I build the infrastructure that connects products to markets and people to purpose. Twenty-five years of B2B technical sales taught me one thing about every industry I have ever entered — from prepress color management to regulated cannabis to international market development: the architecture is always the same. Trust. Systems. And someone willing to walk in the door first.
I am that person.McGhee Consulting Group sits where cannabis industry intelligence, CRM systems architecture, and territory development converge. The operating principle is simple: the person who understands the system, the science, and the relationship is the one who opens doors that stay open.
International cannabis market consulting for clients pursuing licensing, marketing infrastructure, customer relationship management, and organizational structures in emerging regulated markets — from Africa to the Americas. The relationships that open doors and keep them open.
HubSpot Sales Hub Pro architecture. Competitive intelligence workflows. AI-assisted research pipelines. The machine that turns raw market data into targeted outreach and tracks every touchpoint from first dial to reorder.
Terpene education as a market-building tool. Bridging wellness consumers into cannabis understanding through molecular science, not strain mythology. The Terpene Journal — a practice, not a tracker.
Nine African nations have legalized commercial cannabis. The African diaspora sends $100 billion home every year, and that capital is shifting from remittance to structured investment. The terpene science and product development education these emerging markets need does not yet exist. I intend to help build it.
Every systems thinker has a lineage — a sequence of rooms walked through that taught them how to see. Mine runs from counterculture journalism through advertising through prepress technology into cannabis. The thread never changes: walk into a new industry. Learn the architecture. Build something that lasts.
Underground newspaper. Counterculture collective. Nobody owned a skill — everybody taught everybody. Open-door production, shared resources. The first operating system I ever learned.
Chicago’s first private membership disco. Nightlife met design. Music met identity. Every surface was a canvas. The intersection of experience and visual culture. Where I learned that design is communication, not decoration.
Marketing communications firm. Golden Trumpet Award, Morgan Communications. The discipline of building brand architecture for clients who needed more than a logo — they needed a story that held up under pressure.
Color management and proofing technology. G7 methodologies, GRACoL, SWOP. Workflow automation, asset management, plate-ready files. Twenty-five years teaching one lesson: complex products sell through education, not pressure.
Regulated market relationships. Sun+Earth Certified farms. Good People. Solventless concentrate pioneers. California’s regulated market taught the principle that travels: know the science, know the grower, know the buyer.
Chicago base. International cannabis consulting. CRM systems architecture. Territory development. The Terpene Journal. All of it built from the inside out.
Nine African nations have legalized commercial cannabis. Morocco expanded its licensed cultivator base from 430 to 5,000 in two years. The raw biomass is there. The terpene science is not. The product development education is not. The systems architecture to connect cultivators to markets is not.
PAPSS — the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System — is now operational across 19 countries and 150 banks. The transactional infrastructure to move product and capital across African markets is no longer theoretical. What is missing is the bridge between diaspora expertise and continental opportunity. That bridge is built by people who show up. Who understand the science. Who bring the systems. Who come home not as extractors but as builders.
At the seventh Transform Africa Summit, 42 member states gathered under one roof with a single mission: turn the entire continent into one unified digital market by 2030. One digital identity. One payment infrastructure. One innovation ecosystem spanning 1.4 billion people. Africa is not asking permission. It is writing its own digital future on its own terms.
I am in the rooms where diaspora capital, cannabis-legal markets, and wellness infrastructure converge. That is where the next decade of this industry gets shaped. And it is where I belong.
The economic argument for why this convergence matters was written by my daughter. Heather C. McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together dismantles the zero-sum myth: that progress for some must come at the expense of others. Her thesis, the Solidarity Dividend, is the intellectual architecture underneath everything happening on the continent right now. Shared infrastructure creates more prosperity than hoarded advantage. The drained pool hurts everyone. The filled pool lifts everyone. One Digital Africa is not charity. It is the Solidarity Dividend at continental scale.
Heather’s husband, Cassim Shepard, arrives at the same questions from a different door. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow trained at Harvard, MIT, and King’s College London, his life’s work is understanding how cities are actually built — not by planners and politicians alone, but by coalitions of citizens who reclaim space on their own terms. His book Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism documents exactly that. His current research, Self-Help Housing, has taken him to Lima, Mumbai, and Berlin to study how communities build shelter on their own terms, incrementally, without waiting for top-down permission. His film work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the United Nations, and the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town. He is completing a PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology. If One Digital Africa succeeds, it will be because people like Cassim have been documenting the blueprint for decades. His work is worth your time.
Limonene is limonene whether it is in a lemon, a cannabis cultivar, a doTERRA bottle, or a preparation used in traditional African medicine. The molecules do not recognize borders. Neither does the Solidarity Dividend.
Whether you are building cannabis markets on the continent, developing wellness products for diaspora communities, or looking for a consulting partner who brings systems thinking and relationship architecture to every engagement — I welcome the conversation.