Legal cannabis is still a small town wearing a big industry's clothes. Everyone eventually finds out who's reliable and who isn't, but that only happens if you're actually in the room long enough to watch it play out. A business plan can't teach you that. A job can.
TL;DR
Working inside a licensed operation before starting your own gives you three things a business plan can't: real market knowledge, a track record buyers and vendors can check, and a list of who's actually trustworthy. Skipping straight to ownership means learning all three the expensive way.
Take a real job in a licensed operation
Cultivation, distribution, retail, doesn't matter which, as long as it's a licensed business actually moving product. This is where you learn how demand really moves, not how you assume it moves from the outside.
Pay attention to who follows through
Every vendor, buyer, and contractor who comes through that business shows you something. Who delivers on time. Who ghosts after a bad batch. Who pays late and who pays first. You can't get this list from a conference badge or a group chat. It only comes from watching real transactions happen.
Build a track record with your name on it
When you eventually go looking for your own buyers, vendors, or investors, "I worked at this operation and did this job well" is worth more than a business plan with no history behind it. People in this industry check references the same way they check licenses.
Only then, build the plan
Start your own venture once you know your actual market, not an assumed one, and once you have real relationships to draw on instead of a cold list of contacts. The plan you write after a year inside the industry looks nothing like the one you'd have written before it.
None of this guarantees success. It removes the most common way people fail before they start: building a plan around a market they've only read about, with no way to tell a reliable partner from an unreliable one until real money is already on the line.
Every industry rewards this sequence. Cannabis just punishes skipping it faster than most.