Six steps. Every engagement. Every operator. The substance changes — your operation, your license type, your inspection history. The method doesn't. This page is the procedural walkthrough of what actually happens between the day you sign and the day we exit.
We work alongside California cannabis manufacturers, distributors, cultivators, and microbusinesses to turn compliance from a burden into infrastructure. We do the daily work. We build the systems that hold up under inspection. We train the teams that run them. And we stay long enough that your team can keep running it without us in the room — even if you choose to keep us on retainer beyond that point.
Regulations are the Blueprint. Discipline is the method. Mastery is the result.
Every Freed Up engagement — Diagnostic, Project, or Retainer onboarding — moves through the same six steps. Names, durations, and artifacts vary by engagement type. The discipline does not.
One onsite visit, or two video working sessions with leadership and the people who actually do the work. We talk to operators, not just owners. Document review across SOPs, MMPs, batch production records, recent NOCs and citations, training records, premises diagram, surveillance configuration, METRC access. An operational walk-through assesses what's happening on the floor against what's documented. Environmental and licensing review covers CEQA status, water board reporting, pesticide regulation, and cultivation environmental requirements.
We don't bring a template. We bring the code, your records, and a senior read of what an inspector would see if they walked in tomorrow.
Each issue gets a Diagnostic Pain Score — a structured measure of severity, dollar exposure, and what an inspector would cite first. Each license gets a Pain Score and a Qual Score. We pull the public DCC Compliance Action Records on your full license portfolio and benchmark you against operators in your category. The diagnosis ends as a 30/60/90-day remediation roadmap — what to fix when, in dependency order, scoped to what your team can absorb without breaking the rest of the operation.
A fixed-fee Project (METRC Reconciliation Rebuild, SOP & MMP Build, Inspection Readiness Sprint, Re-Application Readiness). A Compliance Officer Retainer for senior advisory. An Operational Office Retainer for back-office execution. Both retainers bundled (12% off the combined). Or "no further engagement" — sometimes the right answer is that your team can close the gaps internally, or that another consultant is a better fit.
If we're moving forward, the engagement letter goes out with a fixed fee, a defined window, and named deliverables. No hourly billing surprises, no scope creep.
For Projects: documentation, training, system rebuilds, sanitation plans, batch records, inspection checklists — whatever the named project's scope requires, built to current DCC standards. For Retainers: scheduled cadence, citation response, METRC reviews, mock audits, real-time enforcement alerts on portfolio matches.
The artifacts are designed for your team to use, not for the engagement to look thorough. If a deliverable doesn't survive contact with your floor, we rewrite it. If your team can't run it without us, it's not done.
Every Project ends with training and handoff. We work alongside your team during rollout — three weeks of shadow-operation support during the SOP & MMP build, three rounds of staff role-plays across multiple shifts for Inspection Readiness, post-implementation training and credentialing for METRC reconciliation. Retainers transfer institutional knowledge to the named owner and backup on your team, every cadence.
The point is that the discipline lives in the people who run the operation after we're gone. That's how compliance done right earns freedom — your team owns the practice, not us.
30-day post-implementation audit for METRC Reconciliation Rebuild. 30-day check-in after SOP & MMP Build rollout to confirm documents match the floor. 30-day Q&A window after the Inspection Readiness Sprint. Retainers carry follow-up forward as standing cadence; Projects close with a written confirmation that the fix is holding under real operating conditions.
If something isn't holding, we surface it. If it is, we exit cleanly — or the relationship rolls into a Retainer if you want ongoing senior coverage as a strategic choice, not because the operation collapses without us.
The six steps are the same. The substance differs by engagement — a Diagnostic compresses the first three into 2–3 weeks; a Project executes 04 and 05 against a named scope; a Retainer runs the cycle continuously. Full detail on the dedicated pages.
A senior read of your operation, ending with a written readout and an honest recommendation. Steps 01–03 in compressed form, delivered as an executive document your leadership can act on.
Read the DiagnosticProductized fixes for known regulatory pain — METRC reconciliation, SOP & MMP builds, inspection readiness, re-application. Steps 04 and 05 against a named scope, with step 06 included.
See the projectsOngoing compliance support. Two parallel ladders — Compliance Officer for senior advisory, Operational Office for execution. The method runs continuously, not just on the engagement boundary.
See the tiersThe clearest way to see how we work is to watch us work on a specific regulation. The Blueprint is where we publish that translation in long form — each post anchored on a section of California cannabis code, with the operating cadence and the failure modes named in detail.
Every fit call goes directly to a Freed Up principal. 20 minutes, an honest read, a clear recommendation either way.