This is the conclusion of our series on the history behind Mary Jane’s Medicinals. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

When I first started mixing batches of infused oil and salve in my kitchen, I hardly had any money to work with. I scraped together about $1,000 for my initial ingredients and containers, and a friend offered to make my company logo and visuals for another $500. I had to sell a batch of salves before I could buy more ingredients to pay for the next production round.

I didn’t get around to making labels for six months. Back in the mid-2000s, the nascent days of the Colorado medical cannabis program, you could walk into a dispensary with a box of unlabeled bottles and say, “These are infused massage oil,” and they would sell them for you. But when I got my first round of labels I thought, “This looks like a real product now.”

Then in 2010, the Colorado legislature passed the first round of medical cannabis regulations, and dispensaries and people making products had to apply for licenses, pay taxes and follow the rules established by the state and local governments.

I did some calculations and figured it would cost about $10,000 to become fully compliant—my heart sunk and I thought about giving up. But my mom told me, “Just do it. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” If she and my sister hadn’t supported me in that moment, I might have lost hope.

I had all of $3,500 in the bank, and all of it was going to have to be spent on just the cannabis business license alone. It was scary to write a check for all the money I had in the world. I wondered how I was going to pay my rent the next month.

But I buckled down and answered everything in the application the best I could and wrote that check. It took a year for the state medical marijuana agency to let businesses know if we were approved, but I took an “act as if” approach, kept making infused products at home and worked to become compliant.

Then I managed to gather together enough money to move operations from my kitchen to an industrial garage space where I could run a basic production facility that would be in compliance. A tech friend pieced together cameras and a DVR to create a security system, which saved me several thousand dollars.

It took the Colorado Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division a while to send investigators all the way out to Telluride. They were in fact still writing the regulations. I would call their Denver office to ask a question and they would tell me, “Ask a lawyer.”

One of the things they hadn’t written regs on was transporting product. My driver and I would hit the road with a car full of topicals and hope to not get pulled over, not knowing what would happen if we did. One time we were actually pulled over for speeding. I had a trunk full of salve, and my heart was pounding in my chest. We got a speeding ticket, but thankfully that was the end of it.

Telluride was seven hours away from most dispensaries, which were primarily centered in Denver. Initially we could send product across the state with various couriers. But when the regulations came out, they said we couldn’t use third-party delivery anymore, and I would have to deliver our products myself.

Again, I thought I might have to give up. I have eyesight issues that mean I can’t drive, and I didn’t have much to pay a driver to go with me. In fact, there were times when I couldn’t pay the driver or fill up the gas tank until after we made our first delivery.

But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Transporting our products forced me to have face time with existing customers, mostly dispensary owners, and build relationships with them. It was a good excuse to cold-call dispensaries that hadn’t placed an order that month. I would call all the stores in the area, and say, “Hey, I won’t be around for another eight weeks, better stock up!”

Customers got to know that was the rhythm and would replenish their supply of our products when they saw me.

So store by store, product by product from massage oil to salve to our bath soak and more, we built the business, and were ready to expand when Colorado voters chose to legalize adult-use cannabis in the 2012 election. In the years since then, we’ve continued to build our topicals business into one of the top cannabis companies in the state.

And I’m betting the coming years will be just as interesting as our past.