They are a New England-based land use lawyer, an athlete-turned-gym sock entrepreneur, and a marijuana grower. Now, they are budding marijuana entrepreneurs with one store open and two more on the way.

Josh Silver, Brendan McKee and Josh Ferranto, the owners of Silver Therapeutics, are unusual in the landscape of Massachusetts’ marijuana businesses. They have no agreements with any multi-state conglomerate and no major investors outside of themselves, their friends and family.

They have opened one recreational marijuana store in a Williamstown strip mall, and plan to use the profits to open two more stores, one with an educational campus. They are also planning to build a grow facility so they can sell to the medical marijuana market.

They are functioning as a start-up, run by the three partners. Their experience provides some insight into the lure, and the challenges, of opening a marijuana business in Massachusetts.

“We’ve all made a lot of sacrifices.” McKee said, listing weight gain, time, social life, and health. “I work every day all day to make this work. I know these guys do, too.”

Silver Therapeutics was the brainchild of Silver, a lawyer living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Silver, 38, became familiar with the marijuana scene as a college student in Colorado. When Massachusetts legalized recreational marijuana, he became interested in getting into the industry, and started reading the regulations. He reached out to a family friend, retired investment banker Billy Bischoff, to help with the fundraising. “I said this is happening 20 miles from here, let’s do it,” Silver recalled.

Tragically, three months after they started discussing their plans, Bischoff died in a car crash.

“It definitely left me reeling,” Silver said.

Before he died, Bischoff had introduced Silver to McKee, and the two of them decided to go ahead with the business.

McKee, 35, a Hull native living in Quincy, has a background in business and sports. He played football at Amherst College, then played in a professional European football league, for the Austrian-based Danube Dragons. He helped found a nonprofit, Innercity Weightlifting, that mentors kids at gyms in Dorchester and Cambridge, teaching them to be personal trainers. He helped found Pedestal Footwear, a company that makes gym socks.

McKee used marijuana to help him sleep and relax while he was playing football in college, and has since used medical marijuana to help him get through a divorce and deal with what he calls “head issues,” like depression and anxiety. He had a medical marijuana card in Massachusetts and was interested in getting into the marijuana industry.

The third member of the trio, Ferranto, 45, grew up in Brookline and was a medical marijuana grower in Maine, with a background in real estate development, who met McKee through a mutual friend.

“I’d been looking for an opportunity in Massachusetts. Most people I spoke to, their ideas sounded half-baked,” Ferranto said. “Brendan and I had some conversations; I thought, this has some legs.”

The three are equal partners, though Silver is officially chief executive officer, Ferranto is chief operating officer and McKee chief financial officer.

They pooled their money and raised money from friends and family. No other business partner has more than a 2% stake the company.

They did much of the work themselves. Silver does the legal and licensing work, Ferranto takes the lead on real estate and McKee manages the business side.

They identified the Berkshire County community of Williamstown early on as a community with available property, where town officials would be friendly to marijuana businesses.

They applied for and received priority in the state licensing process as a medical marijuana dispensary, but are starting out selling only recreational marijuana.

The state’s medical marijuana laws require that a dispensary grow its own marijuana, and the group is relying on the profits from selling recreational marijuana products — purchased wholesale from other growers and manufacturers — to earn the money needed to build their own cultivation facility. They plan to get into the medical market eventually.

They say their success in Williamstown has given them access to more potential investors.

“We’re not backed by big financial institutions,” Silver said. “We don’t have rich aunts that fund us. I read the regulations, and it felt like the dispensary model was the low hanging fruit, the thing we could achieve with the least amount of capital. It felt achievable. It also felt like a way into the industry.”

The partners note that opening a marijuana business is like any other start-up, but it has additional barriers other companies don’t have. Finding a bank took six months because federal law that considers marijuana illegal makes it hard for banks to accept marijuana money.

In April, they opened Silver Therapeutics’ first store, on Williamstown’s Main Street. They were only the second stand-alone recreational marijuana store, not tied to an existing medical marijuana dispensary, to open in the state. Out of a storefront in a strip mall, they sell flower, pre-roll joints, concentrates, edibles, topicals and tinctures, bought from around 15 different Massachusetts-licensed companies. They employ around 20 people.

They plan to open a second store in a South Main Street shopping plaza in Orange this winter. They hope to eventually build a grow facility at an Orange warehouse.

They are also working on opening a business in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston called “City Farm,” which they envision as an educational campus that will include cultivation, retail and a kitchen for manufacturing. They are still working on getting permits from Boston, after which they will start the state licensing process.

“We hope to be a real destination, where people can come see actual cannabis growing,” Ferranto said. “And we want to pull people from the community to learn cannabis jobs.”

The managers of City Farm will be Leah and Sieh Samura, a Roslindale couple that developed a cannabis-based personal lubricant, through an incubator program at marijuana company Sira Naturals, and are now partnering with Silver Therapeutics.

“We’re looking to share our experience with others to encourage a more equitable market, to encourage other people to get into the benefits of legal cannabis,” Sieh Samura said.

Leah Samura was raised in Dorchester and worked with Roxbury nonprofits in technology training. Sieh Samura is an Iraq war veteran who attended Roxbury Community College and Fitchburg State University, then worked as a park ranger and mental health counselor. They used to run a private cannabis club. Both are black.

The Samuras said their goal is to train Boston area residents to get jobs in the burgeoning cannabis industry, whether as entrepreneurs, product manufacturers or as an employee in retail or cultivation.

“You’re talking about having a local equitable industry, how do you get the people in our neighborhoods into the business?” Leah Samura said. “You have to bring the business to them, and ... that’s what we’re doing.”