Retail Store Buildouts: The Punch List
A punch list is your final quality control checkpoint before opening your store. It’s a list of unfinished work, defects, or minor issues that need to be corrected before the project is fully complete. But here’s the reality: There will always be imperfections. The key is knowing what must be fixed now and what can…...
Managing Store Buildout Timelines & Budgets
How to Keep Your Store’s 10-12 Week Construction Schedule On Time & On Budget Retail store construction typically runs 10-12 weeks from lease signing to grand opening. Delays are common, but preventable—the key is clear milestones, tight coordination, and strong project management. Here’s a week-by-week breakdown of a typical retail store construction timeline, plus tips…...
Value Engineering a Store Buildout
Building out a retail store is expensive, but not every dollar is equally important. Value engineering is the art of cutting costs without sacrificing functionality, customer experience, or brand integrity. Here’s how to strategically reduce expenses across construction, millwork, and key materials—while still opening a beautiful, high-performing store. 1️⃣ Understand Where the Money Goes Before…...
Store Design: The Employee Experience
Most brands obsess over customer experience when designing a store—but what about your employees? A well-designed store makes it easier to work, sell, and stay productive, which leads to happier employees, lower turnover, and better sales. Here’s how to map out your store’s design with employee experience at the core. 1️⃣ Start with the Employee…...
How to Negotiate a Retail Lease
How to Negotiate a Retail Lease Negotiating a lease is one of the most high-stakes parts of opening a store—once you sign, you’re locked into years of rent, maintenance responsibilities, and legal obligations. Getting it wrong can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the term of the lease. Here’s how to approach lease…...
The RFP Process: Requests for Proposals
Construction projects are complex and expensive. So it should come as no surprise that many new-to-retail project managers make (expensive) mistakes. Buildouts should have 2 success criteria: And one of the easiest ways to ensure success by those two metrics is by picking the best vendor. A well-structured RFP ensures accurate pricing, clear expectations, and…...
Kicking off real estate searches
When you kick off conversations with brokers, it’ll save you a bunch of time while impressing counterparts if you prepare a few things. We recommend putting together a folder drive that includes the following: ✅ Corporate Financials: for the entity that will sign the leases. This should clearly illustrate your profitability, cash balances, and liabilities…....
How to prepare for design kickoffs
As you launch a store for the first time, getting ahead of design thinking is critical to maintaining your vision, budget, and timelines. As with any other vendor, it’d behoove you to have a perspective before talking to one (unless you’re reaching out to actually generate those perspectives. Often times, they will try to bill…...
Identifying target trade areas
This step takes you from identifying which market you should prioritize, to identifying where within the market you should target. You can leave this up to your broker, but it’s highly recommended to have your own data-driven perspective to guide the broker and avoid the mistakes outlined above. Here’s how to do it: 1️⃣ Open…...
Retail Chart of Accounts
When opening retail stores, it’s likely that you’ll need to update your chart of accounts for things that are unique to brick and mortar retail. You may not need all of these, but it’s better to have zero-balance lines than to wish you had them years ago for addition visibility. Retail-Specific Chart of Accounts Additions…...
Game Theory & CRE
Game theory has always intrigued me since learning about it in the context of economics and business. And I’ve always felt the problem with information asymmetry and opacity in CRE felt like a game theory dilemma, but I’ve struggled to put it into words. So naturally I asked ChatGPT to confirm/counter my hunch and, if…...
A Map for NYC’s Neighborhoods
Defining NYC neighborhoods is akin to defining cocktails: everyone has a different definition. There are lots of maps out there, with some motivations being that brokers and landlords want to classify their locations in a higher rent neighborhood (so they can charge those higher rents). While there’s no right or wrong answer, you should definitely…...
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