In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - not exactly a hotbed of venture capital or startup culture - Stosh Wasik and Logan Stauber have quietly grown The Fire Station from a single 864-square-foot cannabis dispensary into an eight-location operation, all within a few years of Michigan's recreational cannabis market opening. The way they tell it, the growth was inseparable from a deliberate, sometimes unconventional approach to workplace culture - one that started, as many things do in small businesses, out of necessity.
Boots on the Ground Before Corner Offices
The early days were unglamorous. Wasik and Stauber were behind cash registers themselves, checking out customers in a store that was, by any measure, undersized for its traffic. "We were the first to pick up the proverbial shovel and get to work," Wasik said. That hands-on posture - neither symbolic nor performative at the time, just the only available option - ended up shaping the management philosophy they carried forward as the company scaled.
What's striking here is how often that origin story gets dropped from the leadership vocabulary once a company grows. For the two CEOs, it hasn't. Stauber describes personally helping employees find housing and make vehicle decisions - the kind of pastoral employer role that most HR departments would classify as out of scope, and most employees would quietly appreciate more than any ping-pong table. "We always give at least a second chance," he said, pointing to performance improvement programs as a standard tool rather than a last resort.
Millennial Culture, Seriously Applied
The Fire Station's Marquette headquarters offers a personal gym, flexible scheduling for administrative staff, and a benefits package that includes dental, health, vision, and 401(k) options. Wasik frames it as embracing millennial workplace expectations - a description that could read as marketing copy if the operational context didn't back it up.
Cannabis retail is not, by default, a sector known for robust employee benefits. Many dispensaries operate as high-turnover retail environments; compensation packages vary wildly by state and operator. Against that backdrop, The Fire Station's approach - autonomy over micromanagement, benefits parity with more conventional industries - represents a considered bet that retention and culture compound over time the same way operational efficiency does.
Wasik puts it plainly: employees should feel empowered to make decisions without constant oversight from leadership, while still knowing the support structure is there. That balance - freedom within accountability - is harder to execute than it sounds, particularly across eight locations with consistent standards.
Consistency Across Scale, and Why It's the Hard Part
Stauber's observation that "the only constant is change" might sound like a motivational poster, but in the context of Michigan's cannabis market, it describes something real. The Fire Station opened when a single vape cartridge retailed for roughly $114. The market has since compressed dramatically - the company now runs promotions at $100 for ten. That's not a minor pricing adjustment; it's a fundamental restructuring of margin and volume assumptions, and it happened while the company was simultaneously expanding its footprint.
Managing that kind of compression requires standardized operating procedures that are actually updated rather than archived. Stauber mentions pushing continuity across stores down to what paperclip holders sit on each desk - a detail that reads as fastidious until you consider what operational drift looks like across eight locations without it. Every standard operating procedure, Wasik noted, has been "flipped upside down, shaken, three to four times." In a market this young and this volatile, rigidity would have been the slower failure.
Integrity as a Hiring Filter
On the talent side, Stauber invokes a framework he attributes to a classic management principle: energy, intelligence, integrity - and the assertion that without the third, the first two are liabilities. It's a hiring posture with practical consequences. A smart, energetic employee who cuts corners in a regulated cannabis environment creates compliance exposure that can threaten a license. Integrity, in this context, is not a soft value; it's a regulatory buffer.
The customer service philosophy follows the same logic outward. Wasik rejects "good" and "great" as benchmarks, pushing instead for interactions that feel genuinely different from the routine transactional experiences - the grocery store, the gas station - that fill most people's days. Whether that standard holds consistently across eight stores is a question the market answers over time. But the ambition, at minimum, gives employees something to orient around beyond moving product.
Michigan's adult-use cannabis market remains one of the most price-competitive in the country, and the Upper Peninsula presents its own geographic and demographic constraints. Building a company culture that attracts and holds capable people in that environment, while managing rapid expansion and collapsing prices, is the operational reality behind what Wasik and Stauber describe. The shovels, in other words, are still in play.
