As new retailers we expect to sacrifice our weekends and holidays, dry-clean-only clothing, and possibly our lower backs. But we do not have to sacrifice our mental health, personal relationships, or overall well-being.

When you're planning your business, you have the opportunity and obligation to carve out the boundaries that will make your business sustainable for the long term.

Your lease will run five to ten years, so it's critical that you build a "sustainable" model that will allow you to stay healthy, stay married (if you want), participate in your child's life, etc.

So how do you do this? Start with the ideal scenario. The realities of the numbers and the things outside of your co...

In our last post, we told you we're firm believers that where there's a will there's a way. But, lest you think we're starry-eyed optimists, there is a part two to this philosophy. Like the yuzu to our mayo, these seemingly opposite ideas work together to create something amazing.

That part two is our Pedal promise -

Real Talk, Always
We will always tell you the truth, even when it's hard to hear and say. You deserve to know the good, the bad, and the ugly so you can make decisions with confidence. We think that honesty is the best policy, and we're sticking to it.

If you've ever worked in a service industry, you understand the temptation to keep your customers happy by telling them what t...

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. So as a prepared parent, I ordered a “classroom” box of Ring Pop Tongue Painters for my daughter’s third grade class. Yes, I Amazoned the purchase. Yes, these “tongue painters” probably have some gross chemicals in them. Don’t judge me. Sometimes I eat Doritos, too.

These “classroom” Ring Pops come in packaging that allows you to Sharpie on each kid’s name, which I suppose makes the distribution more personal. I didn’t spend the extra $8 on the matching cards that let your kid write individual notes. Alice had to write “unique and specific” notes to each of her classmates in second grade, and it was a reeeeeeaaaaal challenge for a girl who inherited my mother-...

Regular readers of this newsletter know that opening a retail space is hard work - and running one is even harder. And yet, so many of us are determined enough to attempt it - but how can you know whether you have what you need to pull it off?

We get asked this question all the time - "I have a dream of opening a [coffee shop/ crossfit gym/ vegan steakhouse], but I don't have any [money/ experience/ connections with seitan distributors]. Can I do this?

Our answer is always the same - yes, you can!

We are big believers that where there's a will there's a way. The road may not be easy, or obvious - in fact, it rarely is. Fundraising is awkward at best, defeating at worst. Recruiting experie...

Every so often we hear from clients concerns along the lines of, "so-and-so told me that NO ONE will invest in my business until I have a signed lease."

And every time we hear that, the alarms start ringing in our brains. Here's why...

1. There are very few (if any) things in life that "NO ONE" will do. People regularly compete in hot dog eating contests. People have tigers for pets. People get married for the seventh time. You should automatically be skeptical of claims about what "everyone" or "no one" will do. Listen to what the person is telling you, but stay calm, and don't let those claims psych you out or have you thinking that there is only one way to do something. This advice appl...

A couple months ago I read The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. Did you read it too? It seems like a lot of us did.

Like most everything I encounter, there were a few elements that made me think of retail leasing. To be clear, I don’t always think of leasing per se — that would be weirdly specific — but I DO have built in “retailer vision” which I can’t seem to remove. 

Well that’s what happened with The Wager, when at one of the most suspenseful parts of the tale, my mind went to the LOI and leasing process.

If you haven’t yet read it yet, here’s the part of the story you need to know for my point to make sense:

In the late 1700s, a bunch of sti...

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), b...