Plain writing on what actually moves a project.

Most franchise tenants commit to a service number on the LOI with no way to know if it's actually enough for their build. Plans aren't drafted yet. Equipment schedules don't exist. The rooftop unit your concept eventually needs may carry a load nobody has put in front of you. By the time the real numbers come together, the lease is signed, and any upgrade is on you.

Here's the arithmetic nobody runs at the LOI stage: a restaurant kitchen typically needs 300 to 400 amps of three-phase service once the ovens, walk-in, makeline, and HVAC stack up. A typical strip-retail shell delivers 100 to 200. That gap is a five-figure upgrade. And if the utility has to bring new service, the lead time runs twelve to twenty weeks. That's not a construction problem. That's an opening date problem, discovered too late to fix cheap.

I identify these concerns at LOI time and surface them while you still have leverage. When the conversation turns technical, I take the meeting with the landlord directly, and the tone changes once it's clear someone on the tenant side speaks the language. Upgrades can carry real cost, but they're often resolvable, often negotiable, while the lease is still ink on a screen instead of ink on paper.

And here's the argument most tenants never get to make: a service upgrade outlives your lease. It's a building improvement the landlord keeps long after you're gone, which is exactly the case for splitting the cost or pushing it across the table entirely. Miss the moment and that argument is gone. The upgrade becomes your line item, full price, on a building you don't own.

A restaurant kitchen needs a hood, and the hood needs ductwork that reaches the roof. That sentence sounds obvious until you're standing in a former video store, a former dollar store, a former bank branch (the conversion shells where franchise deals actually happen) and you realize nothing above that ceiling was ever built to carry grease duct.

Kitchen exhaust can't run horizontally for any meaningful distance without becoming non-compliant and expensive. So the question is brutally simple: is there a clean vertical path from where the cookline wants to be, up through the structure, to a roof penetration the landlord will actually allow? Some landlords require their own roofer for every penetration to protect the roof warranty. Some prohibit new penetrations outright. Nobody volunteers this at a showing.

I run this down before anyone falls in love with a site. It starts with an extensive review of whatever existing plans and as-builts the landlord can produce, read the way someone who has built from drawings reads them, not taken at face value. Then a directed photo investigation: I tell the broker or the franchisee exactly what to shoot above the grid, and I read what comes back the way someone who has hung duct reads it. Then a survey scope built around what the plans and photos can't settle: joist depths, duct routing, the distance from cookline to roof, the landlord's penetration policy in writing. It takes a few days. Compare that to finding out after design, when relocating a cookline reworks the plumbing under the slab and the equipment layout with it.

Old drawings lie. A thirty-year-old strip center has been five different businesses, and every one of them moved walls. The structure never moved. Somewhere in that history, a load-bearing post got buried inside a partition, a beam got boxed into a soffit, and the as-builts the landlord hands you have no idea. The floor plan everyone is about to design from is a work of fiction, and nobody knows it yet.

Here's how that plays out when nobody checks. The layout gets designed, the drawings get stamped, the permit gets issued, the GC mobilizes. Then demo day: the wall comes down and there's a post standing in the middle of your kitchen that isn't going anywhere. Now the plan goes back to the architect, the layout gets redrawn around structure nobody planned for, the equipment package gets re-worked, and the revised set goes back to the city for review. Weeks gone. Real money gone. And it was all sitting there, findable, before anyone drew a line.

My counter is simple and it doesn't require a plane ticket. I don't accept inherited drawings as truth. I direct a photo investigation of the space, telling whoever is standing in it exactly what to shoot, and I read what comes back the way someone who has opened up a lot of walls reads it. Then I build the scope for the survey company around what the photos can't settle: the walls that don't line up, the soffits with no reason to exist, the places where a renovation three tenants ago needed to hold the roof up. Design starts from measured truth.

Some bids are priced to build the job. Some are priced to win it: thin where the drawings are vague, silent where the scope is hard, counting on change orders to make the margin back once you're committed and the walls are open. On a small commercial project, the difference lands in six figures, and it lands on you.

The defense isn't cynicism, it's paperwork. Every returned bid gets read line by line against every other bid: what's excluded, what's "by others," what's suspiciously cheap. Every discrepancy goes back to the GC in writing. The answers become a documented clarification record. And that record gets attached to the construction contract as part of the bid.

Legitimate surprises still happen; no bid is perfect. But when a change order shows up for something the GC confirmed was included, in writing, during bidding, that dispute is already won. The GCs who build honestly don't mind this process. The other kind stop bidding your work, which is the process working too.

The work letter is the part of the lease that says what the landlord delivers and what you build. It reads like boilerplate. It prices like boilerplate too. Until you hit the gaps. "Broom clean" tells you nothing about the 100-amp panel. "HVAC in good working order" says nothing about whether five tons of cooling can serve a kitchen that needs twelve. "Landlord's existing systems" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence.

Then there's the money mechanics. A TI allowance that pays out when you get your certificate of occupancy means you float the entire buildout cost while the landlord holds the check: a cash-flow trap for a franchisee already stretched across equipment and franchise fees. Monthly progress disbursement is negotiable, but only before signature. And down in the back pages, the restoration clause: the obligation to return the space to its original condition at end of term, which can quietly cost tens of thousands of dollars nobody budgeted, for a buildout the next tenant might have paid to keep.

I read these documents construction-first, flag what's vague, and put numbers on what the vagueness could cost. Your attorney handles the legal terms. I make sure the construction terms describe a building you can actually open in.

There's a forty-eight hour window on every project when the whole truth is visible: rough-in. Every conduit run, every junction box, every vent stack, every piece of blocking: installed, inspectable, and about to disappear behind drywall for the life of the building. Whatever gets missed in that window gets found the expensive way, usually by the next trade, sometimes by nobody until year two.

So at rough-in and again at final, I'm on a live video walk with the GC's superintendent on camera. I direct what gets captured: open that panel, show me the home runs, get closer to that hood duct joint, pan the blocking where the wall-mounted equipment lands. I spent years installing the work that hides behind walls. I know where it gets rushed and what rushed looks like.

Issues get caught before they get covered. The recording becomes part of the project record, which means the punch list argument in month five is a screenshot, not a memory contest.

Every restaurant needs a grease interceptor between the kitchen drains and the sewer. The health department insists, the sizing is set by code and fixture count (often seven hundred fifty to fifteen hundred gallons at franchise scale), and it has to sit somewhere a pump truck can reach. None of that is exotic. What's exotic is finding room for it in a shell that was a retail store last year and never drained anything greasier than a mop sink.

Interior placement means saw-cutting the slab and re-routing under-slab plumbing. Exterior placement means excavation, and a location the jurisdiction and the landlord both accept, with truck access that doesn't block the neighbor's drive-thru at 6 a.m. Get it wrong, or discover it late, and you're moving a kitchen on paper, or eating a change order the size of a car, while the schedule waits on redesign.

It's one line on my pre-LOI checklist, answered with the floor plan, the site plan, and one call to the jurisdiction about sizing requirements. Cheap question. Expensive silence.