I’ll say it – everyone loves to hate lawyers. They’re right up there with telemarketers and politicians on the list of most maligned professionals, and when you’re scraping together the cash to fund your Capital Budget, legal fees get a lot of scrutiny. And we get it – every dollar counts!

You cannot forgo an attorney for your lease. This has been the subject of numerous other newsletters, and it’s a requirement in our First Location Program. (Don’t believe me? Reply to this email and we’ll happily tell you why.)

You CAN manage your legal fees, but here’s the thing - most people actually do it wrong and end up i) spending more, ii) getting a worse lease, or iii) both. In many situati...

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...

Let’s talk about landlords.

Often when we start considering retail spaces, Pedal Retailers express some version of this concern about large, corporate landlords: won’t they try to take advantage of us as a small business?

The image in their minds is that corporate landlords are like this:

While individual or mom-and-pop landlords are like this:

But having worked on more deals than any human should, we know that in many cases, the big corporate landlords can actually be like this:

And that mom-and-pop landlords can also be like this:

It makes total sense for small retailers (especially those navigating brick-and-mortar for the first time) to assume that corporate landlo...

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...

Our society is so polarized that we can disagree on some of the most fundamental topics, like whether The Righteous Gemstones is a genius work of art (it is), or whether life is worth living without cheese (it is not).

Still, there are a few baseline things we can all agree on:

No one wants to be taken advantage of

Everyone likes a good deal

In retail real estate, your best safeguard against #1 is to use a reputable retail real estate broker. But #2 is tricky, because when it comes to brick-and-mortar business, your “good deal” is almost certainly not my “good deal”.

Your broker’s job is to ensure that the deal you’re considering is within the realm of normal for your m...

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 go...

You don’t need to read your lease. You just need to know what it says.

I had lunch recently with a veteran commercial insurance broker. She works for pretty large independent agency in my area, and she’s an insurance woman like I’m a retailer — born into the business and steeped in years of first-hand experience. She insures small businesses — all types of insurance and all types of businesses (shocker: scrap yards are dangerous!), and she admitted that restaurants and bars are her favorite businesses to insure...but mostly because it’s more fun to meet a client there than in a scrap yard.

Anyhoo, our conversation turned to leases (as most of my conversations do), and she spoke the...