High Standards

Some play checkers, Casey Flippo plays chess.

By Brock Hyland
Photography By NOVO Studio

When Paragould native and entrepreneur Casey Flippo first endeavored into the Arkansas cannabis industry with his best friend, Sean, he had no idea his latest business venture would reach the heights it has. Thanks to an impromptu motto, “play chess while everyone else plays checkers,” he’s grown what originally began in 2019 as a small CBD company in Monroe County, to a multistate, regional leader in cannabis product production and retail. The best part? He’s just getting started.

Did your status as Arkansas’s first cannabis processor present a different set of challenges that you might not experience today?
Absolutely. For Arkansas specifically, we were licensed to be the first processor in 2021, but the program really got started in 2017 or 2018 with cultivation and dispensaries. Everyone got an aggressive head start on us, so when we came into the market there was a lot of resistance. Nobody knew who these new kids on the block were. There was a lot of uncertainty involved with taking that leap into the medical cannabis market, but after what we went through during COVID and our experience transitioning from a small regional hemp company into the legal market, we were ready. We hit the full send button. It created a sort of moat around our business model because other groups that were looking to do the same thing tended to shy away from it. They didn’t see the value, while we took it as a challenge. We saw an opportunity to crack this code and if we could just position ourselves correctly, we saw there was a huge need and a huge opportunity. There were a lot of things that happened to accomplish those goals, and it paid off extreme dividends. That’s how we were able to launch into other markets to become a regional operator with both wholesale and retail applications. It’s all about resiliency. Being the dark horse is how we felt coming into this market. We felt like we were behind. We felt we had to prove ourselves and work for every piece of success that we got, and we’re still willing to do that.

How does the evolving legal landscape in Arkansas and beyond shape the way you strategize your business?
Operating within the highly regulated Arkansas cannabis market is hard enough; doing that as a multistate operation multiplies the complexities by the number of states we’re in and makes it that much more cumbersome. It’s always changing — month to month, quarter to quarter — so it’s something we continuously monitor. Otherwise, you run the risk of falling behind. That’s really where we saw a niche in our business application with the processing as well as the retail. I can’t echo enough my reliance on Sean [business partner] and our legal team at the Rose Law Firm. Without those two groups, I would really struggle with it.

If you could change one thing about the current landscape in Arkansas, what would it be?
I believe our governing body as well as the industry do a pretty great job at regulating and self-regulating. I feel blessed to be a member of this industry. I think people in large part recognize the value of cannabis. I just wish there was something that addressed access early on, which would directly correlate with more patient participation. The landscape being what it is now, it’s important for us as industry operators to ensure that if a patient wants access to this medicine, whether it be through delivery services or geographically repositioning our stores, we as industry operators are willing to adhere to that. Every patient deserves access to this medicine.

If you could do a celebrity colab for any cannabis product with anybody — living or dead — who would it be?
For living … I’m the biggest Eminem fan of all time. I would love to do a collaboration with him. I know he’s clean now, so we would do a non-THC version. I just want to meet him and hang out! For dead … I was a huge Biggie Smalls fan back in the day. I think if I had to weigh it out, the fact that Biggie isn’t around anymore, I think he gets the nudge on Eminem.

Dark Horse stands by its name. In every new opportunity, in every new industry, in every circumstance, we view ourselves as the underdog. We’re going to scratch and claw until we reach a pinnacle and achieve the goals that we’ve set forth since day one. 

What’s your favorite stoner film?
Gotta love “Grandma’s Boy.” It came out around my transition into college where I was being introduced to marijuana for the first time. I probably watched it two dozen times in a week.

What’s your go-to munchy snack?
I’m a huge popcorn guy. Some extra movie butter and a flick — I’m here for that.

What’s next for Dark Horse?
Dark Horse stands by its name. In every new opportunity, in every new industry, in every circumstance, we view ourselves as the underdog. We’re going to scratch and claw until we reach a pinnacle and achieve the goals that we’ve set forth since day one. That said, our approach is conducted in phases. Every new state we try to enter, we try to introduce a wholesale segment to the market — whether that be cultivation, consumer packaged goods or manufacturing. Then we try to come back full circle and start introducing some retail applications. As of late, we’re really in the retail phase. In the immediate term, Dark Horse is simply focused on growth in all categories, but we’re really focused on honing in the retail.

Where does the name Dark Horse originate?
We used to be Dark Horse Medicinals, and the foundational piece to that is our original logo, which was a black knight chess piece that parcels out into molecules, specifically the THC molecule. Early on, whenever we were building our foundational business acumen, I came into our second-ever team meeting and on the whiteboard, I wrote, “Play chess while everybody else plays checkers,” indicating that we were going to make strategic moves while everybody else was focusing on what’s right in front of them. That was something that we echoed throughout our growth stages, and that black knight chess piece became a symbol for what we stand for.

What was it like starting a business during the pandemic, and how were you able to achieve such rapid and successful growth during that period?
There’s a lot of skill associated with what we’ve accomplished, but there’s certainly been a lot of being in the right place at the right time. We had a very successful hemp business when we first started. We were one of the largest production facilities in the tri-state area. We had the largest facility bringing in material from Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma on a regular basis. We were flourishing — and then the world shut down. It’s really a circumstance that, until you go through that as an entrepreneur, it’s unfathomable to have such immediate success and then get the rug pulled out from under you. One thing that I’m most proud of is in our infancy, the easiest and most realistic thing for us to have done would have been to pack up shop and call it quits. But we didn’t do that. We scratched, we clawed, we found ways to overcome short-term challenges to just make it work — with the hopes that we were going to be given an opportunity to showcase our skill sets. Right place, right time. Because of that resiliency, we were one of the first companies licensed in Arkansas as a processor. And because of that adversity, we were able to build a very successful business based on a solid foundation. It just goes to show how resiliency and having faith in yourself can lead to really great things.