After selling his cannabis company for over $800 million, Josh Joseph is creating a new home-grown business empire focused on real estate, sports, entertainment and music. Even as weed stocks have plummeted from their highs, some of the early pot-trepreneurs who cashed out at the peak are now turning their cannabis fortunes into family offices and diversified portfolios. Joseph, who co-founded Grassroots Cannibis in 2014 and sold the company to Curaleaf in 2020, has launched a family office called Big Plan Holdings using his cannabis fortune as seed money. “It was a crazy run and a great exit,” he told CNBC’s Family Office Investor. “But all of the sudden you’re done and we said ‘now what?’ I knew we were good at cultivating relationships, good at deploying capital and we had a wonderful investor following. So we just started digging in.” Today, Joseph’s Nashville-based family office, which includes his wife and two daughters, is building a vast collection of investments in real estate, entertainment, hospitality, sports and music. Vegas Strip of the South Joseph is about to open three mega-bars and restaurants on Nashville’s famed Lower Broadway, which has become the Vegas Strip of the South, hosting up to 20 million tourists a year. And appropriately for the Music City, Big Plan has launched a music publishing business and recording studios producing everything from K-pop to country. He’s also created a sports-management agency to tap into the growing demand for athletes and pop stars endorsing cannabis products. The NBA, for instance, recently removed cannabis from its list of banned substances and allows players to invest and promote cannabidiol (CBD) products, a non-addicitve chemical compound used to treat pain and anxiety. Several former NBA players are now high-profile spokespeople for cannabis brands. “A lot of professional athletes and musicians and entertainers love cannabis,” Joseph said. “We pride ourselves on being matchmakers, putting deals together between the companies and the brand ambassador.” Keeping the weed theme, Big Plan is investing in a THC-infused seltzer called Happi as well as a CBD-infused beverage called Mad Tasty. The core of Big Plan’s strategy, however, is commercial real-estate. Before founding Grassroots with his three partners in Chicago, Joseph worked in commercial real-estate handling distressed sales and restructurings. His commercial real-estate expertise helped Grassroots find top locations around the country at lower prices than many competitors, as well as structure favorable loans and leases. Now, Big Plan is teaming up with cannabis retailer Silver Therapeutics to buy $35 million of marijuana-related commercial real estate in New England. With commercial real-estate facing a crisis driven by tighter bank lending and rising office vacancies, Joseph sees potential opportunity. He’s in the early stages of creating a distressed commercial real-estate fund for investors. Today, the University of Illinois graduate says he “wouldn’t want to own any office towers anywhere” today, even in fast-growing cities like Nashville or Austin. Yet retail space may be undervalued in some locations, especially if it can be used for restaurants and services rather than traditional retail stores, he said. “Retail is holding up fairly well compared to other asset classes,” he said. “And it isn’t the old power center that has every space filled with an actual retailer. It’s your insurance company, your dentist, your hairstylist, restaurants. And we’re also focused on real-estate tied to immersive experiences.” Unlike most family offices, Big Plan didn’t actually start with a big plan or mission. Joseph prefers to be opportunistic with deals he comes across. “I use a lot of gut and intuition,” he said. He is disciplined when it comes to returns, however, targeting “mid- to upper teens.” Next generation Big Plan is also committed to its next generation. From day one, Big Plan has been a collaborative effort between Josh, 48, his wife Tara, and his daughters Sydni and Sophie, who are all listed as co-founders. Tara is CFO and handles branding and marketing for many of the brands while also running American Paint, a fast-growing hat company. Sydni oversees business development and handles due diligence and screening for potential deals, while Sophie is president of the Joseph Family foundation. “My number one piece of advice for other family offices is get your kids involved,” he said. “What I hear from other family offices all the time is ‘we have our estates all set up but our kids don’t know what’s going on.’ I think folks get scared to share what they have with their kids. But we’ve always been open with our kids about everything.”
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