Coaching for leadership team delivers personalized development to managers across high-growth business

Nabis is a fully-licensed cannabis wholesale platform with the largest portfolio of cannabis brands and supplying 100% of California’s dispensaries and delivery services. Growing quickly to meet demand in a fast-evolving market, the company offers clients lightning-fast fulfillment, warehousing, payment processing, financing, data analytics, sales and marketing services. With these diverse offerings comes complex needs for hiring and managing teams from engineering for the platform to delivery workers.

While many organizations are moving to an emphasis on skills-based hiring, the leadership at Nabis has found that finding the ideal mix of skills and experience for every role in their business has the potential to slow them down. Hiring more flexibly has allowed them to keep pace with their ambitious growth targets, and they use coaching to develop skills that their leadership team needs to keep pace with the growing business.

Key Highlights

• Coaching for Nabis leadership team delivers personalized development to managers across the rapidly scaling business
• Manager growth and effectiveness is supported through coaching relationships that build over time
• Nabis is able to scale up as needed by hiring more flexibly, knowing that coaching can accelerate the development of skills and capacity for individuals where they need it
• Tiered options from Torch allows Nabis to offer a cost-effective development experience to more employees, safe in the knowledge that vetted coaches ensure consistent quality

A complex business scales faster with coaching

When Nabis searches for talent, they focus on finding the superstars who are capable leaders and passionate about the business.

“Those people are hard to find, and so we want to retain and develop them. As we grow, the challenges and needs of our team continue to evolve and become more complex. We wanted to level-up our internal skill sets across our executive team to be able to help scale ourselves as a business and ensure we continue to grow,” says Vince Ning, Co-founder and CEO of Nabis.

Having seen first hand the benefits of a good coach in his own professional life, Ning believes that offering that same experience of a Torch professional coach to the leaders in Nabis is an effective way to ensure the team is prepared for any challenge. He also believes it is a better investment than building a more seasoned team from the start: “[Coaching] felt like a more cost-effective way to level up our team without having to go out to hire some expensive, experienced executive,” says Ning.

Leaders can learn faster from coaching

Working with a dedicated professional coach over time has been valuable for the company founders. “I knew what I didn’t know, and what I needed to know. And it was helpful to find a coach through Torch to be able to solve those problems and just ask questions directly as they come up over time,” he says.

They wanted to bring that same transformational experience to the rest of the leadership team. With the Torch platform, Nabis found a scalable solution for developing leaders capable of managing teams effectively for growth and performance. “A lot of [people on] our team are young, raw, talented individuals,” at a moment in their leadership development when it’s easy to make mistakes. But coaching with Torch helps accelerate their growth, allowing them to “make fewer mistakes to learn the same lessons,” he explains.

Embracing a coaching culture

Torch’s coaching platform has allowed Nabis to scale the benefits of coaching to more of its leaders. Ning appreciates that there are tiers of coaches that can be matched to c-level or individual contributors: “As a growing startup you’re always trying to strike a balance between what you want to do for your employees and what’s economical for the business,” he says. In some cases employees might otherwise have considered paying for a coach outside of work, and Ning values that the Torch coaches are vetted and he knows his team is being coached by qualified professionals.

Nabis has embraced coaching as part of its culture: leaders discuss coaching opportunities positively in performance reviews, and employees appreciate it as a development opportunity for their own professional growth. “The teams are grateful that coaching is offered,” he says.