The efforts by the industry in Florida are worthy of praise. However it’s wise to stop short of claiming a victory unless we have an understanding of how to use it.

We never doubted a win in Florida, it was doubtful whether or not an effort would be made to engage the consumers, or to provide any long term stability to fundraising, usually at the expense of market confidence and how to mitigate that.

It’s easy to hit the gong of fear and raise a few million dollars and pat yourselves on the back. It’s much more difficult to do that again, and again, and again. Each time this is done, factional rifts increase while reputations and credibility are diminished. Market confidence is slower to recover.

Now the heads are back in the warm Florida sand, without having actually established anything but a front to be assaulted next session.

This is where a home run can turn into an end run.

A home run would have been working for an activation campaign at brick and mortars for consumer vestment and to build out stable fundraising for long term strategy. This was presented and then hastily rejected in the typical fear based fervor we’ve all become accustomed to.

An end run is raising funds, depleting them, and being back at square one in a year or less running the same sky is falling fundraisers. This doesn’t provide stability, and is far from a home run to write home about. It is a temporary win, and one that goes around the actual problem at hand, but it is a win nonetheless.

This is the problem with Trade Organizations generally. They are purely reactionary, celebrate far too early. They diminish the roles of the consumers they rely on without lifting a finger to vest them. Typically excluding of anyone that sees beyond the fog of war, ultimately exhausting their own funds that are finite in nature.

Proof of this exhaustion would be to try and raise another few million tomorrow because it’ll be needed for next session, so best to start now.

Kudos to all who were involved, try not to let it go to waste.