Beyond the Monthly Fee: Why Cannabis Projects Are Turning to Fractional Development Leadership

Cannabis & Tech Today caught up with Jeff Lair and Sam Andras of 3rd Act Architecture and Consulting to discuss the decisions that shape a cannabis facility’s performance long after construction ends. Their argument begins with an easily overlooked detail, such as the clearance needed to service equipment, and extends to the financial assumptions underpinning an entire development.

For owners committing millions of dollars to cultivation and processing facilities, those connections carry considerable weight. A change in lighting can alter cooling and dehumidification requirements, while additional cultivation capacity can expose a bottleneck in drying or packaging. The consequences can remain embedded in operating expenses for years.

Lair and Andras advocate for experienced leadership on the owner’s behalf, including a fractional director of project development who can provide senior oversight as needed. In this discussion, they explain how that role connects business objectives with design and construction, where apparent savings warrant closer scrutiny, and how owners can assess a service whose benefits sometimes involve problems avoided.

Costs That Outlast Construction

Cannabis & Tech Today: What do owners tend to overlook when evaluating the cost of a cannabis facility project?

Jeff Lair and Sam Andras: The construction budget captures only part of the financial consequence of developing a facility. Decisions about equipment, materials, room dimensions, and access all influence how much the operation will cost to run and how reliably it can perform.

Something as ordinary as the location of a floor drain or the clearance around a filter can affect sanitation, maintenance, and labor for the life of the building. Those details deserve attention alongside the larger decisions about site selection, production capacity, and mechanical systems. A facility’s performance emerges from hundreds of interconnected choices, and experienced oversight helps owners understand their consequences before they become permanent.

C&T Today: Why does the timing of a decision matter so much?

Lair and Andras: A coordination issue identified during programming may be resolved through a conversation. During design, it may require revisions to the drawings, while discovery after bidding can affect pricing, contracts, and the construction schedule.

Once construction is underway, the same issue can lead to change orders, demolition, reconstruction, and delays. After opening, it may become a recurring expense through additional labor, inefficient workflow, maintenance difficulties, or increased energy consumption. Recognizing a problem early preserves the owner’s ability to address it while the solution remains relatively straightforward.

“Recognizing a problem early preserves the owner’s ability to address it while the solution remains relatively straightforward.”

Jeff Lair and Sam Andras

Coordinating the Facility

C&T Today: How can a project encounter these problems when qualified specialists are involved?

Lair and Andras: Each participant approaches the project through a particular responsibility. Engineers evaluate building systems, equipment manufacturers understand their products, contractors construct the contracted work, and operators focus on production. The challenge is keeping those responsibilities connected to the performance of the whole facility.

Increasing cultivation capacity, for example, creates demands on drying, curing, trimming, packaging, storage, and material movement. A lighting change can affect electrical infrastructure, cooling, dehumidification, controls, and operating costs. The team needs a consistent process for examining those relationships and determining whether a proposed decision still supports the owner’s business and operational requirements.

C&T Today: What should an owner examine beyond the construction budget and completion date?

Lair and Andras: Budget, schedule, and scope remain essential measures, but the assessment should also address how the completed facility will function. That includes workflow, sanitation, maintenance access, contamination control, operating expenses, and the ability to expand.

We use a process we call consequence analysis to examine what changes when a decision is proposed. We consider its effects on capital spending, operating costs, labor, production, revenue, quality, compliance, and risk, then relate those effects to the business plan and financial projections. Depending on the circumstances, that analysis may support a lower initial investment or justify additional spending to protect long-term performance.

Evaluating Value and Compliance

C&T Today: When does a proposed construction saving deserve closer scrutiny?

Lair and Andras: Any saving deserves examination when it changes how the facility will operate. A lower-priced mechanical system may carry higher energy costs, and reducing equipment redundancy may increase the financial exposure associated with a failure. Removing space can also create a workflow that requires additional labor every day.

Value engineering works best when it begins early and evaluates cost in relation to performance. Future expansion provides a useful example. Deferring infrastructure may reduce the initial budget, but installing it later could require demolition or disruption within an operating facility. The owner needs to understand that trade-off before deciding whether the immediate saving is worthwhile.

C&T Today: Where do compliance considerations enter that discussion?

Lair and Andras: Compliance considerations run through the physical details of the facility and the procedures used to operate it. Material selection affects cleaning and durability, while personnel movement, material flow, pressure relationships, waste handling, and controlled access all warrant coordinated review.

A detail that appears acceptable within one discipline can create a concern elsewhere. Equipment installation, for instance, has implications for maintenance access and sanitation as well as production. Bringing those perspectives together during design helps the team examine how the facility will actually be used and identify concerns before construction makes them more difficult to resolve.

Development Leadership on the Owner’s Behalf

C&T Today: How does an owner know when they actually need a fractional director?

Lair and Andras: The need often becomes apparent when an owner has an architect, engineers, contractors, vendors, and an operations team, but no single experienced person is responsible for connecting all of their decisions back to the owner’s business objectives. The warning signs can be subtle: vendors making recommendations independently, design decisions being made without fully understanding their operational consequences, budgets changing without considering long-term cost or value, or the owner becoming responsible for coordinating technical decisions outside their area of expertise.

Each member of the project team may be performing exactly the role they were hired to perform, while those roles are typically focused on a particular discipline, scope, or phase of the project. The broader responsibility includes what we refer to as consequence analysis, evaluating what a technically workable decision means for capital cost, operating cost, constructability, schedule, maintenance, flexibility, future expansion, and ultimately the owner’s business.

That broader perspective is often where the leadership gap exists. A fractional director works across those individual disciplines on the owner’s behalf, asking, “Will this work?” and “What happens if we do it this way?” The objective is to keep the hundreds of individual decisions being made throughout a project aligned with the owner’s operational, financial, and long-term objectives.

C&T Today: How does a fractional director work with the architect, engineers, and contractor?

Lair and Andras: The role provides continuity on the owner’s behalf while supporting the responsibilities of the project team. That begins with clearly documenting the intended operation through a basis of design, including production requirements, workflow, equipment, systems, performance criteria, and relevant compliance considerations.

That document gives the team a reference as the project moves through engineering, procurement, construction, commissioning, and startup. Budgets, personnel, equipment selections, and market conditions can change along the way. Someone needs to retain the reasoning behind earlier decisions and evaluate proposed changes against the owner’s original objectives and evolving requirements.

The fractional model can suit organizations that need senior development expertise during a build or expansion but have a different staffing need once the facility is operational. Its usefulness depends on maintaining that continuity across the stages where important decisions are made.

C&T Today: How can an owner assess the value of that oversight?

Lair and Andras: Start with the results that can be documented, including procurement savings, reconciled scopes, alternative technical solutions, and the elimination of unnecessary work. Those outcomes provide a tangible basis for evaluating the engagement.

Other benefits require more careful judgment because they involve an expense or disruption that was avoided. Identifying a scope gap before bidding, recognizing that additional cultivation would overwhelm post-harvest operations, or preserving maintenance access can protect the investment in ways that extend beyond the construction budget.

The monthly fee should be considered alongside the capital committed, the annual operating expenses affected, and the revenue dependent on the facility performing properly. The owner also needs to consider the consequences of a delayed opening, interrupted production, or a retrofit after operations begin. That broader view connects the cost of oversight to the decisions it is intended to improve.

Featured image: BXXXTY / Pexels. Stock photography illustrating indoor cannabis cultivation.