Step 1 of the Blue42 suite
Blue42 Site Feasibilityis a site-selection modeling tool that tells you whether the location you’re evaluating is a good deal or a bad deal.
It calculates the sales volume your lease demands, tests it against what the trade area can realistically support, and returns a clear GO, CONDITIONAL, or NO-GO—with the reason attached.
Delivered as an Excel file, the second you pay — plus your first month in the Blue42 community, where you can watch it being used. After that month, staying is a paid subscription you choose — nothing charges you automatically.
Four competitors splitting the trade area, and a one-mile ring carrying 4,100 people. Under the 1.5× walk-away line, but with no cushion in year 5.
Two competitors instead of four, or 8,000 people instead of 4,100, or $1,100 a month off the base rent. Tab 11 prices all three.
Want the method in full before you buy? Read the coffee shop site feasibility guide — the arithmetic, the site-condition checklist and the landlord asks, worked through end to end.
You’re standing in an empty retail space with a broker waiting for an answer. The space looks clean. The rent seems fair.
What you can’t see is that the water heater was sized for washing hands, converting the space into a café could trigger a parking requirement you’ve never heard of, or the building predates the ADA by a decade.
Any one of those can turn a six-week buildout into a nine-month project—and every month is rent you’re paying before you sell a single cup.
Blue42 Site Feasibility walks you through what to investigate and the questions to ask. Then it runs the numbers on your answers, so you can evaluate the location before you commit to the lease.
Ten years. Fifty-plus locations assessed. Leases negotiated on my own behalf and with a lawyer, across the table from billion-dollar international property managers and from mom-and-pop owners who inherited a strip center from their father. Different rooms, same job.
What you didn’t know to ask
Six of them. Every one is answerable from a brochure, a ten-minute phonecall, or ninety seconds standing in the space — if you know to ask. Blue42 Site Feasibility asks you all of it, in order.
What’s the water heater sized for?
A former boutique has one sized for washing hands. You’re adding a three-compartment sink, a mop sink, a handwash sink — and health code has temperature requirements. Go electric and you may outrun the panel: if the build needs 200 amps and the space has 100, that’s a utility service upgrade, and the power company owns that timeline, not your contractor. Go gas and the line may not carry the BTUs.Either path touches MEP. Permits +3 months. Health permit +2 more.
What’s the parking minimum for food service at this address?
Everyone asks whether customers can park. Almost nobody asks whether the city’s minimum blocks the permit outright. Converting retail to food service can be a change of usethat triggers a higher requirement — and if the site can’t meet it, you’re into a variance, a hearing, and a real chance of no.Ten-minute call. Planning department, not the broker.
What year was the building built?
Anything before 1992 predates the ADA. Pull permits and you can trigger accessibility work across the whole path of travel — entrance, restrooms, counter height, the route from the parking to the door. And who pays isn’t a legal question with a fixed answer. It’s a lease question, and silence usually resolves against the tenant.Get it in the LOI. In California, ask whether there’s a CASp report.
Second generation, or a vanilla shell?
A shell is a twelve-month project — every permit, every trade, rent running the whole time. A space that was already a coffee shop, with usable plumbing, power and a hood path, is about three. That nine-month gap is rent against zero revenue, plus nine months of not learning how your business actually runs.Lenders want operating history. Do the shell second.
Which ring is that population number from?
Broker flyers report population at one, three and five miles. I’ve seen the same address show 8,429 at one mile and 54,622 at five. A downtown walk-up draws from one mile, arguably tighter — nobody drives four miles past two other coffee shops to reach you.A one-mile ring is 3.14 sq mi. Over ~15,000 per sq mi, the number is lying to you.
Does free rent run to the day I can legally open?
Not a round number of months — the date you are permitted to operate. Your buildout improves the landlord’s asset, and if permits slip you’re paying rent on a space you aren’t allowed to sell from. Same conversation covers exclusivity: ask for a use exclusion, with a cap at 10% or less of center GLA as the fallback.Both belong in the LOI, while you still have leverage.
None of this is a research project. It’s knowing which call to make. Most operators don’t sign a bad lease because they’re careless — they sign it because nobody ever showed them the list.
Then the math
Every other feasibility spreadsheet opens by asking how many customers a day you expect to do. You don’t know — you’ve never operated in that building, at that daypart mix, against those competitors. So you’ll reach for a number, and it will be the one that makes the rent work, because you already like the space.
This runs it the other way. The lease tells you what the site demands. The trade area tells you what it can give. The gap between them is your answer.
STEP ONE
What the site demands
Occupancy cost for every year of the term — not just year one, because escalations mean year one is never the hard year. Solved at three thresholds: bare break-even, your target margin, and your target owner income.
STEP TWO
What the trade area can give
Effective population against published coffee shop spend per head, divided out to daily occasions, then split across every outlet competing for the same cup. Plus the traffic your door captures directly.
STEP THREE
The comparison
Required against supportable, the market share the lease is demanding, and the cushion above bare survival. Then a verdict — with the reason named and what would have to be different.
The walk-away line
1.5×
Over this, walk
Four competitors plus you is five outlets. An even split is twenty percent of the market. Take what the lease demands and divide it by that even split.
More than 1.5, walk.Not because it’s impossible. Because you’d have to beat every competitor by half again — on opening day, with no habit built, no name recognition, and no reason yet for anyone to change where they buy their coffee.
Operators do beat the field. They rarely do it from a standing start while carrying a lease that requires it.
Inside the model
The sheets are locked so you can’t paste over the math by accident. You type in the green cells and nothing else. Every formula stays readable — you can click any cell and see exactly where the number came from.
The blue ones are where the answer lands.
What it doesn’t do
Blue42 Site Feasibilityanswers one question: can the site carry the lease. Here’s what it deliberately leaves to the rest of the suite, and what no model can do at all.
Where the numbers come from
And the soft ones are marked soft.Pass-by capture rates come from retail foot-traffic analytics, not government data — the sector’s too fragmented to track centrally. The model defaults to the conservative end of that band on purpose, and says so where it does.
It’s built to be wrong in one direction.Every soft input defaults low and the cash requirement errs high. Being wrong low costs you nothing. Being wrong high leaves an operator undercapitalized, and that’s what closes shops.
What you get
Questions
It’s built for exactly that. It asks you the questions in order and tells you where each answer comes from — a brochure, a ten-minute phone call, ninety seconds standing in the space. You don’t need to know what a grease interceptor is when you start. You will by the time you finish, and you’ll know whether this one has one.
Two ways. Everything else assumes you already know what to look at — this walks you through it. And everything else asks you to type in the transactions a day you expect, which is the number you have the least basis for and the one the whole model turns on. This solves for that instead.
Four hard triggers, any one of them: the trade area can’t cover even the survival number; the lease needs more than 1.5× what the site supports; contribution margin can’t reach your target; or the shop never covers its own costs inside 24 months. It tells you which one fired, and how much would have to change to clear it.
It’s a screen, not a forecast. It’s built to be wrong in the conservative direction — every soft input defaults low, the cash requirement errs high. Being wrong low costs you nothing. Being wrong high leaves you undercapitalized.
Yes. Change the audience numbers, the average order value, the per-person spend and the competitor count. Everything else — occupancy, timeline, accessibility, parking, the ramp, the landlord asks — works unchanged. There’s a toggle, and the reason for the override is reported alongside the result so nobody can quietly swap the research out.
Microsoft Excel, on a Mac or a PC.That’s the only supported answer. Don’t open it in Google Sheets — the import strips the sheet protection, which is what stops the 553 formulas being overwritten by a stray paste. It will look like it worked, and the model will be broken.
It’s licensed to you and your business, for as many sites as you are evaluating. Save a copy per site and run them separately. It isn’t licensed to be resold or passed around.
All sales are final.This is a digital product and the community access starts the moment you pay, so there’s nothing to return. That is why this page is as specific as it is about what the model does and what it deliberately doesn’t — read it before you buy, and if anything is unclear, ask first.
That’s the best trade in this business. $99, one time, and you’ll know today.
Buy the model — $99