Meet the Pa. Queen of Legal Weed
Her work with Al Boscov, prison inmates led to her new career.
Chris Visco was once a major buyer for a department store. She has taught serial killers how to make lamps. She has also run several political campaigns, and operated a bakery.
Now Visco is Pennsylvania’s dominant retailer of medical marijuana. The 47-year-old mother of three is the cofounder and CEO of TerraVida Holistic Centers, a chain of three cannabis dispensaries scattered across the Philadelphia suburbs.
“I am the biggest [legal] weed dealer in the state,” Visco said, with customary bravado.
Her claim is supported by the state’s medical marijuana growers.
“We sell between 30 and 40 pounds of [marijuana] flower a month,” she said. “Then there’s the concentrates and other products. I’ve had over 20,000 unique patients who have walked through the doors since we opened in February. And the business is still growing.”
She’s also a patient.
Visco said cannabis products have been good for her migraines and insomnia. She uses the Pineapple Express strain for her headaches.
And each night, an hour before bed, she takes a 10 mg THC capsule that she maintains increased the number of hours she can sleep from three to between five and six.
“It’s really worked for me,” she said.
Visco has taken an unorthodox route to the top of the Keystone State’s cannabis industry. She presides over an expanding chain — she hopes to open six more spa-like dispensaries next year — and employs nearly 80 people.
“Chris understood from the beginning that the marijuana business is, aside from whatever else it might be, a business,” said state Sen. Daylin Leach, a Democrat. “And as such the basic rules of business apply: Provide a good product, at a reasonable price, and market yourself aggressively. This put her light years ahead of some others who felt that marijuana was magic, and the normal hard work of building a business wasn’t necessary.”
In Las Vegas in mid-November for the MJBizCon, the world’s largest marijuana business convention and expo, Visco
said she witnessed a whirlwind of consolidation as venture capitalists sought to acquire successful grows and dispensaries throughout the country.
“Everyone was buying and selling,” said Visco, who entertained and rejected a few offers.
The number of patients walking through TerraVida’s doors may be rising, but Visco said her stores may still see lots of red ink this year.
“In the medical market, no one is making money,” Visco said. “Everyone — myself included — is playing the long game, waiting for adult recreational use to become legal and for congress to reschedule the drug from a Schedule I narcotic so we can take care of banking and get rid of that 280E tax.”
Because the federal government considers marijuana to be in the same category as heroin, banking services are hard to find and onerously expensive. Dispensaries are also prevented under 280E from writing off the cost of doing business, making for an effective tax rate up to 70 percent.
The daughter of John P. Durante, who was the Republican sheriff of Montgomery County, Visco admits to smoking “lots of marijuana” back when she was a high school and college student.
“I went to a lot of [Grateful] Dead shows,” she said. “I was a big smoker when I was a teenager.”
After graduating with a degree in psychology from Drexel University, she was hired at Boscov’s department stores as a gift department manager. She rapidly rose through the ranks and became a star buyer.
“I was promoted because I was aggressive and made sure I was always in the right place at the right time,” she said.
That became her template.
Al Boscov became her mentor. The legendary department store king, also a Drexel graduate, was Visco’s boss for nine years.
“He taught me how to be an entrepreneur,” Visco said. “He showed me if you were driven and had ambition, you could and would succeed financially.”
Boscov hand-picked her to enter the executive training program. The master retailer, who died last year, was so fond of Visco that he anointed her with a pet name.
“He’d see me and call out ‘Here comes Tenacity!’ ” said Visco, who says she wants to be ”the Al Boscov of cannabis.“
Visco left Boscov’s in 1998. The commute to Reading from the Philadelphia suburbs ate up an hour and a half of every day.
“I had to be closer to home and my children,” she said.
In need of work, she talked her way into a job as an associate buyer for dresses at David’s Bridal in Conshohocken.
She spent seven years working for David’s.
In 2004, Visco met an entrepreneur who had landed a government contract for a lighting business. The contract, with the U.S. Department of Justice, was up for renewal.
“We hit it off,” Visco said. “And for it to be a woman-owned business would give it a leg up.”
With the partnership forged, the pair won a new contract.
The company, called Performance Lighting, imported parts and shipped them to Florida, where inmates in the maximum security prison there assembled the components into marketable lamps.
“I spent a lot of time behind the walls. I trained serial killers to put together lighting fixtures,” Visco said.
Visco said she and her partner built the business from $1 million a year in revenues to $10 million. It was a good run. But with the federal contract set to expire in 2011, Visco again set her eyes on the future.
She launched a social media marketing firm from scratch in Conshohocken to promote restaurants. It evolved into the business she’d call PJs & Coffee.
But when her father died unexpectedly at the age of 60, “there were dozens of people who wanted his job and I knew who he wanted to replace him,” Visco said.
Republican Eileen Behr, who had been appointed to complete Durante’s tenure, won a full term with Visco’s social media assistance.
Her results caught the attention of the Montgomery County Democratic party. They brought her on to train candidates.
“I was hired by individual Democratic candidates and went 16-0,” she said. “Most of them were underdogs. Then I had more candidates from Philadelphia who wanted to hire me for contentious primary races.”
While running the coffee shop, she was approached by a field director for one of the political campaigns she had worked on. The field director asked if Visco would talk to a client who was exploring the idea of opening a cannabis growing facility.
As a favor, Visco reviewed the woman’s investor presentation.
“She hadn’t positioned herself properly. She was going to investor meetings with a huge PowerPoint presentation that had no dollar signs on it,” Visco said. “How do you ask for millions without telling people what the expected return on their investment was going to be?”
The meeting sparked her interest, not in growing but in opening dispensaries. She returned to the bakery to discuss cannabis with her business partners, Adina Birnbaum and Valentine Gorski.
“We agreed we should do it ourselves. We were all retailers,” Visco said. “We figured, how hard could it be?”
The trio submitted four applications to the state. According to Visco, they were the only applicant that was certified as a women-owned business enterprise.
The trio was at Birnbaum’s house when Birnbaum’s son, searching for results online, screamed out “You won!”
“I fell to the ground and started sobbing,” Visco said. “I was elated.”
Her suppliers said that compassion is a key to her achievement.
“There’s good reason why Chris has been so successful, and it’s not just her keen business sense,” said Kobi Waldfogel, sales manager for Terrapin Pennsylvania, one of the state’s 11 operating cannabis growers. “Chris really cares about her patients’ well-being and it shows. You really can’t fake that kind of empathy.”
TerraVida opened the day after Valentine’s Day. Visco said she loves the business more than she ever thought she would.
Visco expects the industry to shake out as talk heats up about state and national legalization. But she’s planted her stakes and is staying put.
“I have no desire to move on. This is what I do. This is who I am now,” Visco said.