Tim Kirby of Releaf: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis or CBD Business

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Kirby.

Tim Kirby is the Chief Executive Officer of Releaf — with an enviable track record of growth in highly regulated markets. Releaf was conceived in 2022 to address the low uptake of CBPM in the UK. The vision is to make CBPM more trusted and accessible and to improve the quality of life for millions of people through increased awareness and education. Under Tim’s leadership, Releaf is the fastest growing and most trusted provider in the UK with the greatest patient advocacy (measured in volume of reviews and quality reviews rating on Trustpilot) on boarding over 2,000 new patients each month, supported by 50+ specialist doctors and reaching £3M+ in monthly revenue as of YE 2025. International expansion began last year in Germany with plans to continue this growth throughout Europe.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My business partner and I have always been drawn to markets that are highly complex, opaque and heavily regulated environments where the barriers to entry are high and the path to market is anything but obvious. We’ve developed a core competency in building digital ecosystems that go to market effectively in exactly those kinds of spaces.

When we looked at medical cannabis in the UK, we saw a clear anomaly. In mature markets territories that had been issuing medical cannabis prescriptions for five or six years around 3% of adults hold a prescription. Yet when we first examined the UK in 2023, there were only around 25,000 patients, despite legislation having been in place since 2018. That gap told us everything. The market existed, the need existed, but nobody had built the infrastructure to serve it properly.

That insight led us to invest in a technology platform designed to meet that unmet healthcare need and to the launch of Releaf in 2024.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

What strikes me most isn’t a single moment, it’s a pattern I see repeated constantly in our Trustpilot reviews. We’re the highest-rated medical cannabis clinic in the UK, with over 7,000 five-star reviews. And here’s the thing: not one person mentions cannabis. What they talk about is quality of life. They talk about getting their lives back.

A significant number of those stories involve opioids patients who had been through escalating prescription cycles, each one stronger than the last, and found that this alternative approach gave them something conventional medicine hadn’t offered: relief without dependency.

The lesson I take from that is the importance of keeping an open mind about what’s available for your condition. Your GP can only prescribe within a fairly narrow set of pathways. What we’ve demonstrated is that there’s a meaningful population of people who haven’t been failed by medicine, they just haven’t been shown all their options.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Releaf operates in the cannabis industry, which means it is surrounded by people from the cannabis industry. They are a breed I had never encountered before: enthusiasts of the subject, first, and enthusiasts of delivering exceptional healthcare, second.

In the early days, I was so focused on building a network and knowledge quickly that I broke my own golden rule: ‘assume mediocrity until excellence is proven.’ Excellence was rarely proven. I gave too many self-described industry experts and operators too long to demonstrate their mediocrity, and extended credibility that simply hadn’t been earned.

The lesson? Trust the rule. It exists for a reason.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

The most exciting work we’re doing right now is around opening up demographics through the way the medication is presented. There’s a population of people who might genuinely benefit from medical cannabis but are put off by the format grinding flower, loading a vaporiser because it doesn’t feel like medicine to them.

We’re working with our supply chain to change that. Gel capsules in blister packs, for example. Suddenly it looks and feels familiar. It removes a psychological barrier that has nothing to do with efficacy and everything to do with perception.

One project I’m particularly excited about is bringing a pessary to market in the coming months. When you look at our Trustpilot data, the number of women citing endometriosis is striking. It’s a condition that is chronically under-treated and frequently misunderstood. If we can offer a format that works for that population specifically, we have the chance to reach people who’ve been let down by conventional pathways for a very long time. That feels like meaningful progress.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

My wife, without question, for her patience, and for tolerating the level of distraction that comes with building something you’re genuinely passionate about.

Beyond that, I’ve been fortunate enough to stand on the shoulders of some extraordinarily talented people throughout my career. I wouldn’t want to single out individuals because I’d inevitably leave someone out who was fundamental to where I am today. What I will say is that almost everything I know has been borrowed from people who’d already solved the problems I was facing.

There’s a phrase our HR director Amy Hughes uses when we’re bringing in emerging talent: ‘We took the stairs up we should send the elevator down.’ That idea has stayed with me. It’s not just a nice sentiment; I think it’s a genuine responsibility. If you’ve been lucky enough to learn from exceptional people, passing that on isn’t optional it’s the point.

This industry is young, dynamic and creative. Does your company use any clever and innovative marketing strategies that you think large legacy companies should consider adopting?

Healthcare marketing, and particularly alternative healthcare, is a different discipline. People don’t want to see advertising. What they want is to find someone who looks like them, sounds like them, lives like them and hear them talk honestly about their experience.

Early on, we coined an internal framework we called ‘feel, felt, found.’ The idea was simple: when someone receives a diagnosis or a prescription they’re uncertain about, they go to Google. They search the condition, they search the medication. We wanted to own that click pathway not with advertising copy, but with patient stories structured around that three-part arc. ‘I understand exactly how you feel. I felt exactly the same way. What I found was…’

It creates a bridge from the uninformed to the experienced. That, to me, is the most effective form of marketing in healthcare: not push, but recognition. Large legacy companies spend enormous sums broadcasting at people. The smarter play is creating the conditions for people to find their own way to you, through the voices of people they can actually relate to.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the Medical Cannabis industry? Can you share 3 things that most concern you?

Honestly, I think they’re largely the same things, it just depends which way you’re looking at them.

What excites me most is the growing recognition of medical cannabis as a legitimate and valuable component of the healthcare system. The evidence-base is building, patient outcomes are demonstrable, and the conversation is becoming more serious.

What concerns me is that too many participants in this industry still aren’t approaching it as a healthcare proposition. When I first started meeting clinic operators, a good number of them were activists rather than clinicians, more interested in medical cannabis as a vehicle for legalisation than in the patient outcomes. That framing does real damage to the credibility of the sector.

There were 5.5 million opioid prescriptions issued in the UK last year. There were 5,500 opioid-related suicides. That doesn’t make headlines. What excites and concerns me equally is whether the medical cannabis industry will take that seriously, or whether it will keep chasing the wrong market for the wrong reasons.

The opportunity is to educate, to legitimise, and to serve the people that conventional healthcare has run out of options for. Whether the industry rises to that is, to my mind, the defining question.

Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis Business”? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Assume mediocrity until excellence is proven

It sounds harsh, but I mean it constructively. If you assume the best in people from day one, you set yourself up for disappointment and worse, you don’t give them the scaffolding they need to succeed. A more rewarding approach is to assume that most people, however talented, will need support, coaching and structure before they can operate at their best. Build that in from the start, and the results will follow.

2. Lead by doing, not by title

You can lead with authority for a short period of time. But if people only follow you because of your position, talent will walk. The leaders I’ve respected most are the ones who were prepared to go through the same development process they asked of others doing it first, then doing it together, then letting the team own it. That cycle builds genuine respect.

3. Success is boring. Raise your boredom threshold

I’ve been told before that I must have a very low boredom threshold to stay motivated. The opposite is true. The most effective thing you can do is repeat the same granular activities, with the same consistency, to different audiences, day after day. We talk at Releaf about not having 30,000 patients, we have one patient having a great experience, 30,000 times over. That mindset, focused on quality rather than scale, is what drives results.

4. Results are a by-product of behaviours. Stop talking about last week

One of the most common and wasteful habits in business is spending Monday morning reviewing last week’s results. The results are already fixed, the conditions that created them are already gone. What I’d rather do is feed forward: talk about the behaviours and intentions that will drive the outcomes we want this week. Performance lives in behaviours. If you want better results, change what people do, not how you describe what already happened.

5. Never let your inner voice be drowned out by other people’s opinions

Beware the industry, people and organisations are not all that they seem. The root cause of the UK market’s failure to reach its potential has nothing to do with a lack of appetite from patients. Millions of adults are actively seeking effective alternative healthcare. The barrier has always been the people and their approach, not the opportunity.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Put the business above yourself, and restructure your thinking around what that actually means in practice. The instinct in a lot of organisations is to see the team as a resource that supports leadership. I think it’s the other way around. Leadership exists to support the business to act as a framework that enables the people doing the work to do it well.

That shift in orientation changes everything: how you hire, how you communicate, how you measure success. And the culture you get back will reflect the behaviours you demonstrate. If you want a great culture, show the behaviours that create one. There’s no shortcut.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

It’s a waste of time focusing on results and outcomes, in your personal and professional life. All we do is become experts at talking about results and validating them after the fact. What actually drives change is understanding the behaviours behind the outcomes you want, and then feeding forward: committing, with genuine intention, to practising those behaviours every single day. Results take care of themselves when you get that right. If I could inspire a movement, it would be that one. Stop measuring the scoreboard. And start becoming better at the behaviours required to get the results you want.

What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?

Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/timpkirby
https://releaf.co.uk/

Thank you for sharing these insights!