Staffing

Cannabis back-office staff, useful from week one.

Add a full-time hire without the headache of hiring. HQ recruits, trains and manages cannabis-experienced staff who already know your platforms, and work your hours inside your systems.

Talk to the Team30-min intro · No prep needed
Average savings40% on roles filled by HQ
Team121 team members globally
Kickoff7-10 days from signature
Why cannabis experience matters

Most new hires have never read a manifest.

The person knows accounting, sales or marketing, but they’ve never touched METRC and have no idea what LeafLink or Dutchie is. So wrong product names get punched into orders, COAs go missing from manifests, payments sit for 60-plus days, menus go stale, and the books get coded in a way that turns 280E into a nightmare next April.

It’s not a people problem. Cannabis has its own software, its own rules and quirks that take months to learn from scratch. HQ hires and trains back-office staff who already know them, and a cannabis-experienced senior operations lead oversees each team, joins your weekly check-ins, and owns the quality of the work.

Trained on the platforms you already run
  • LeafLink
  • Distru
  • Nabis
  • Treez
  • Dutchie POS
  • Flowhub
  • Cova
  • Blaze
  • Meadow
  • METRC
  • BioTrack
  • QuickBooks
  • Sage Intacct
  • NetSuite
  • Bill.com
  • Klaviyo
  • Alpine IQ
  • Canix
  • Indica Online
  • Acumatica
  • Headset
  • Hoodie
Roles we staff

Start with one role, or build a full back office.

Staffing gives you dedicated people who work under your direction. If you’d rather HQ own the outcome of a whole function, each role links to the managed service that covers it.

Sales Operations

Same-day order entry, substitutions, buyer records and territory reporting, so your reps sell instead of doing admin.

  • Order entry into LeafLink, Distru and Nabis
  • Live menu and substitution management
  • Buyer CRM cleanup and preference tracking
  • Sell-through reorder recommendations
Prefer it fully managed? See Sales Support →

Accounts Receivable

Daily retailer outreach, statement reconciliation and aging reports, so payments stop sitting for 60-plus days.

  • Daily collections outreach
  • Statement and credit reconciliation
  • Aging bucket and escalation reporting
  • Customer record hygiene
Prefer it fully managed? See Accounts Receivable →

AP & Bookkeeping

Bill capture, vendor payments, month-end close prep and 280E-clean coding, built around QuickBooks, Sage or NetSuite.

  • Bill.com, Ramp and Melio workflows
  • Vendor onboarding and statement audit
  • 280E-compliant GL coding
  • Bank and credit card reconciliations
Prefer it fully managed? See Finance & Accounting →

Controller & FP&A

Month-end close, entity-level P&L, 13-week cash forecasts and dashboards your operators can actually use.

  • Standardized close checklists
  • Multi-entity P&L and chart of accounts cleanup
  • Cash flow and forecasting
  • SKU- and territory-level margin analytics
Prefer it fully managed? See Finance & Accounting →

Marketing Operations

Lifecycle email, paid social for dispensaries and weekly reporting that ties campaigns to in-store revenue.

  • Klaviyo and Alpine IQ lifecycle flows
  • Meta paid media for dispensaries
  • Creative ops and weekly reporting
  • Cannabis-compliant segmentation
Prefer it fully managed? See Marketing →

Data & Catalog Ops

SKU deduplication, standard images and descriptions, and ongoing catalog QC, so your menus and reports stay accurate.

  • Master catalog cleanup and dedupe
  • Photo and description standardization
  • Ongoing SKU governance and QC
  • Distributor portal data sync
Prefer it fully managed? See Data Management →
HQ vs. a staffing agency

More than a placement. Less than a hire.

An agency fills the seat and leaves the training and managing to you. HQ hands you someone who already knows the work, and keeps managing them after they start.

Cannabis-trained on day oneNo 90-day ramp. Your team already knows METRC, manifest workflows, 280E and the major POS and distribution platforms.
Managed, not just placedEvery role sits inside a larger HQ team, so you get built-in management, coverage when someone is out, and quality control.
40% average savingsA small back-office team for less than one in-house hire costs you fully loaded. Operators save an average of 40% on roles filled by HQ.
Scale up or down on short noticeAdd coverage for a state expansion, harvest season or year-end close without payroll and HR overhead.
SOPs and reporting you keepEvery workflow is written down in shared SOPs. You own the playbook, even if you leave us.
Cannabis onlyHQ only works in cannabis, so compliance rules, platform quirks and how orders, payments and inventory move are daily work, not a learning curve.
How it works

From scoping call to embedded team.

  1. 1Scoping callIn 30 minutes we map your back-office stack, the gaps causing the most pain, and the roles that would help fastest.
  2. 2Team match and SOP buildWe assign trained teammates and an experienced operations lead, then write up your workflows in shared SOPs you own.
  3. 3Embedded from week oneYour team gets Slack, system access and a weekly check-in. Cleaner data, faster orders and tighter AR show up inside 30 days.
  4. 4Scale on demandAdd roles when you expand, scale down off-season, and swap functions as the business changes. No hiring overhead.
FAQ

Common questions.

How is Staffing different from HQ’s managed services?

With Staffing, you get dedicated people who work your hours inside your systems, under your direction. HQ recruits, trains and manages them, and covers when someone is out. With a managed service like Accounts Receivable or Finance & Accounting, HQ owns the outcome of the whole function against agreed SOPs.

Are your staff licensed for cannabis work?

Our team handles back-office and operational work, not regulated activities like manufacturing, retail handling or transport that need state-issued cannabis licenses. They work alongside your licensed staff on administration, accounting, data and reporting, outside the regulated chain of custody.

Where is the team based?

HQ has a global team of 121 people across LA, Belgrade and Mexico City, trained on cannabis workflows. Every engagement has a cannabis-experienced operations lead as your day-to-day contact, backed by a US-based senior operations team that handles oversight and quality control.

What does it cost?

Engagements are monthly retainers scoped to the role and the volume of work. Operators save an average of 40% on roles filled by HQ compared with a fully loaded in-house hire.

What size operators do you work with?

From single-state brands and one-to-three store dispensary groups to multi-state operators and licensed distributors. The smallest engagements start at one role; the largest run the full back office across five or more functions.

How fast can a teammate start?

Typical kickoff is 7-10 days from contract signature. Urgent engagements, like peak harvest, an AR backlog or a sudden departure, have been onboarded in under 72 hours.

Talk to HQ

Tell us what you need to hire. We’ll come back with a plan.

A 30-minute call is enough to scope the roles, the estimated cost and the timeline. HQ supports back-office work for brands, distributors, dispensaries and MSOs across CA, NY, MA, NJ, MI, CO, IL, AZ, NV and OK.

Talk to the Team