Are you ready for the end of year mad dash to get stores open?

I don’t care what your concept is, if you’re involved in any brick and mortar Retail Real Estate expansion, you can relate to this….

In January or February of this year, you sat down as a group and said, “We’re going to open X number of stores this year and we’re going to open them all up by November 30th so we don’t do what we did last year!). Now that the summer is halfway done, you’re looking at your Real Estate Construction spreadsheet (next post will be why are you still using Excel for this, but I digress) and you’re having your “oh #*#” moment. You have 10 more stores to open just to HIT budget and 7 of them don’t even have a fully executed leases and others aren’t even close on entitlements/permitting.

You have 3 choices:

1. Give your two weeks notice, tell your significant other it’s time for you to chase your dream of becoming a professional rodeo clown and take the family on the road.

2. Have your annual,” I promised the board we would get these stores open and we MUST hit the number” meeting. In turn, you give on a negotiating point or two, rush the GC’s to complete stores (and piss them off in turn), probably wear out one or two of your valuable employees including the one project manager who always seems to have to work on Christmas Eve because that store must get open. Then meet again the first of January and say, “2014 is the LAST year we work in December because we’re getting all our stores open by November 30, 2015 this year!”…

3. Partner with an Outsourced Team that can offload your Site Selection, Project and Construction Management. Can you put a value on a) Hitting your store opening budget, b) keeping your internal team happy and less stressed and c) proactively working to improve your processes versus always trying to put out fires on your current projects. I’m guessing if you sat down you could do that. By partnering with a firm like Centerpoint Integrated Solutions, your RE team can let us know when a lease is signed, we can handle all the site plans, permitting, entitlement, project and construction management NATIONWIDE because we’ve been doing it for years. We’ve helped clients exceed their store opening budgets, control their costs and look good for their boss (hey, let’s be real here…that’s what its all about).

So, if you’re all about Rodeo Clowns, go with #1.

If you like the constant rat race and getting your teeth kicked in weekly by Senior Management choose #2.

If you want to successfully grow your retail concept year after year, I’d say #3 is your choice.