate chains. I could see the corporate greed where they would nickel and dime the pharmacy to cut down on technician help but added more services on top of filling hundreds of prescriptions a day, with even less man power. We wer

e measured by how many flu and covid shots we gave, or how many covid tests were done, while the phones were ringing nonstop, and prescriptions kept coming in. Patients who are ill and are not feeling their best, aren’t always the most pleasant, but we were trained to see through that with compassion. Even if the insurance issues were not our responsibility, we were the one who’d take the blame. Pharmacy is a thankless job, and it was making a difference and saving people’s lives that made it worth it.

But at one point of my life, I couldn’t go home and shut off my brain from working anymore. It was so fast paced with

 so little support that I had to rerun my day in my head to make sure I didn’t kill anyone by overlooking a drug interaction or didn’t catch special dosing for someone with kidney failure. That kind of stress made me lose my hair and I thought about quitting every day.

Rewind to 2019, soon after the 2018 Farm Bill had passed to legalize CBD and Hemp, removing it from the controlled substances classification, my partners and I have been talking about how this could be the beginning of something big. We saw that little by little, people were gaining interest in alternative and natural health. I saw it too from my own eyes at the pharmacy that people were starting to look at other ways to feel better, especially in the mental health space. People’s perception to herbals was changing.

To tell you the truth, with my background and doctorates in pharmaceuticals, my training did not cover herbal medications in detail. Almost overlooked. The general consensus was that if a medication is not “FDA Approved,” which 98% of all herbals and supplements aren’t governed by the FDA, and because there is “lack in substantial published research,” that we were taught to overlook plant medicine.

It makes me think that our curriculum is likely driven by large drug companies, substantially, because they have the deepest pockets. Think about it, why would anyone continue to study an herb that costs so little to grow and extract, and cost so little to sell to the general public? Thoughts like this made me think if this line of work truly aligns with my values. Don’t get me wrong, some medications out there are lifesaving. And some are just band aids that come with more side effects that leads to prescribing of more medications to treat the side effects. It can be a vicious cycle.

Even I was skeptical of plant medicine and CBD at first. Living in the south (Texas) where marijuana was seen as the “Devil’s Lettuce” and hemp is basically marijuana’s cousin, I had to do a deep dive to learn what the plant is, its benefits, and the studies that are currently out there about it, which grows every year. It wasn’t until I tried it for myself to help with my anxiety in the fast-paced pharmacy, and it helps my elderly mom with sleep. It was funny because i was praying every day that I wouldn’t be drug tested at my job while I tested CBD out for my own curiosity. When I realized that I did not have those racing thoughts at night or when I felt calmer and clearer at work that I was onto something. I could spread the awareness of plant medicine and give people the potential to feel the calm in their already hectic lives. Having peace of mind like that is priceless.

My partners and I decided, this was it. This is what we would invest our time, energy, and money in. Cannabis, CBD, holistic health. If we can share with more people the feeling that they were no longer trapped in their minds, or even be able to breathe a single sigh of relief to step away from their busy life, this is the goal that we wanted to achieve. We also wanted this to be an education-first business model, that there is a licensed pharmacist behind these products to educate on hemp and cannabis.

April 2019, we opened CBD Farmhouse in Addison, Texas, in the middle of an office building complex, just about 1200 square feet with a small kitchen to produce CBD products. We kind of just jumped into it blindly, but we had the drive. No fear. I was still working my day job full time at the pharmacy, and as soon as I clocked out of my day job, I went directly to CBD Farmhouse to see what we needed to do to start building our dream business.

As a pharmacist, I made sure all of the formulations we chose were pure, clean, and effective. We started our first round collaborating with reputable companies to privately label a few staple products such as simple CBD tinctures, topicals, and edibles. From there, we learned from our customers and listened to what it was that they were looking for. Customer feedback is so important to us as it is one of our core values- collaboration, which is what makes us successful. Even though we are a hemp and natural health company, I believe that we are more of a people business where dialogue, feedback, and communication is how we foster meaningful partnership.

Our branding also evolved over the years. It took about 4 different rebranding revisions with 3 different graphic designers, including me, to get the branding and look we have today. As part of the product development, formulation, and label design, I wanted to be very hands on as the Creative Director and Pharmacist Consultant. I learned what I could from the first two graphic designers until I was able to create the digital art myself. Today, our labels are solely designed by me. Wearing multiple hats is both a blessing and curse for running a small business, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Our first business model, a past partner wanted to focus on business-to-business sales, or wholesale. It wasn’t until late 2019 that we became noticed by regular retail customers looking for a store front. It was a very humble beginning where we made a very small section of our office a store front, not expecting to have walk in customers at all. Then as the word of mouth spread about our products and our cannabis consultants, we grew our retail side of the business as a happy accident.

In 2020, the country was plagued by the COVID pandemic. The world changed and people were looking more within themselves for happiness. We noticed that our customer demographic looking for sleep, anxiety, and mood regulating natural products increased. We started building a good rapport with our customers and we took from their dialogue what kind of products we needed to improve and create.

2020 was also a scary time for us too, because with mandatory city-wide business shutdowns. We really didn’t know if we would make it for the first half of 2020. We used that time to go back to the drawing board as much as possible to keep innovating our products and make it the better while hoping that the world and business would go back to normal. We did our best to keep our staff on the payroll as well even though we didn’t make many sales. This was when we started adding other nutraceutical supplements such as ashwagandha, valerian, and vitamins to the mix. We were starting to diversify our products to set us apart from other CBD brands.

In October 2020, in the midst of COVID, working at the pharmacy didn’t feel like my true calling anymore. 2020 was the first year the corporate office stopped giving me pharmacy students to precept, as teaching is one of my passions and it was the last glue that kept me from leaving my job. I asked one of my CBD Farmhouse partners one night, how is business going? Are you ready to have a pharmacist full time? We took a gamble and said yes. I put in my notice and then became the Chief of Operations, COO, at CBD Farmhouse two weeks after. A bold move and failing was no longer an option.

In 2021, we grew out of our 1200 square foot office. We could not believe it. We took a calculated risk and moved to a 6,000 square foot office with a lab and warehouse space. It was a time of growth, and it was a challenge. Wholesale grew significantly and retail, both in store and ecommerce grew. Maybe it was a little too fast for us to scale properly, and we pushed through because again, failing is not an option. We sacrificed our personal and family life and worked longer and harder. My partners and I became married to the job, and our own family life felt the stress.

In 2022, my life changed. I was pregnant with my first baby girl and my priorities changed. It was a second epiphany that I had that I needed to reevaluate my life goals and priorities again. Growing up in an immigrant family, we were taught to work hard and never complain. My parents sacrificed so much to bring us to this country, often working multiple jobs where we almost never saw them for more than a few hours a day when they were off the clock was hard. I told myself that I would never do that to my own child and started to see what I needed to do to wind down, automate operations, and be able to actually step away from work for once without having to worry about my staff.

My baby girl wasn’t the only curveball life gave me in 2022. My health and family life fell apart because I had prioritized work over my personal life. I had to quit our business altogether for my own mental health and my baby’s health for some time. I decided at that time that although I had built this business with our partners from the very beginning, from the formulations to the branding, design, and culture, there was a real chance that I could not return. My life had become so engrossed with work that it was a life that I did not envision what I wanted for myself and my unborn child.

I changed careers to work in a behavioral health clinic to manage psych medications for the indigent population up until I was 40 weeks pregnant. As a single mom. I never thought about going back to CBD Farmhouse because I thought I was content in helping people manage their depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and bipolar mood disorder. Although it was mostly through prescription medications, I advocated natural supplements as much as I could. It was definitely a better quality of life than my community pharmacy job because we actually had time to close down for lunch. It was a dream job that gave me purpose again. I was okay with that for the time being.

In 2023, a tragedy that shook the whole company. My “Work Mom” from CBD Farmhouse, Ms. Doe suddenly passed away from cancer. She was our beloved lab supervisor, literally the glue that held our company’s culture together. We had been talking while I was away from CBD Farmhouse, and she’d check up on me from time to time to make sure I was doing okay during my pregnancy. She also had a granddaughter on the way that would be due around the same time as mine. I was devastated from her passing, and so was the whole company. Although we wished that we had come together at a better time as a company, it was a bittersweet reunion. I do still miss her dearly.

I reconnected with the majority percentage investor of CBD Farmhouse, Luwan Hy. We spoke about how things are going, and it made me remember what it was that made me love my role as COO so much. The conversation she had with me was that they wanted a change in leadership. My ex-partner had already stepped down as CEO by then, and an interim-CEO was put in place, a person that I had trained briefly to assist me in operations before I left.  However, his way of management was just a continuation of what was not working with the past CEO. I told them, if I were to come back, IF, I want to be able to choose my own staff to be my right-hand partner in crime. I wanted a fresh start, on my terms.

I pitched to them my business model, made drastic proposals to shift gears to move from wholesale/distribution, to focus heavily on retail ecommerce and walk in store sales, focusing on what makes CBD Farmhouse who we are today. An education-first and customer-oriented company. And collaboration with Texas local brands within our new event space is what we envision our new business model to be.  It came as a shock because wholesale business was what we did for years, but as we looked into the numbers, it was not what we needed to do in this post-COVID economy. We needed to go back to our roots, to serve our customers.

I ended my presentation to the CBD Farmhouse investors with a simple quote that I live by to this day, inspired by my late “Work Mom,” Ms. Doe. “You lose 100% of the chances you don’t take.”  And I got the job. I became CBD Farmhouse’s new CEO on my birthday in 2023. In loving memory of Ms. Doe.

And that is how I got to this position today. I am a single mom, pharmacist, cannabis consultant, and CEO, still navigating this whole work-life-balance process. And I am hopeful of what else is to come in 2024. 

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

Since returning as the new CEO there have been many obstacles I had to face. I was tasked to turn this company around with my new team. With the passing of Ms. Doe and sudden change in leadership, reuniting the team, rebuilding rapport from my return, and raising moral was first on my agenda. Working well as a team is the foundation of every business. We were a small crew again and we were all challenged with wearing many hats. And we pushed through and made it work.

Another important part of my job is to evaluate every single service that we use from manufacturers, marketing agencies, down the services that kept our lights on. It opened my eyes to not only learn how these services operate, but also, I saw the waste and mismanagement some companies did because we didn’t know what metrics to look at or what questions we needed to ask. I have to say I learned so much about email marketing, SEO, social media marketing and ads, more than I needed to. It was the only way to truly have a lean and mean team.

I was not afraid to let go of a service or company, no matter how long it’s been with CBD Farmhouse, to make room for something better. We were ready for a fresh start, and fearless about it. To turn this company around from nearly closing its doors, it was something that had to be done.

Now towards the end of 2023, we are operating with a new inventory management software, website, email marketing, SEO company, social media content creation, point of sale software, and product formulations. We have made so much progress and we are excited for what else is to come in the near future. With my team of strong women leaders, and our amazing team, we are ready for the years to come.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

Other than creating and formulating our products, my passion is in product design, digital marketing, and podcast content creation with my Operations Coordinator, Xochilt Jacquez. I’d like to get the company to the point where my staff is trained and empowered to take charge in their own department, and I am there to guide, and problem solve if they have struggle coming up with a solution. I feel that we are at the point where we need to be continually innovative and evolving, which is why I want to shift my focus from operations, now that it is more streamlined, to creating more functional products and creatively marketing them to the public.

The reason why my passion is digital marketing is because I want to get better at connecting to our customer base across all digital platforms. I explain my job to my friends and family simply in this way. If i am able to connect with our customers through the product branding, the carefully chosen words in the email marketing, or through the friendly user interface of our website, I’d be effectively “Selling the Dream” and spreading the word of plant medicine, one connection at a time. Getting people’s attention to not only teach about cannabis and plant medicine, but also engaging in their attention and interactions is an important part of my job. Getting customers to come back because they enjoy our products and our staff is what makes me know that we are doing a good job.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?

This coming 2024, we have converted our cubicle office space into a larger dispensary style show room. Not only are we carrying our CBD Farmhouse branded products, but we are also opening up our retail shelves to carry more high-quality brands. We are looking for more Texas local brands of cannabis and holistic health products to collaborate with us, set up pop up shops, events, to offer the next best hemp dispensary experience in DFW.

Since starting our podcast production with my Operations Coordinator and Social Media Manager, Xochilt Jacquez, we are ready to have guests to join us. Topics can range from plant medicine, mental health, to running a small business. We are excited to grow our education-first business model and spread the word about alternative health and mindfulness.

With the new front store expansion, we also have an event space available for rent that is perfect for yoga instructors to host Puff and Pose, sound bath sessions, or CBD infused food catering. The possibilities are endless to collaborate with the community.

If you are a business looking to collaborate with us, please email us at management@cbdfarmhouse.com. We’d love to grow together.