Matchmaking works best when you know yourself first 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩

I watched a lot of Millionaire Matchmaker in my 20s, and I find myself thinking about the show even today. I KNOW that Patti Stanger turned out to be totally problematic in a zillion different ways, but since we didn’t get cancelled when Sheila published an excellent newsletter about Anne Hathaway’s age-defying face, I’m feeling emboldened.

On the show, Patti and her team of punk rock assistants would work with a client - usually an older “millionaire” seeking a young woman to ride shotgun in his red Ferrari. Ick. Patti would usually deliver said women - but that’s not where she’d start. No, first we’d start with an amusing romp through the man’s dating history, trying to detangle what’s gone wrong in the past, and what he’s looking for in a life partner.

The man is often resistant - sometimes outright hostile - to this probing from Patti and the team. He came to the show to meet babes, not talk about his attachment issues, dammit! But time and again, he’d come to realize that the reason his past relationships haven’t been successful isn’t because he picked the wrong woman. It was because he didn’t really know what he needed or wanted, so he didn’t know how to seek that out in a partner, or draw it out in a partner he already had.

Maybe I should leave Patti Stanger in the early 2010s like everybody else, but I just can’t. I think of her so often when I’m helping new retailers choose retail spaces. While Pedal Retailers don’t hire us in pursuit of mating partners, our process of matching retailer and space is not so different from Patti’s - a retailer needs to know their business needs before they can identify a space that suits them.

That’s why we always start by identifying a new retailer’s budget, location, timeline and space criteria - if these four critical elements aren’t clear from the outset, we have no way of knowing when we’ve found “the one.”

Even more importantly, we don’t know what we should be negotiating when we trade paper, or when we’ve got a deal that works. Signing a lease is WAY too big a commitment to make off vibes alone.

Some people date around for fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that - but Pedal Retailers don’t shop for retail spaces for entertainment. We go in with a laser focus on finding the right spaces and negotiating the best deal so we can stop looking and open up shop. The only sure way to lease a space that’s really going to work is to do the hard work of figuring out your business wants and needs before you get out there and start looking.

Just like Patti Stanger taught us.