THE COFFEE EMPORIUM · QUEENSLAND EXPANSION · SITE VISIT CARD
Site visit card
The question you are answering is not “does the rent work?” —
it is what has to be true for this to work, and is it? Front: what to collect standing in
the centre. Back: where each answer is entered, and in what order.
Two sides. Print it double-sided, or keep it on your phone.
Before you go
Open the calculator and pick the site — or New site if it is not on the list yet
Write down what is known and what is assumed — before you see the place
Standing in the centre
Count the door. One peak hour, one quiet hour, same day.
People past the door, and people in
Walk the distances — each anchor, the food court, the car park entry
What trades either side, and what is vacant on that arm
Nearest coffee, and how far
Photos: directory map with an X on it, the shopfront,
the sightline 20m each way
Ask centre management
Previous operators — dates, turnover, how each one ended
Centre foot traffic — the figure and how it is measured
Redevelopment, re-merchandising, tenancy moves — with dates
Lease expiries nearby
What they will actually do: contribution, rent-free, term
The lease facts
Area · base rent · gross or net · outgoings
Term and options
Percentage rent — and whether it is “greater of”
Review basis — fixed % or CPI
Turnkey or fit-out, and who owns the fit
The four numbers that decide it
Turnover = customers a day × average sale.
Never a typed lump.
Occupancy = rent ÷ net sales.
Band it by centre class, not the national café average.
The floor = what it costs to employ someone to do the owner's rostered shifts.
The buffer = how big a sales miss it survives.
Three rules
Read year three, not year one.Year one is flattered by every concession a landlord finds easy to give.
Evidence beats arithmetic.No green without a door count or a trading history behind the turnover.
If the shortfall is bigger than the whole rent, it is a turnover problem.No lease term fixes that one.
Never
Never let turnover rise without the roster rising
Never treat a centre-wide visitor figure as a door count
Never send the tracker, the capture log, or the Economics Annex
Where this card fits
Four things decide a site. Only one of them is a spreadsheet, and most of what is
written on the front of this card is typed into the calculator — not into the profile.
1 · The place
This card
Position, sightlines, what trades either side, what happened to the operators
before. Obtainable only by standing here and asking.
2 · The terms
The landlord
Rent, contribution, term, reviews, handover date. Obtainable only by negotiating.
Until they exist, every figure in the model is a placeholder.
3 · The consequence
The calculator
What 1 and 2 mean in money. Downstream of both. Run before the visit it
models assumptions; run after, it models facts.
4 · The appetite
The group
What exposure Emporium will carry and at what turnover it stops. No tool produces
this — it is the decision panel in the profile.
What you write down, and where it goes
These are calculator fields, not profile fields. Enter them first; the profile
picks the figures up afterwards.
What you counted or were told
Where it is entered
People past the door, a day
7 · TRAFFIC → Or counted, a day
Of those, the share who came in
7 · TRAFFIC → Of those, buy %
Centre visits a year, and the share on this arm
7 · TRAFFIC → Centre visits · On this arm %
What a previous operator last turned over
7 · TRAFFIC → What it last did
Area · seats · centre classification
1 · THE STORE
Base rent · gross or net · outgoings · term · reviews · percentage rent
3 · THE LEASE
Rent-free weeks · landlord contribution
3 · THE LEASE · 4 · THE DEAL
When they can hand it over
3 · THE LEASE → Site available from
The four traffic lines are the ones that matter most: a
turnover with a count or a trading history behind it can reach green. A typed one is capped at
amber however good the arithmetic looks.
The order of work
Rough the numbers first, on placeholder terms. It costs ten minutes.
Kill anything that is dead at every turnover before you drive there.
Visit what survives. Count the door. Ask centre management the four history questions.
Enter what you counted and what you were told, and re-read the gate.
Press Send to the site profile. The figures, the colour and the first draft of the
questions cross over.
Write what only you can write — the position, the history, what has changed — and
add the questions a model would never think to ask.
The calculator can tell you a site fails. It cannot tell you a site works.
If the shortfall is bigger than the whole rent, no door count rescues it — a red on
plausible terms holds without a visit. A green or an amber does not: those are exactly the
sites this card exists for.
Site visit cardCard → calculator → site profile → covering email