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Melissa Sturgess: “You can’t change the rules standing on the sidelines”

The CEO of Ananda Developments, Melissa Sturgess, tells Sarah Sinclair how a 25-year career in precious metals has set her up to take on the cannabis industry.

Melissa Sturgess knows that success comes when we’re outside of our comfort zone.

“The world is not a safe space, you have to get into an unsafe space and be prepared to take risks in order to make leaps,” the CEO tells me over Zoom from St Tropez, France.

Sturgess is on holiday, but still working she insists, when we speak. Our conversation taking place just weeks after Ananda Developments announced it had been granted a Home Office licence to grow high THC medical cannabis for research purposes.

“If you’re not in the room you’re not in the deal,” she continues. “You have to work out where the power is and go there. If men have the power, you need to get male mentors.”

She is used to being the only woman in the room. Coming from a background in metals and mining equity capital markets, she was the only female chief executive of a publicly quoted company for more or less her whole career.

Born and bred in Perth, Western Australia, Sturgess studied statistics and psychology and worked in corporate finance until her late 20s. Then she met a group of entrepreneurs who were putting mining deals together on the African continent and “fell into” the fast-moving, high-capital sector.

“I never really knew what I wanted to do, I sort of fell into it but found that I loved it,” she admits.

“I got lucky because I was working with a group of guys who were very entrepreneurial and very successful.”

She spent several years moving between continents, living in Perth and orchestrating deals out of Johannesburg, before travelling to London to raise the money and list on the stock exchange.

Over the last 25 years Sturgess has got countless deals over the line, in gold, diamonds, coal and other precious gemstones, operating in complex jurisdictions such as Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia.

“I gained a lot of experience operating with complex deals and raising a lot of money as a director of publicly quoted companies,” she says.

“When I started in the mining space it was completely male dominated. The guys used to say to me ‘suck it up princess’. Complaining was not an option – if you complained, you just got left out.

“The approach I’ve always taken is that business is business. It’s a game and there are rules. You learn to play by the rules and when you win you have the power to change the rules.”

She adds: “I think that there are a lot of men who don’t really like the rules either, but they still have to play by them. My gender was just one of many issues, they are going to pick on any kind of weakness and saying that you wanted things to change wasn’t going to change anything.”

Her opportunistic nature came into its own when she moved to London in 2017 after a slump in the metals market and read an article in the Financial Times about a medical cannabis conference in the capital. Soon afterwards she was on a plane to Israel to meet the organiser of the conference and learn everything she could about medical cannabis.

“I went from being opportunistic about it, to thinking actually this is really fascinating and this is going to be more than just a deal, it’s something that I’m going to get really immersed in,” she says.

Through Ananda Developments, a listed company, with shares traded on London’s AQUIS Stock Exchange, she made a few small investments in the space. Production was never on the cards until she was introduced to growers who had produced medical cannabis for GW Pharmaceuticals as part of their trials for Epidyolex trials.

“We had never been interested in growing before, as we thought it was going to be a really commoditized area of the cannabis space. But when you meet guys who have done it successfully and have these amazing insights into growing medicinal cannabis cost-effectively, and in UK conditions, it’s actually pretty incredible,” she says.

Over the next two years the team put together what Sturgess describes as a “meaty” research programme and applied to the Home Office.

The process was “rigorous” she says, but “so it should be” and her experience applying for exploration licenses across the world stood her in good stead.

“Working with licencing that is in the gift of a government, in complex situations is certainly something I have done a lot of,” she says.

“You go out and do your exploration work, you show the government that you are good corporate citizens, that you run an operation that is legal and rigorous and that employs local people.”

The £300,000 purpose-built facility in Lincolnshire will see Ananda’s subsidiary, DJT Plants, grow 65 strains of high THC cannabis for use in large-scale research, focusing on the conditions for which cannabis products are being prescribed in the UK.

Subject to further Home Office licensing, the plan is to move to commercial growing, with the aim of supplying high-quality and consistent products to UK patients, as well as exporting to Europe.

“There’s increasing demand in the UK, but all the material we currently have is imported and quality and consistency seems to be variable. Our aim is to have our own unique strains that will be suitable for the indications that are being treated in the UK, and will be plants or chemovars that thrive in UK conditions,” says Sturgess.

The facility will use the UK’s natural growing season, during which its greenhouses will benefit from long hours of light and the right temperature to avoid having to rely on artificial light and heat. Its material will then be sent to Israel for cannabinoid and terpene analysis.

Sturgess explains: “When you grow under artificial conditions, the power that is consumed is astronomical, so whilst we talk about this natural product we’re ignoring the fact that actually it can be really damaging.

“Patients and prescribing doctors will know they are getting a UK product, which hasn’t travelled very far, meaning it’s probably going to be fresher and hasn’t chewed up power or transportation costs coming from the other side of the world.”

Meeting campaigners and patient advocates in the space over the last few years, including Hannah Deacon, the mother of Alfie Dingley, the first UK patient to be issued an NHS prescription for medical cannabis, Sturgess has seen the need for producing a consistent and high quality product for UK patients.

“Having met Hannah three years ago, shesits on my shoulder virtually the whole time,” she says.

“All I think about is that we should be providing medicinal cannabis in the UK for people like Hannah, who need it for their kids or for themselves or their friends, family, loved ones.”

Despite being the driving force of the industry, Sturgess fears that when capital gets tight it’s these advocacy roles which will disappear as larger companies swallow up the space.

“Women will say to me that they find it hard because the industry is so male dominated, but I don’t feel that because of where I have come from. However, what I observed in the early days, certainly in North America and Canada, was a lot of women in the grassroots and advocacy roles. As the industry matures you get the bigger companies coming in, and it tends to be mainly men running those companies,” she says.

“Women can do themselves a disservice when they portray the caring side so much. They tend to think that if they work really hard, someone will offer them a pay rise, or
if they volunteer, someone will offer to pay them. But it’s about knowing your worth
and putting a price on things.

“When you get to the business side of things, it’s about money and if you want to make money for shareholders it becomes really competitive. There’s only so much money out there, so people are often competing for the same pool of capital.”

But Sturgess has played the game for a while now, and is in prime position to help change the rules.

“I want to encourage [women] not to stand back and wait to be noticed,” she adds.

“You’re not going to change the rules of basketball by standing on the sidelines, you’re going to change the rules by getting in there, playing the game and becoming a respected player.”

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