Occupancy cost read against projected sales before the lease is signed.
We count who is near the site at lunch and at dinner. We walk the offices, hotels, hospitals and apartment buildings around it and ask each for its headcount, because a trade area that looks full on a map can empty after six.
The site has to answer two questions: whether it can earn its rent, and who already wins the occasion you are opening for.
Tell us what’s next.
Bring the market, the sites in play and your unit sales.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Most site decisions rest on a weekly sales number nobody tested.
By the time we hear about a site, the decision is nearly made: a lease weeks from signing, a new market already toured, or a second concept sketched on a hunch about the neighborhood. The rent, the build-out budget and the concept are already sized to the weekly sales line in the pro forma.
Your nearest units, sister brands included, are the comparables. The competitor set is shopped as a guest and laid out against the concept attribute by attribute: format, menu and bar program, footprint and check.
A lease deadline gets the headcount around the site, the forecast from your nearest units and the occupancy read against it; the rest waits. A multi-market expansion gets the whole scope, market by market, before any market is ranked.
Between site decisions your director of operations or finance lead keeps the read running on the units you already have, on the monthly and quarterly cadence we set up with them, so the next lease is judged against current numbers.
Example scope of work
Examples of what the scope can include; yours is written to the problem you bring.
The market
- Market thesis for each new market: how restaurants fail there (a wage floor, a price ceiling, a seasonal trough, no zoning), written before any site is toured.
- Price scan of the competitor set: peers grouped in tiers, with prices for the dishes and drinks guests compare, at lunch and at dinner, each one dated.
- Teardown of a competitor’s traffic driver: the offer, its days and hours, the pricing and the food anchor, ending on what transfers to your brand.
The site
- Comparable-unit forecast: each nearby unit’s week laid out day by day, then covers per seat by day, then an adjuster for the new site.
- Yardstick from your own units: dollars per seat and per square foot, split indoor and outdoor and by table type, held against the footprint on offer.
- Demand calendar around the site: nearby hotels’ convention calendars, venue show days, sports seasons and corporate moves, each carried into the forecast.
- Occupancy against a range of sales: rent, CAM and taxes as a share of projected sales, year by year, from the low case to the high, held to a norm of six to eight percent and a ceiling of ten before the LOI.
The units you run
- Daypart split by unit: lunch, brunch and dinner shares and the food and beverage mix in each, against last year, before the next site is chosen.
- Group sales compared unit to unit: event sales and space fees across your units in one market, so a market problem is told apart from a unit problem.
- Guest sentiment by unit: review-platform ratings scored on food, service, atmosphere and value, read monthly, since guest scores move before sales do.
- Quarterly competitor shops: each unit’s named set visited at the dayparts where they compete, and holiday menus and pricing checked before the season opens.
How it runs: a standing weekly call with your director of operations or finance lead, and in person for the trade-area counts and the competitor shops.
Fees are set by the scope and the value of the outcome, agreed before the work starts, with any time on site built in, never by the hour, the day or the visit.
The order of the work
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 01 | The decision and its deadline are agreed before any data is pulled |
| 02 | Your existing units are read before any new site is |
| 03 | The competitor set is chosen by the occasions you want to win |
| 04 | A go, a no, or the conditions a site must clear |
If this is what’s next, bring it.
The call works out where the work starts.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Common questions
What information do we need to bring to a market analysis?
Can’t we get this from the broker’s demographic package?
What happens if the analysis says don’t sign?
Who runs it
RANGE was founded by Jon Peck, who spent twenty years running multi-unit restaurant groups: eight brands built and scaled, twelve openings across six concepts in three years, and more than $100 million of annual P&L owned.