Founder and CEO, The Source Marketing • Group Marketing Architect • Email Jedi • Empathy Driven Leader
The Hotbox with Dustin Hoxworth isn’t your polished PR interview. It’s me getting stoned and asking people the questions they probably aren’t ready for. These aren’t cold reads or copy-paste Q&As; I sit with my guests, usually multiple times, and I’ve likely met them in person, which gives me a window to learn who they really are before I ever send the questions. By the time the words hit the page, it’s smoke-thick honesty, not surface-level bullshit. These are cannabis conversations that showcase the voices, stories, and truths that won’t show up in the boardroom.
The Hotbox with Kristen McFarland
Some people enter the cannabis industry through curiosity. Others arrive through opportunity. Then there are the ones who arrive through a lived journey, the ones who carry grit, pain, reinvention, and a sense of purpose bigger than profit. That is Kristin McFarland.
I’ve been following Kristin’s work on LinkedIn for a few years now, long before I knew the story behind her success. At first, I saw the professional side: a sharp strategist, a natural teacher, a marketing mind who genuinely loves the unsexy parts of the work like deliverability, automation, conversion paths, lead pipelines, and SEO architecture. Recently, I learned more about the woman behind the brand, and it instantly deepened the respect I already had.
Kristin’s path has not been easy. At times, it’s been soul-crushing, the kind of personal and professional obstacles most people never talk about publicly. Not only did she push through them, she transformed them into fuel. Today, she stands as the Founder and CEO of The Source Marketing Group, one of Denver’s most respected boutique marketing technology firms serving both cannabis and craft beer brands. She leads with empathy, compassion, and conviction, anchored by the belief that small and medium-sized businesses deserve access to high-level strategy, not watered-down shortcuts.
She helps her clients “market like a badass,” but she leads like a human. Her work drives revenue, builds loyalty, and gives brands the tools they need to scale, especially minority owned companies and startups that traditionally do not get first access to world-class marketing support. Kristin is proof that grit and generosity can coexist, that you can be analytical without losing heart, and strategic without losing soul.
Welcome to the Hotbox with Kristin McFarland.
The Hotbox Q&A: 5 Questions with Kristin McFarland
You have built a successful agency in a tough industry while navigating incredibly personal and difficult chapters in your life. What was the turning point when you realized you were not just rebuilding; you were rising into your role as a founder and CEO?
The question isn’t when I realized I was rising into my role as a Founder and CEO, it’s when everyone else did. I knew since day one what I was capable of as a leader, and that was proven time and time again in the first few years running The Source Marketing Group and launching the media arm of the business, Market Like A Badass.
We hit major revenue and business milestones early on. When our services included event management, we produced the largest Veterans Day parade in Denver, with 40,000 people, and secured the first-ever FAA-approved drone flight over downtown federal buildings. I was nominated for Picmonkey’s Shero Award and The Source Marketing Group was nominated for Emjay’s International Cannabis Awards. We were making an impact beyond marketing campaigns – leading community events, connecting job seekers and marketers with education and employment, volunteering at World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Fest, and beyond. All while scaling a business and working with the largest multi-state operators in weed.
I built a profitable, award-nominated, ethical business, leading a global team through a pandemic, temporary facial paralysis, divorce, and homelessness.
COVID confirmed our strong foundations. Even though we lost 80% of our revenue overnight, we still came out with year-over-year growth after pivoting into fully digital marketing offerings. That kind of pivot doesn’t happen by luck. It happens because you have a clear vision for your business, can execute under pressure, and adapt when everything changes.
That kind of leadership is not taught. That’s not rising to the occasion. That’s perseverance baked into who I am – and it’s been there from the beginning.
I’m a big believer in leading with empathy and compassion, and I know you are too: how has empathy, compassion, and conviction shaped the culture of The Source Marketing Group and the way you show up for your clients?
When you’ve been on the other side – when you’ve been the person struggling to make payroll, questioning if you’ll make it – you show up differently. As a self-funded agency owner, I know what it’s like when everything is on the line, so we treat our clients’ businesses with that same urgency and care.
Empathy in practice means we don’t just deliver technical marketing solutions; we understand the Founder who’s terrified their Green Wednesday campaign will fail, so we make sure we are monitoring in case we need to take action to recoup sales.
We’ve built our culture and pricing based on empathy and compassion – we give back to charities that contractors nominate, we offer social equity pricing so we’re not shutting out operators who need help most, and much more. We’ve launched over 50 episodes of the Market Like A Badass podcast to educate leaders on topics like managing your mental health as an entrepreneur, understanding privacy and security, navigating dispensary marketing, building websites that convert, and other actionable tips to help minority-owned businesses that start out with less funding and resources.
Our team is aligned around this same philosophy – we’re not order-takers in a transactional relationship with our clients. We’re partners who genuinely give a damn.
My conviction has helped shape the culture at The Source Marketing Group – it shows up when we push back on a platform vendor trying to lock customers in, or when we advocate for social equity operators who deserve the same quality of marketing as the big MSOs. We care enough to be honest, even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s the culture – we show up with both heart and backbone.
Your service suite is powerful, from email systems that actually drive revenue to websites that convert, and multi-channel campaigns that get brands noticed. What is the deeper philosophy behind your approach to helping companies “market like a badass”? What makes your work different from typical agency playbooks?
My philosophy is that all companies can market like a badass, aka deploy best-in-class marketing campaigns at any size or scale by doing the fundamentals well. Across my experience with Fortune 200 companies all the way down to startups, I have seen firsthand that you don’t need a $1 million marketing budget to make an impact. In my career, I’ve scaled multi-million dollar brands and influenced millions in revenue with even the smallest of budgets.
It’s how you leverage the marketing channels available to you. That is why The Source Marketing Group’s brand challenge to our clients is to “Market Like A Badass”. In practice, that means to use transformative, unique, and memorable brand experiences to scale your business and engage your community of buyers.
What makes our work different?
We actually give a shit. We understand that when you’re operating in spaces where the rules keep changing, you need someone who knows how to navigate complexity, not someone reading from a playbook written for industries that have it easy.
The Source specializes in an already niche category. We are retention specialists focused on high-converting websites and campaigns, automations that put revenue on autopilot, and integrating that tech to ensure we can monetize customer data across loyalty, email, push, SMS, and other platforms.
What we don’t do is try to be everything to everyone. We know that in a highly regulated industry like cannabis, “whatever you do, do it well” is a mantra we cannot afford to forget. Generalists don’t cut it when the fees for non-compliance can shutter your business.
Our founding team brings unique deliverability expertise that doesn’t exist anywhere else in cannabis. We bring deliverability experience from enterprise SaaS, where we had data across 2.5 billion subscriber inboxes, mastering compliant sending, navigating spam traps, IP authentication, teaching best practices, and working with some of the largest global senders like Groupon and Macy’s.
That’s why we spend a lot of time and resources educating the cannabis space on email and deliverability – we’ve seen operators who are desperate to improve their customer acquisition scrape bad data, tank their sender reputation, and send their communications to spam. That is where we come in as a proven partner to improve your communications plan and protect your sending reputation. We build your marketing plan with best practices and compliance in mind, so you can market like a badass.
Many of your client success stories involve taking struggling systems like deliverability, websites, automations, and retention, and completely transforming them. What do you think founders misunderstand most about marketing today, and what patterns do you see repeatedly that keep businesses stuck?
The biggest pattern I see keeping operators stuck is building what I call a “Franken-stack”- overpaying for a hodgepodge of various clunky marketing tech that doesn’t actually talk to each other and/or perform the way you want, then not having budget left to build the team and foundation that would make any of it work.
Cannabis operators often think they need “built-for-cannabis” technology for every business solution, especially because banking, payment processing, or other areas do require industry-specific solutions. Instead of having best-in-class marketing technology, for example, an operator is paying $1,200/month for software that performs like it was built in 2005, locked into closed systems where they can’t leave with all of their own data, or they have a loyalty platform that cannot integrate with their email provider or data warehouse. Meanwhile, mainstream tech would serve them 10x better at one-fifth the cost.
Then, on top of the expensive, clunky tech, their foundations are broken. DNS isn’t configured. Automations aren’t set up correctly. Triggers are firing wrong. They’re trying to scale marketing on a house of cards, and they wonder why nothing works.
Smart operators choose platforms with open APIs, native integrations, and flexibility for custom integrations – not walled gardens that restrict growth. They invest in getting the basics right first: the right tech stack, the right people, and the right processes. When you’re already being over-taxed and over-regulated, you can’t afford to spend your budget on restrictive tech and then have nothing left for the team or strategy to actually drive results.
Build the foundation. Choose a tech stack that gives you control. People + Process + Technology. That’s how you scale efficiently per location or market.
You have worked with major brands as well as small, minority owned companies with limited resources. What have these experiences taught you about leadership, resilience, and the responsibility you carry as a founder serving underrepresented and emerging businesses?
Working across that spectrum has taught me that good marketing isn’t just about budget, it’s about strategy and scrappiness. I’ve seen minority-owned operators with limited resources outperform massive MSOs because they were willing to be strategic, test, and optimize every dollar.
The stakes are high for every client we work with. When we work with a social equity operator or a minority-owned business, we know that a campaign underperforming could mean they can’t make payroll. That responsibility sits heavily, and it should.
Many social equity operators and BIPOC-owned businesses face barriers I’ll never experience. Working alongside such brilliant minds in cannabis has taught me that being a true leader is lifting others up along the way. As Tanya Osbourne with Canna Diva says, “Leave your purse by the door,” and that is something that has always stuck with me as a leader. It is my responsibility to lead the team, yes, but it’s also my responsibility as a leader to invest in our community, be an advocate in rooms where others are not yet seated, and empower others on their path to follow their own dreams.
I’ve been disappointed staring around a room, seeing only small businesses showing up to local social equity events or pitch contests. I often wonder why the well-funded businesses that claim to care about the industry are never in those rooms. That tells me I have to keep leading by example and pushing back against operators who are only in it for profit. Someone has to call out the performative allyship and actually show up. These are operators who were impacted by the war on drugs, who finally got a chance to do this legit, and they deserve to be supported with the same energy and resources as everyone else. That’s why I keep showing up, to fight for the people and plant that this industry was built on.
Resilience isn’t just about survival; it’s about who you lift up when you make it through. I mentor, I create resources, I share knowledge freely, and I price my services in a way that doesn’t shut out the operators who need help most. The cannabis industry talks a lot about equity. I’m trying to live it in how I run my business and support others.
This work has taught me that success isn’t just about building a profitable agency. Success is measured by community impact, not just revenue. It’s about sharing expertise, creating opportunities, and empowering others to build something of their own.
Kristin’s story is one of resilience, precision, and purpose. She built The Source Marketing Group from a place of lived experience, from knowing what it feels like to start over, and from refusing to let circumstance define her ceiling. The work she delivers for her clients is powerful, but the way she shows up as a leader is what truly sets her apart. She brings clarity, compassion, and conviction to an industry that needs all three.
It has been an honor watching her rise over the past few years and an even greater honor to share her story here in The Hotbox. The industry is better because she is in it, and the people she serves feel that every day.
