The three little pigs and their leases 🐷

Recently, a Pedal Retailer who is very close to lease execution said they were taken aback by how long, involved and challenging the whole process has been. They’d heard it many times before they started (from us and from others), but still it was somehow way more…well, everything…than they expected.

As is my modus operandi, I scanned my brain for the most apt metaphor, and since my home office looks straight into an eight-year-old’s hot mess of a bedroom, guess what metaphor popped up?

The Three Little Pigs 🐷

If you recall, The Three Little Pigs is a fable — a short story meant to teach us an important moral. Ostensibly the story is about working hard (the pigs) and greed (the wolf), but I think it’s about retail leasing. Obviously.

The first pig builds a house out of straw 🌾. Some say he’s lazy, but let’s assume he’s just really, really eager to start living in his own house. So he looks around his immediate vicinity and sees a bunch of readily available straw, and he thinks, “Great - I can build a house out of this stuff. Done.”

This Little Pig just called a “for lease” sign and signed an LOI and lease because he was just SO. DAMN. EAGER. No information. No planning. No negotiating.

Now this guy’s brother, the second Little Pig, was a little more circumspect. He wanted to build something that had some stability to it, so he went out farther into the woods and found some very strong and sturdy-looking sticks 🪵. So much more stable than straw, duh.

This Little Pig looked at multiple spaces to lease, but beyond the asking rent, he didn’t negotiate the LOI (because he didn’t know what any of the terms meant), and he didn’t engage an attorney to review the lease, because that was expensive, and he hated attorneys ever since his divorce 😬.

Now the third Little Pig (who was probably their sister), was like, yeah…if I’m going to spend my time building a house, and if I need to be safe and comfortable in it, I’m going to do it the right way. So she got a term loan from the bank and bought a bunch of bricks. She did have to wait a few weeks for them to arrive because of supply chain issues, but when they did, they were nice and heavy. She also decided to hire an architect and contractor, and while that took more time and money, she was confident that she was getting a solid house.

This Little Pig navigated the leasing process like a pro. She planned properly, she engaged experts, and she was strong in her negotiations because she knew what she needed.

Enter The Big Bad Wolf 🐺

Now, The Big Bad Wolf is always lurking around the woods, because that’s all he knows to do. He’s messing up people's plans, eating people’s grandmas, and generally just keeping everyone scared and anxious all the time.

In our version of the story, The Big Bad Wolf is just normal retail life: unpredictable economic events, competitors moving in down the block, changing customer preferences, you know, the usual.

So Big Bad goes to the first Little Piggy’s straw house and huffs and puffs and…you know it…blows the house down. Since poor Piggy never made a business plan with financial projections and didn’t negotiate his lease to ensure a secure occupancy cost, his business never hit the revenues he needed to pay his rent when his sales didn’t grow as expected.

Now second Little Piggy’s in slightly better shape, but since he never read the Repair & Maintenance section of his lease and didn’t have an attorney to flag it and negotiate it, when Big Bad blew Piggy’s HVAC system down, he wasn’t prepared to foot the $25,000 bill to replace the unit, and he had to shut down 😱.

Finally Big Bad went to the third Little Piggy’s house, and it was looking really inviting since Piggy painted the exterior and got some lovely new awnings. But our wolf didn’t give a flying fig about effective branding, and he huffed and puffed and huffed and puffed, and while he was certainly making a disturbing racket outside, it didn’t really bother Piggy’s staff and customers too much.

Of course old wolfy came back every so often, and third Little Piggy definitely had some moments of stress (especially when she had to fire her brothers for sleeping on the job after she generously hired them after their own plans fell apart), but she was secure in her home of bricks 🧱. And when she decided that it was time to retire in Cabo, that Assignment/Sublet clause she had negotiated made it pretty smooth to hand over the keys to someone else.

So the moral of the story is slightly more nuanced than the original, but such is life. It takes more effort, more time, more money, and more perseverance to build a house of bricks, but if you need to live somewhere where wolves try to eat you on the regular, it’s all going to be worth it in the end.

Also, don’t hire your lazy brothers even if you feel bad for them.

The End.