Amber Staffa
Chief Education Officer
Amber Staffa brings an impressive hybrid of Education and Marketing experience to the BSC team. As a retired educator with a robust focus on curriculum development, Ms. Staffa has an intense knack for organizing information and formatting it for various audiences and learning styles. The natural synergies between education and marketing have carved a unique spot for her in the cannabis community.
Ms. Staffa spearheads the development of various cannabis education and training programs, many of which instruct high level professionals from other mature industries about the proper application of their skill sets to cannabis. In addition to training and on-boarding new team members, she currently assists clients with brand development, strategic planning, team and business history narratives, and other brand-specific necessities for viable licensees.
Amber graduated with a dual degree from Rowan University in New Jersey. Her early ventures included a private sector music school with a studio-wide custom curriculum, with a roster of 100+ active students. Seeking to elevate the education of the instructor community, Amber published a satellite blog with her custom resources, activities and assessments for teachers. She also published two workbooks aimed to address complex, otherwise bothersome topics in motivating formats. Amber was a member of MTNA and participated both locally and nationally at conferences and adjudication events.
Faced with the necessity to pursue something less physically taxing, she transitioned the studio into a perpetual referral program, and joined forces with another partner to brand and scale a nationwide e-commerce travel company. She led the company through a brand launch, and oversaw social media, content marketing, search advertising, SEO optimization, and trade show strategies. In pursuit of tangible IP she also developed extensive, written recruitment, on-boarding, and training systems for new planners. Re-focusing the company on groups, she grew sales 112% over 18 months, and developed a wedding-specific re-brand prior to the sale of the company in July 2017.
This marked the start of her full time participation in BSC Group, where she assisted partner Brian Staffa in transitioning a personal consulting entity into a larger branded company with a broader range of service offerings, and an esteemed collection of high level professional consultants. Amber branded out the complete BSC Group entity, and continues to manage the brand.
Citing the need for high quality, streamlined educational resources in emerging cannabis markets, Amber led BSC Group’s participation, alongside a group of three other partners, in designing and executing the New Jersey Cannabis Symposium event series. For this entity, she developed the complete brand suite, and developed cross-functional marketing strategies to execute within an aggressive timeline. The inaugural event in January was attended by nearly 800 people. Amber has since delegated most of her hands-on responsibilities to focus on BSC’s ability to continue to affect change in the industry.
Amber’s most recent projects include the design and instruction of a custom BSC Group course, “Cannabis for PhDs,” which has been paramount for enabling BSC Group to extract value from high level consultants in mature industries, outside of the cannabis space.
Areas of core interest and comprehension include:
- Brand & Consumer Psychology
- Choice Architecture
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
- Hierarchy of decision-making
- Bloom’s Taxonomy