This week I’ve been listening to a four-part series about the Medici on one of my favorite podcasts, The Rest is History. Anyone with a mild interest in art history is surely familiar with the Medici family from Renaissance Florence who commissioned some of the most significant artworks in western history like Donatello’s David (the scrawny one, not Michelangelo’s ripped version) and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. 

Not surprisingly, as the Medici banking business passed from grandpa Cosimo to son Piero and then to his son Lorenzo, the business acumen and attention to detail started to wane as the gout and baller-lifestyles grew. So when a feisty party-pooper friar named Girolamo Savona...

📞“Alexis, guess what?! We got the space! It’s yours!” 

That phone call was one of the highlights of my time at Pedal. It’s not often that we’re in suspense over whether we’ll “win” a deal definitively, but that’s how it went for Fedwell, Alexis Starkey’s neighborhood farm-to-table comfort food concept.

The experience was all the more amazing because of how close it came to not happening at all. Alexis’ road to finding her dream space was long, winding, and quite literally tragic at times. Nothing ever felt certain.

And yet, here I was, letting Alexis know that she’d 🥇 beaten out two established restaurant concepts for a rare second-generation space right in her own neighborhood, ...

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...

You probably already know that the cost of building out a retail space is often the single largest line item in a pre-opening budget. The fact of the matter is that there’s not a whole lot to be done about this. If you need to modify a space to suit your business, you’re going to spend some serious cash — the more dramatic the changes, the more dramatically you’ll need to dig into your wallet.

If you’re do any sort of construction work, many of the costs will be beyond your (and even your contractors’) control. Every commercial contractor is working with the same framework: labor, materials, overhead, and profit. Remember, they’re running businesses, too.

So, even though there may not be a...