Kyle Meade has never been much for small talk. For years, one of the hardest parts of selling cannabis was the obligatory dinner with a dispensary buyer: two hours across a table, searching for something to say.
So he moved the meeting somewhere he felt at home. Instead of booking dinners, Meade began inviting buyers across Nevada out for a round of golf.
“That way, instead of having to fake a conversation, we could just kind of be together riding in the cart and have little real-life conversations,” Meade says. The business talk usually waits until the 17th or 18th hole.
It’s a fitting strategy for someone who spent years chasing a pro golf career and now runs Envision Enterprises, stylized as NVZN, a company that owns and manages 10 cannabis brands in Nevada. The standout of the bunch is Bad Batch, a vape brand Meade co-owns that has taken off in the state and is now expanding beyond it.
Chasing the Dream
Meade with his low gross champion trophy from the 2023 Las Vegas Golfers Association Red Desert Cup.
Golf came into Meade’s life long before cannabis did. He was 12 when he started slipping through a neighbor’s backyard to play the course near his home, and today he describes the game as spiritual.
Sales paid the bills, whether he was selling timeshares or fashion, but golf was always the dream. Eventually, he decided to bet everything on it, quitting his timeshare job and moving to Florida to pursue a professional career full time. He made the leap after losing his twin brother, Joshua, one of the biggest believers in his game, when Meade was 27.
Over the years, Meade competed in high-level amateur events across the country, including national championships in South Carolina and a Korn Ferry Tour pro-am in Nevada, and won tournaments in Utah, Nevada and Arizona. One highlight was the U.S. Amateur Tour’s Boulder City two-man championship, which he won alongside his cousin, Jon Minkoff. At his peak, he carried a +6.3 handicap, meaning he typically played several strokes better than a scratch golfer.
The dream lasted until real life caught up with him. He had gotten married and bought a house, and golf wasn’t paying the bills.
“The dreams are only good for so long, and then sometimes you gotta go back to reality,” Meade says.
So he went back to sales, but he didn’t leave golf behind.
Building Envision
In 2020, a friend launched Sauced, a Nevada brand of live resin extracts and concentrates, and brought Meade on to help sell it. The job put him in front of dispensary buyers across the state, and he got to know many of them over rounds of golf.
When other brands began arriving in Nevada, including the Los Angeles vape brand Dabwoods, Meade started selling for them too. Before long, he stopped leaving that opportunity to anyone else. He took on every brand he could and built his own sales and marketing company, Envision.
“All these brands that needed sales or needed ins to the store
