The pharmaceutical industry sets undeniably high expectations for processes, practices, and standards. Treehouse knows that this expertise is paramount to ensuring safe high-quality products and that's why we built a team with extensive pharmaceutical experience to develop our operations. Our chief operations officer, production staff, and quality control chemists have decades of pharmaceutical experience between them. This expertise is responsible for our industry-leading compliance and consistent high quality hemp extracts.
Below, our chief operations officer, Robin Montana, shares the top 3 lessons she garnered from her pharmaceutical experience that have proven essential to developing a high caliber team and operations at Treehouse.
1. Set high quality standards. Day-to-day operations require dedication to standards. At Treehouse, we talk about those standards all of the time from wearing your safety glasses to monitoring process parameters to in-house testing and proactive training. Empowerment at all levels of the organization is essential to maintaining quality and all of our staff are empowered to call out inefficiencies in our processes.
2. Culture is key. Pride comes naturally, culture does not. In this ever changing industry, culture is developed and maintained when we are in sync – when all levels of the organization understand, believe, and act out our mission, values, and goals. If you don’t buy into the culture, you will have an unproductive and inefficient team. Trust and respect need to be nurtured in all corners of the organization.
At Treehouse, we have “munch-n-learns” where team members share their knowledge with the entire team. This gives us an opportunity to learn something new and understand how our individual specialties fit together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s also a great way to invest in each other’s growth.
3. Embrace change. As a team led by scientists, we are trained to disprove our hypotheses. Failure opens the opportunity for improvement – as individuals, as a team, and as a company. Our culture of decision making is founded in the scientific method and provides a safe framework for course correcting. We establish a hypothesis, develop an experiment, perform the test, collect the data, and modify without bias. If we see an opportunity for improvement, we improve it.
The most challenging change I experienced in the pharmaceutical industry and at Treehouse was around paper. Implementing cGMP compliant technology (MES) means that paper goes away. However, it provides comprehensive and unmatched track trace capability and quality control. It was an enormous effort, not without trials, but I'm happy to say we succeeded!
Without regulation and official guidelines, it takes a strong internal customer-first culture to make sure products are compliant and safe. I thank my pharmaceutical family and experience for all the lessons learned and knowledge gained. I am proud of my Treehouse family and what we’ve built and hope our standards promote a broader commitment to quality within the hemp industry.
