How long should it take from signing your lease to your soft or grand opening?
There are a number of important elements to be considered, which will dictate how long it will take for you to open.
You
The first thing is you and your preparedness. Do you have everything in place before you sign your lease?
This would include menu and menu costing, vendors, logo and visual design elements. We would strongly recommend you have all of these elements in place before you sign the lease. This means you can focus your attention on getting the ball rolling on the development of the physical space, choosing an architect and a contractor, etc.
Responsiveness of other people
Here we are talking about the responsiveness of people you will be working with. Your landlord, the contractor, the city you live in.
Landlord
Be aware that negotiating the lease with your landlord can take up to a month in some cases.
Architect
How long will it take them to draw up the plans? Make sure you ask them for a time estimate when you are interviewing them. How big is the team around them, and how long will it take for amendments to be made?
Contractor
Timings can vary dramatically depending on the size of their team. They might have a lot of sub-contractors and other people in their team which would mean quicker time-frames. Again make sure to ask the right questions when you are interviewing them to get a gauge how quickly they would be able to carry out the work.
Get references from the contractor and ask them ‘did the job finish on time and did they stay within budget’ – these are the two most important factors to find out.
Some contractors will come on site and tell you it will take 2 months to complete the job, however they might just be saying this to win the job.
Be sure to ask the following questions:
How many people will be committed to working on site each day?
How long will each phase of the project take?
Get their response in writing so you can refer to this in the future if they do not follow through with what they have promised.
The city you live in
The time frame for this can really vary by city, but generally larger cities will take longer to process plans than say a more suburban area or a smaller town or city. This process really is out of your hands and it is something you will need to be patient with, it can take anywhere from a week to month depending on where you live. If you are lucky, your architect may have a relationship with whoever is reviewing the plans which could help to speed things up!
So let’s get to the juicy bit (excuse the pun), how long it will actually take – that’s what you really wanna know!
Generally, for clients we have helped, we can get this process down to 4 months and on average we would say it should be taking 4-6 months. We have seen people take up to a year to open their business however these have been much larger projects.
If you feel you need help with any aspect of starting your Juice Bar, through from planning to opening, and beyond, reach out to us.