Sarah Strickler on Cannabis Leadership, Community and Growing Grown Rogue

What does it look like to build a cannabis company that gets bigger without losing sight of the people who helped build it?

For Sarah Strickler, cannabis leadership is rooted in community, transparency, quality and the environments we create for people and plants to thrive. The co-founder of Grown Rogue joined me on The Canna Boss Babes Podcast for a conversation that moved from the company’s beginnings in Southern Oregon to motherhood, stigma, multi-state expansion and the deeply human side of scaling a cannabis business.

Sarah’s story begins well before Grown Rogue became a multi-state cannabis brand. A lifelong athlete, she earned a Division I basketball scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where discipline, teamwork and persistence became foundational parts of her life.

Cannabis came later, in part through her husband and Grown Rogue co-founder and CEO, Obie. Growing up in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley meant cannabis was already woven into the region’s culture, but Sarah’s relationship with the plant deepened as she began to see access as a matter of personal choice.

"I always viewed it as if this was going to heal someone’s body, they should have access to it."

Who Is Sarah Strickler?

Sarah Strickler is the co-founder of Grown Rogue, an Oregon-born cannabis company that began in the medical market before formally making the transition into Oregon’s recreational market in 2016. What started with 15 hand-dug holes on a hillside with gravity-fed spring water eventually grew into outdoor farms, a 17,000-square-foot indoor cultivation facility and expansion beyond Oregon.

That growth did not happen without mistakes. Sarah openly describes the early years as a period of experimentation, including trying to be too many things to too many people before the company sharpened its focus around flower, quality and consistency. At the same time, Sarah and Obie were confronting another challenge: becoming publicly visible after years of living around the stigma attached to cannabis.

For Sarah, visibility was personal. She and Obie were raising three daughters, and she wanted them to inherit a different relationship with cannabis than the shame and secrecy previous generations had experienced. She also wanted Grown Rogue employees to feel proud of their work and respected within their communities.

Building the company therefore became about more than cultivation—it became an opportunity to change the environment surrounding cannabis itself.

Sarah Strickler’s Cannabis Leadership Starts With Environment

One of Sarah’s most compelling leadership ideas is also one of the simplest: environment shapes growth. That applies to cannabis plants, but it also applies to employees, families, leaders and communities. As Grown Rogue transitioned from medical cannabis into the recreational market, Sarah realized she could no longer remain in the shadows. If she wanted the environment around cannabis to change, she had to participate in changing it.

"The environments in which we put people and plants are indicative of how they’re going to grow and move forward."

That philosophy is especially visible in how Sarah talks about her team. Some Grown Rogue employees have been with the company since its earliest days, and she describes watching people develop skills, become leaders and move their lives forward as one of the greatest joys of the entire journey. Success, in this framing, is not only measured by expansion or beautiful flower. It is also measured by what becomes possible for the people growing alongside the business.

The same attention carries through to the product. Sarah emphasized Grown Rogue’s hand-trimming and the human touch involved in its flower, as well as the importance of consistency and consumer choice. Genetics and strain preferences can shift almost like fashion, she explained, and different markets develop their own tastes. That makes listening to consumers part of the cultivation and brand-building process.

"To watch people move their lives forward is, it’s an incredible thing to watch and witness and be a part of."

Scaling Cannabis, Motherhood and the Courage to Be Visible

As the conversation turns to expansion, Sarah makes clear that scaling in cannabis requires adaptability. Grown Rogue began in Oregon before moving into additional state markets, each bringing its own regulations, packaging requirements and compliance realities. Multi-state growth is anything but copy-and-paste, and Sarah’s response to uncertainty is remarkably focused: control what you can control. When regulations and markets shift, she returns to the company’s mission, its team and the quality of what they are creating.

But perhaps the clearest example of why transparency matters to Sarah has nothing to do with facilities, regulations or expansion. It happened in 2016, during the first year she and Obie were building Grown Rogue, when Sarah began telling other parents what they did for a living.

Her daughter had a birthday approaching, and Sarah had recently opened up to some of the other mothers about working in cannabis. Suddenly, a fear set in: What if the other parents judged her? Worse, what if that judgment affected her daughter?

As the birthday approached and responses were slow to arrive, Sarah remembers her little girl asking, “Mama, are they gonna come?” Sarah reassured her that they would, but privately she was scared. It was one of those moments when the stigma surrounding cannabis stopped being an abstract industry problem and became deeply personal—a mother wondering whether her career could change the way people treated her child.

Then everyone came.

The experience stayed with Sarah because it helped clarify what she wanted to build for her daughters. She wanted to create a path where they could be proud of what their parents did, talk about cannabis without shame and grow up in a world where another mother might not have to wonder whether her child’s birthday party would be affected by cannabis stigma.

Transparency also produced an unexpected result. Once Sarah and Obie began sharing their story, people in their community started coming to them with questions. Friends wanted to know about cannabis for parents, grandparents and other loved ones. By making themselves vulnerable, Sarah and Obie became trusted resources rather than outsiders.

That experience informs how Sarah approaches cannabis with her daughters today. She talks about education, transparency and moderation, treating cannabis honestly as an adult-use product rather than something that needs to be hidden. Her daughters see their parents building a company, working alongside people they respect and participating in an industry they are actively helping change.

"We became that trusted source by opening up, and that’s really ultimately why Obie and I, we did a lot of tours in the beginning."

Sarah’s story is also a reminder that leadership requires something outside of work. Her athletic identity remains a major part of how she manages stress and protects her own well-being. Whether she is lifting heavy weights, sprinting, practicing yoga or getting outdoors, movement is a boundary she prioritizes so consistently that her family now knows when “mom needs to go work out.”

That athlete mentality follows her back into the business. When Sarah talks about Grown Rogue’s culture, she returns to grit: the instinct to hear that something cannot be done and practice until it can. It is the basketball player’s mentality translated into entrepreneurship - keep showing up, keep improving and keep aiming higher.

The story of Grown Rogue challenges the assumption that growth and integrity have to exist on opposite sides of the cannabis industry. Sarah’s version of cannabis leadership connects better environments, stronger teams, quality products, educated communities and the courage to be visible even when visibility feels uncomfortable.

And perhaps that is the thread running through Sarah’s entire story. Cannabis gave her a business to build, but building that business also gave her opportunities to challenge stigma, create jobs, raise her daughters differently and become a trusted voice in her community.

Watch or listen to Sarah Strickler’s full conversation with on The Canna Boss Babes Podcast for more on Grown Rogue, motherhood, leadership and what it means to grow something without losing sight of why you started.

https://youtu.be/yO7xs_G8nZk