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Finance chief Roy Cysner and CEO Paul Yau aim to grow their luxury cannabis brand, The Travel Agency, in a complex regulatory environment with limited access to traditional credit.
As legal cannabis retailers compete for customers in New York City, leaders at luxury recreational cannabis dispensary The Travel Agency say building a brand in the industry requires careful financial discipline as much as retail vision.
That dynamic is reflected in the company’s leadership structure. CEO and co-founder Paul Yau is himself a former CFO who spent much of his career in private equity, venture investing and other corporate finance roles before launching the company. Today he works closely with CFO Roy Cysner, whose background spans accounting and finance leadership positions at companies including Warby Parker, Gympass and BuzzFeed.
Together, they say their complementary finance backgrounds shape how the company approaches expansion, operations and strategy as the cannabis market continues to evolve.
In conversations with CFO.com, Yau and Cysner described how their shared fluency in finance influences the way they built and run The Travel Agency, now with several locations across Manhattan and Brooklyn. While the company operates in a heavily regulated industry with limited access to traditional financial infrastructure, both executives say the partnership between CEO and CFO has helped guide decisions ranging from store expansion and hiring to inventory management and supplier relationships.
Yau said his background in finance played a direct role in how the company initially approached its leadership structure. In the earliest days of the business, when the company operated a single store, the founders handled most strategic financial responsibilities themselves while relying on a controller to oversee the accounting function.
“When we initially founded the company, we had one store, so the most senior person in the accounting team was a controller,” Yau said. “The controller handled the accounting and controlling work, and anything involving FP&A, capital raising or more complex financial work, my co-founder Adam [Semler] and I handled ourselves.”
Both Yau and Semler previously held CFO roles, which meant the company’s early finance leadership came directly from the founding team. “I’m a former CFO, and my other co-founder is a former CFO as well. So Roy’s got two of us,” Yau said.
As the company expanded beyond its first location, the complexity of its finances increased quickly. Each store operates through its own legal entity, which means the volume of accounting work and financial oversight grew alongside the business. That shift ultimately pushed the founders to bring in a dedicated finance leader.
“As we scaled to two stores, three stores, four stores, the bulk of the volume of accounting increased materially,” Yau said. “At that point, we had to build out the accounting team, and eventually it became clear that we needed a CFO.”
Yau said his goal when hiring a CFO was to complement the strengths he and his co-founder already brought to the business. Much of his career focused on the dealmaking parts of corporate finance, which shaped how he approached financial strategy.
“I think most CFOs fall into two buckets,” Yau said. “You have CFOs who come from a core accounting and controllership background, and you have CFOs who come from more of a dealmaking background, like capital raising and private equity.” Yau placed himself firmly in the latter category.
“What I wanted was someone who was rock solid on the controlling, cash management and controls side of the business.”
For Cysner, working with a CEO who has finance experience has created a different dynamic than he encountered in many earlier roles. In previous companies, he often partnered with founders whose strengths lay in product development, marketing or creative strategy, which sometimes made financial discussions more complicated when operational realities clashed with a founder’s vision.
“I’ve worked with founders that are brilliant but creative folks,” Cysner said. “People who are very comfortable visualizing how a business should look, but a lot of the information I provide can sometimes be difficult feedback.” Those conversations, he added, can become especially challenging in early-stage companies where founders remain optimistic about the long-term potential of the business.
“All founders are sitting there hoping they have a path that looks like [Mark] Zuckerberg at Facebook,” Cysner said. “They will act like they are just building their thing and they don’t have to worry about anything else.” He said working with a CEO who understands finance changes the tone of those conversations.
“With Paul, it’s nice because he gets it,” Cysner said. “It makes our discussions very easy when we talk about strategic decisions, whether it’s investing in the business, partnerships with suppliers, hiring or marketing.”
Yau said the structure of the company today places the finance function fully under Cysner’s leadership, allowing the finance team to take responsibility for everything from accounting to planning and operational analysis.
“All of the finance function is delegated to Roy and his team,” Yau said. “They do everything now. I’m just the recipient of the output of their work.”
The finance team currently consists of four people handling accounting, financial planning and operational finance responsibilities across the company’s stores. That work extends well beyond traditional accounting functions and increasingly intersects with the day-to-day operations of the retail business.
“The whole team does the full stack of finance and accounting work,” Yau said. “They do the FP&A, they do everything now.”
Cysner said the partnership works largely because both executives approach financial discussions with similar expectations around transparency and accountability. “I’m a really upfront, transparent person and CFO,” he said. “Paul can absorb and digest all the information I provide, good or bad, and react to it in a way where I still have the freedom I need to completely own the finance organization.”
As The Travel Agency expands across New York City, financial analysis plays a central role in evaluating store performance and guiding operational decisions. Cysner said the company monitors store-level results closely, reviewing performance each week to identify trends in sales, inventory and customer behavior.
“We look at our business on a weekly basis,” he said. “On Monday, it’s very clear how each one of our stores has performed [over the week] and what the trends look like.”
Inventory management remains a particularly important operational consideration for a cannabis retailer operating in a fast-moving and still-developing market. The company generally aims to maintain roughly two and a half weeks of inventory across its locations, a level Cysner said allows the business to stay flexible without tying up excessive capital in product.
“A lot of times it’s cash on delivery. They bring the product, you provide the payment and then they deliver it.”
-Roy Cysner
The Travel Agency
Managing that inventory also requires careful working capital planning because cannabis businesses still face limited access to traditional credit due to federal scheduling of cannabis and tax rules under Section 280E. Unlike many retail sectors, where companies can rely on revolving credit facilities or supplier financing, cannabis operators often must rely primarily on cash.
Instead, many suppliers operate with strict payment timelines or cash-on-delivery arrangements. While some vendors offer limited flexibility, the broader lack of credit options means companies must manage liquidity carefully as they scale.
“What you generally see in the industry is terms with suppliers,” Cysner said, hinting that larger suppliers usually offer better terms. “A lot of times it’s cash on delivery. They bring the product, you provide the payment and then they deliver it.”
That dynamic makes inventory discipline particularly important as the company grows. When evaluating the early performance of a new store, the finance team focuses on metrics that provide early signals about how quickly a location is gaining traction in its neighborhood.
“The two biggest things are going to be traffic and basket size,” Cysner said.
Those metrics have shifted as the New York cannabis market has matured. Early locations opened into a market with relatively few competitors, allowing stores to build momentum quickly. As more dispensaries open across the city, however, the ramp-up period for new locations has grown longer.
“If you know how to approach it, regulation can be your friend… if you know how to leverage the barriers to entry, you can actually create a bit of a moat.”
-Paul Yau
CEO, The Travel Agency
For Yau, the scale and visibility of New York City remain central to the company’s strategy. The city’s global prominence creates an environment where building a retail brand can have ripple effects far beyond the immediate neighborhood where a store operates.
“The beauty of New York City is it’s the epicenter of the world,” Yau said. “People come to New York to build brands.” That dynamic shaped the company’s decision to expand aggressively within the city as legalization unfolded. “We always knew there was an opportunity to build a business in New York,” Yau added. “We were fortunate enough to be one of the first to go.”
Despite the complexity of operating in a heavily regulated industry that is ripe for change, Yau said regulation itself can sometimes create advantages for companies that understand how to navigate it. Drawing on his experience investing in regulated infrastructure sectors earlier in his career, he said the key is understanding how regulatory frameworks can shape competitive dynamics.
“If you know how to approach it, regulation can be your friend,” Yau said. “If you know how to leverage the barriers to entry, you can actually create a bit of a moat.”
For The Travel Agency’s leadership team, that approach continues to shape how finance and strategy intersect as the company grows in one of the country’s most closely watched cannabis markets.
“We just work very closely together,” Cysner said. “We talk often, sometimes weekly, sometimes more, depending on what’s happening. It works.”
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