Retail

By Robert Reid, principal, Corporeal Visions Inc. Every multi-unit retail and restaurant operator knows the math on a late opening. Rent starts on the commencement date whether the doors are open or not. Staff have been hired and trained against a date that is now moving. Marketing has been spent. Equipment is sitting in a warehouse accruing storage fees. A four-week slip on a single restaurant can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in carried rent, payroll and lost sales, and for a team opening several units a year, those slips compound. What separates the teams that open on time from the teams that don’t is rarely the quality of the finishes or the size of the budget. It is whether the general contractor (GC) was made to own a handful of coordination points that fall between the cracks of a typical bid. Facility and construction managers who put these items on the table before the contract is signed, and hold the GC to them through turnover, tend to open when they said they would. Demand A Written Lndlord-To-Tenant Handoff Most late openings trace back to the first week, not the last. A tenant build-out starts on the assumption …