Open My Business — Planning Guides for Physical Venues
Step-by-step planning guides for people opening a cafe, shop, bar or restaurant — built from 35 years of real projects.
Years of experience
Designing and opening shops, bars and restaurants. The same experience, now in a format you can use.
Guides available
Why this exists
Over 35 years designing and opening physical venues, I've watched the same mistakes happen again and again. Not because people lacked ability or enthusiasm — because they didn't have a system.
The lease signed before anyone checked the services. The fitout quote that didn't include approvals. The layout that looked right on paper but didn't work for real customers. These aren't unusual. They happen constantly.
The Open My Business guides exist to give first-time operators — and people who've been burnt before — the framework that makes the difference between opening well and spending the first year recovering.
Each guide covers a specific venue type, takes you from site confirmed through to open doors, and is built around what actually happens in real projects — not theory.
Where people get burned
The three stages where it goes wrong
Signing before understanding the commercial terms, services capacity, approval requirements and true cost. This is the most common and most expensive mistake.
Budget blowouts from services upgrades, approval delays, contractor issues and scope creep. Most of this is preventable with the right questions asked early.
Launching without a plan, running out of runway before trading is established, or opening into a market that wasn't properly understood. Momentum is hardest to rebuild.
Start here — it's free
Not sure about a site? About to enter lease negotiations? This checklist covers the eight critical areas you need to assess before you commit — built from the same 35 years of experience as the full guides.
It won't replace professional advice, but it will make sure you're asking the right questions before you sign.
A pre-lease checklist for anyone opening a cafe, shop, bar or restaurant
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The full suite
Each guide takes you from site confirmed through to open doors — step by step, in the right order. No filler. Just what you actually need to know.
Cafe
From espresso machine placement to approval pathways — everything you need to open a cafe that works from day one.
Retail
Layout, fitout, approvals, supplier setup and launch — a complete system for opening a retail shop that trades well from the start.
Bar
Licensing, services, layout and fitout for bar environments — where the compliance and design requirements are more complex than most.
Restaurant
Kitchen design, health approvals, front-of-house flow and full launch readiness — everything a first-time restaurant operator needs.
Add to any guide
LAUNCH BONUS PACK — THREE EXPERT TOOLS
Concept to Sales Programme · Build My Brand Playbook · How to Choose & Brief a Designer
Years of experience
Who built this
The Open My Business guides were built from 35 years of designing and opening physical venues — hundreds of real projects, with real budgets, real approvals and real consequences when things went wrong.
The same problems come up constantly. The services upgrade nobody budgeted for. The approval that took three times as long as expected. The lease clause that nobody explained properly. The contractor who disappeared. The layout that looked right until real customers walked in.
These guides exist because most of those problems are preventable — if you know what to look for and in what order to look for it.
This isn't theory. It's what actually happens when you open a physical venue, and what you need to do about it.