Mike Berro owns what could be the largest cannabis marketing agency in the Midwest — and he doesn’t even smoke weed.

“Growing up in my culture, weed was a big no,” he says. But that didn’t stop him from seeing an opportunity to get in on Michigan’s burgeoning industry.

Born and raised in Dearborn, Berro went to live in Lebanon for a couple of years before returning to metro Detroit, where he landed a marketing job. He quit after two months, he says, but soon landed a gig doing IT work for attorney Joumana Kayrouz. The two bonded over their shared Lebanese heritage, and her company hired Berro on the spot when he fixed their printers. There, he says he helped design the iconic billboards around town that Kayrouz became known for.

Then another interesting opportunity presented itself. Berro says his cousin married someone who had started a legit dispensary. In 2018, Michigan voters approved Proposal 1, which legalized cannabis for adult use.

The dispensary hired Berro to do its marketing, who worked in the back of the building on his laptop, and then gave him more money when they opened another store. Through word-of-mouth, he started getting more and more clients and moved into the cannabis industry full-time in 2019.

That’s when Berro says he decided to go all in.

To read more, click on Metro Times