Bricks in the Wall - Read your lease before you sign!

Reading this post could easily save you thousands of dollars.

When an entrepreneur conceives of their new business there is a boat load to consider. Product, market, budgets, financing, employees, insurance, store location, product inventory, and on and on and on.

Just for a moment let's assume that once you settle on a store location everything else is ready to go. So if you found the location tomorrow and had it ready to open the next day...how will consumers find you? Think about that. Yes, the business may have a website and a facebook page, but what about passers by? The answer is obvious, you'll need a store front sign.

Here is the part that could save you thousands of dollars...

We've agreed that we'll need a store front sign, so how to save big bucks on said sign....first and foremost DO NOT SIGN A LEASE WITHOUT READING IT CAREFULLY!!!! This may seem like a very obvious statement, but you'd be surprised at how many folks don't. Here is why this is so important: a building owner may have written into the lease certain sign type requirements. They may have limitations too, but limitations won't COST you thousands...requirements might.

For example, there is a strip plaza in our beautiful town of Wooster, Ohio where the building owner requires their tenants to purchase and have installed what are called Channel Letters. These types of signs do look very nice, but they are also expensive and are often charged by the letter. One new tenant in this strip came to us for a sign and was shocked to find out that her sign was going to cost $8,000. She had not read the lease carefully before signing it and didn't realize that Channel Letters were required. What she was forced to do was to abbreviate her store name. This example is several years in the past and unfortunately her store is no longer in business.