Is opening a small shop on a UK high street still viable?

Executive Summary & Verdict

Promising — 7/10. Sign a lease on this, but read the lease first and read section 06 before you read the lease. The plan is viable for three reasons that have nothing to do with optimism about the high street: the premises earns its keep through labour rather than display, the business rates bill on a unit of this size is zero, and the operator already has a customer book. Almost every failed shop plan is missing at least two of those.

The three findings that set the score. First, rates: a rateable value of £12,000 or less on your only property means 100% Small Business Rate Relief, and between £12,001 and £15,000 the relief tapers to nothing [1]. Your 620 sq ft unit at an indicative £11,400 pays nothing; the 900 sq ft unit you preferred, at £15,500, pays the full bill — roughly £5,900 to £6,700 a year depending on which multiplier the council applies [2][3]. That is one property decision worth about £500 a month, forever.

Second, margin. This is not a stock business. Roughly 60% of your revenue is workshop labour at close to 90% gross margin once consumables are taken out, and 40% is goods at the 25–35% the bicycle trade is normally planned at [4]. The blend is about 67%, which is why £1,970 of fixed cost needs only about £276 a day to cover rather than the £600 a stock-led shop would need. Third, the constraint: the £62,000 goes entirely, working capital lands at 2.4 months, and workshop demand collapses from November to February. That is the part of the plan that can still kill it, and section 07 sequences around it.

Idea Validation

The premise survives the test that most retail plans fail: there is a reason for the room to exist. A wheel cannot be trued over the internet, an e-bike drive unit cannot be diagnosed by post, and a customer who has just snapped a gear cable on the way to the station cannot wait three days for a courier. Your physical presence is not a shop window for goods that are cheaper elsewhere — it is the delivery mechanism for the thing you sell.

The seventy repeat customers are the strongest single line in the answers, and they are worth more than any market study. They are evidence of demand at a price, collected at your own expense, in the exact catchment. Before you commit, mine that list properly: how many are within fifteen minutes of Kirkgate, how many had a job over £60 in the last year, how many came back twice. A mobile book converts to a shop book at something well under 100%, and the gap matters.

What the answers do not yet contain is a view on the four dead months. Bicycle workshops are brutally seasonal — the service rush is March to September and the December bench is empty. Your fixed costs are not seasonal. A plan that is validated on August numbers and financed with 2.4 months of working capital is validated against the easy half of the year. The honest version of this idea has a stated answer to "what does the workshop do in January", and section 07 proposes one.

Market & Target Customer

Your market is not "cyclists in West Yorkshire". It is three distinct groups who happen to share a shop, and they buy differently enough that you should price and roster for each.

• The Hannahs — leisure road and gravel riders. High-value bikes, annual or twice-yearly services, willing to pay for competence and for being told the truth. They are your margin. They are also the group least tied to Otley: they will drive twenty minutes to a mechanic they trust, which cuts both ways.
• Commuters and utility riders. Lower ticket, higher frequency, and completely intolerant of a queue. A puncture, a brake bleed, a light fitted while they wait. This group is what makes a fixed premises pay on a wet Tuesday in November.
• E-bike owners. The fastest-growing and worst-served segment, and the one where capability is genuinely scarce. Drive-unit diagnostics and battery-health reporting are specialist, chargeable, and almost impossible for a general bike shop to fake.

Two things to measure yourself before you sign anything. Count the footfall on your actual shortlisted frontages — three weekdays and one Saturday, with a clicker, in the hours you intend to open. And do not assume the national picture describes your street: UK retail footfall in August 2026 was down 1.7% year on year, with high streets down 3.1% while retail parks rose 1.0% [1]. A market town on a cycling route is not an average high street, but you need to know which way yours is moving rather than hoping.

Competitive Landscape

You have framed the competition as the Leeds shop with the three-week queue. That is one competitor and not the important one. Rank them honestly.

Online parts retailers are your real competitor on goods, and you will not beat them. A customer standing in front of your accessory wall can price the same chain on a phone in eleven seconds, at a number below your cost of sale on a bad day. This is the single most important strategic fact about the retail half of your business: the front of the shop is not a price proposition. It is convenience, fitting, advice and immediacy attached to a workshop visit. Stock accordingly — consumables, small emergency items, and things that are fitted the same hour — and do not attempt to compete on a range.

Mobile mechanics are your real competitor on labour, and you used to be one. They have no rent, no rates and no shopfit, which means their cost base is lower than yours will ever be. What you get for the £930 a month they do not pay is a bench, a workstand, a truing jig, a parts wall, a diagnostic laptop and the ability to keep a bike overnight. If you cannot name the jobs that are only possible because of those things — wheel builds, bearing presses, hydraulic overhauls, e-bike faults, anything needing a second visit — then the premises is not earning its keep and you should stay mobile.

The Leeds shop with the queue is a gift, but a temporary one. Queues get fixed. Build the relationship with the customer rather than the position against the competitor.

Business Model & Monetisation

This is a labour business with a shop attached, and every decision should follow from that sentence. The scarce resource is one qualified pair of hands for roughly 40 chargeable hours a week, less the time spent serving the counter. Revenue is capped by bench hours, not by floor space, which means square footage is a cost and not an asset.

Here is the difference that decides this plan. An online shop holding stock has costs that move with orders — pack, post, storage — and a quiet week costs almost nothing; a high-street shop's £1,970 leaves the bank account whether one person walks in or two hundred do. That single structural fact is why the premises has to be justified by something an order cannot deliver, and it is why every other section of this report keeps returning to fixed cost rather than to sales.

Revenue lines, in the order they matter here

• Workshop labour. The business. Close to 90% gross margin after consumables, priced by job rather than by hour, and entirely capacity-limited. Protect bench hours from everything else.
• Parts fitted in the course of a job. The highest-quality retail revenue you will ever take, because the customer is not price-shopping a cable they need fitted today.
• Counter retail. Tubes, lube, lights, gloves, a tool. Real money, small money, and a reason for people to come in between services.
• Servicing plans and winter storage. Prepaid annual servicing billed monthly, and secure winter storage with a spring service included. This is the line that answers January, and it converts seasonal labour into level cash.
• Trade and fleet work. A local hotel's guest bikes, a delivery fleet, a school's cycle-training stock. Invoiced, scheduled in the quiet months, and immune to footfall.

What to refuse in year one: new bikes. Stocking bikes means 60–70% of an inventory budget in slow-moving units at a 15–40% markup depending on tier [1], financed by you, depreciating by model year, and occupying the floor space you are paying rent on. It is the most common way a workshop-led shop turns a good margin into a bad one.

Finances & Budget

Start with rates, because it is the line prospective shopkeepers get wrong most often and it is the line that decides which unit you take. Rateable value is set by the Valuation Office, not by your landlord and not by your rent [1]. For 2026–27 in England the small business multiplier is 43.2p in the pound below £51,000 rateable value, and a separate, permanently lower retail, hospitality and leisure multiplier of 38.2p applies to qualifying properties below £51,000 [2][3]. Then Small Business Rate Relief sits on top: nothing to pay at all at a rateable value of £12,000 or less if it is your only property, tapering to zero relief between £12,001 and £15,000 — at £13,500 you get 50% off, at £14,000 you get 33% off [4].

Applied to your two shortlisted units, that is the whole argument. The 620 sq ft unit at an indicative rateable value of £11,400 pays £0. The 900 sq ft unit at £15,500 is above the taper entirely and pays the full bill: £5,921 a year on the retail multiplier, or £6,696 on the standard small business multiplier. Which one applies is not a detail you can assume — the lower retail multiplier requires the property to be wholly or mainly used for a qualifying retail purpose [3], and a business where most of the floor and most of the revenue is a repair workshop is exactly the marginal case. Ask the billing authority in writing before you sign.

Monthly fixed cost, and the daily takings it demands

Rent £930 (620 sq ft at £18/sq ft, within the £15–£50 band published for secondary locations [5]). Business rates £0 under Small Business Rate Relief [4]. Service charge and insurance rent £75. Utilities £180. Broadband and phone £45. Insurance £90. EPOS and fixed card charges £40. Accountancy £85. Commercial waste £45. Saturday assistant, 8 hours a week at the £12.71 National Living Wage plus employer National Insurance, about £480 [6]. Total £1,970 a month.

You need to draw £2,000. So the business must generate £3,970 of gross profit a month. At the blended 67% gross margin — 60% of revenue as labour at about 90%, 40% as goods at about 32% [7] — that is £5,943 of monthly revenue, or about £276 a day across 21.5 trading days.

Now test that against reality rather than hope. Four workshop jobs a day at an average £48 ticket is £192 of labour, which is comfortably inside one mechanic's capacity in season. Parts fitted on those jobs add roughly £45. Counter retail: sports and outdoor equipment specialists convert 15–22% of people who enter the shop [8], so forty visitors a day at 18% is seven transactions, and seven at a £14 average basket is £98. That totals about £335 a day against a £276 requirement — a 21% cushion, in season, with one pair of hands.

MVP & What to Build First

No pivot is needed here. What is needed is sequencing, because the plan's only real weakness is cash timing and sequencing is free.

Build first — before the keys

• Sell the winter before you open. Offer the seventy existing customers a prepaid annual servicing plan billed monthly, and winter storage with a spring service included. Money in, in advance, against the months the bench is empty. Thirty plans at £18 a month is £540 a month of level revenue that does not care about the weather.
• The workshop, to full capability. Bench, stands, truing jig, bleed kits, diagnostics. Every pound here buys chargeable hours. It is the only part of the fit-out that generates revenue rather than enabling it.
• A booking system that takes deposits. Not a notebook. A customer who has paid £20 to hold Thursday morning turns up on Thursday morning.
• One trade account. A hotel, a delivery fleet, a cycle-training provider. Invoiced work scheduled into the quiet months is worth more per pound than the same revenue in July.

Defer — deliberately, and in writing on the plan

• New bike stock. Year two at the earliest, and only funded from trading, never from the opening budget.
• The retail range. Open with a deliberately thin accessory wall and let the workshop tell you what to stock. Every guess you make about accessories is dead money on a shelf you are renting.
• A second mechanic. The temptation in July will be enormous. Wait until the prepaid plans and trade accounts cover a second wage through January, not until the July queue annoys you.
• The bigger unit. It costs about £500 a month in rates alone before a penny of extra rent [1]. If you outgrow 620 sq ft, that is a very good problem and it should be solved with a trading history, not with a redundancy payment.

Go-to-Market & Launch Plan

You are not launching to a cold market. Seventy people already pay you, and that is the whole launch. Treat the opening as a migration, not an introduction.

• Write to the seventy, individually, twice. Once six weeks out with the address, the opening date and the servicing-plan offer; once in the opening week with a booked slot already suggested. A mailout that tells someone their service is due on the 14th outperforms any discount.
• Get in front of the club, not the town. The road club that meets in the market square is forty high-value customers in one conversation. Offer a free winter maintenance evening in the shop — not a discount, a skills session. It fills the bench for February.
• Lead with the e-bike capability in every piece of copy. It is the one thing nobody within twenty minutes can match, it is the highest-ticket work on the bench, and it is what makes people drive past a competitor.
• Open on a Saturday in March, not in the autumn. March is the front edge of the service season. An autumn opening spends the fit-out and then meets the quiet months with no trading history and no cash.
• Do not discount labour at launch. A half-price service fills the bench with people who will not pay £65 in June, destroys the one high-margin line you have, and anchors your price at the wrong number in the exact catchment you need.

Marketing & Growth

For a shop with a fifteen-minute catchment, almost all marketing advice is irrelevant. Three things move the number and the rest is decoration.

Google Business Profile, completed to the last field. "Bike repair near me" on a phone is the entire search market for this business. Exact opening hours including the days you are shut, photographs of the workshop rather than the shopfront, the words "e-bike diagnostics" in the description, and a reply to every review. This is free, it takes an afternoon, and it will outperform every paid channel available to you.

The service reminder. A bicycle service is a recurring purchase that customers forget to make. An automated message twelve months after the last job, naming the bike and what you did to it last time, is the highest-return marketing in the trade. Your booking system should do this or you should change booking systems.

Named work. Your stated differentiator is that a customer knows who touched their bike. Make that visible: a photograph of the finished wheel build, a one-line note on what you found and what you left alone. Trust is the product in a repair trade, and "we did not replace your cassette because it has another season in it" is worth more than any advertisement.

Pricing Strategy

Price labour by the job, not by the hour, and price it at the top of the local band. You are selling scarce competence with a same-week turnaround against a three-week queue; being the cheapest mechanic in Wharfedale is a strategy with no upside.

• Fixed-price service tiers. A safety check, a standard service, a full strip-and- rebuild, each at a published price with a published inclusion list. Customers buy certainty, and fixed prices protect you from the job that quietly takes three hours.
• Charge separately and openly for diagnostics. An e-bike fault-finding session is skilled work with a real cost. Free diagnosis trains customers to use you as a triage desk for work they then take elsewhere.
• Do not discount parts to match online prices. You will lose, and the customer who only buys the parts you price-matched is not a customer. Charge list, fit it today, and make the fitting the reason.
• Price the servicing plan for cash flow, not for revenue. Its job is to move July money into January. A modest saving against pay-as-you-go is a fair trade for you and it is the single most valuable product in the range.
• Display prices as a single inclusive total. While you are below the VAT threshold there is no VAT to add; once you register, every displayed price must be the total a consumer pays, and repricing at that point is a business decision you should plan rather than discover — see section 12.

Legal Setup & IP

The lease is the real risk document, not the business plan

You are about to sign a personal commitment larger than your entire opening budget, and the part that matters most is whether sections 24 to 28 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 apply. If they do, the tenancy does not simply end on the contractual expiry date — it continues, and you have a statutory right to ask for a new one. If the lease is "contracted out", you have no renewal right and you leave on the last day. Contracting out is only valid if the landlord served the prescribed warning notice in the form set out in Schedule 1 to the Regulatory Reform (Business Tenancies) (England and Wales) Order 2003 and the Schedule 2 requirements were met; otherwise the agreement is void [1].

For a business whose value is a local customer book and a £16,600 fit-out you cannot take with you, security of tenure is not a technicality — it is the difference between an asset and a five-year rental of someone else's goodwill. Four more lease items to settle before signature:

• Dilapidations. A full repairing obligation on an older high-street unit can produce a five-figure claim at the end of term for a roof or a shopfront you never touched. Commission a photographic schedule of condition before you take occupation, and try to limit repair to that standard.
• Service charge. Ask for the last three years of actual figures, not an estimate, and ask whether it is capped. An uncapped service charge is an unbudgetable cost.
• The rent deposit deed. Whether the deposit is held on trust, whether it accrues interest, and precisely what triggers a drawdown and a top-up obligation.
• Permitted use, break clause and rent review. A permitted use drawn narrowly as "retail shop" can put your workshop in breach. Get the repair and workshop activity named.

Planning

Most high-street shops sit in Class E (Commercial, Business and Service), which since 1 September 2020 has combined the former A1, A2, A3 and B1 uses. Class E(a) covers the display or retail sale of goods to visiting members of the public and E(c) covers the provision of other appropriate commercial services in a commercial locality [2]. Moving between uses inside Class E generally needs no planning permission, which is why a unit that was a card shop can usually become a bike shop without an application. Do not assume, though: a workshop element with noise, extraction or a compressor can raise questions the retail use would not, and the unit's existing lawful use is a matter of fact. One email to the local planning authority quoting the address settles it.

Consumer law in a face-to-face sale

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 goods you sell must be of satisfactory quality (s.9), fit for a purpose the customer made known (s.10) and as described (s.11), and the short-term right to reject under s.22 runs for 30 days from the latest of ownership passing, delivery and any installation [3]. Beyond that, a retailer must repair or replace a faulty item returned within six months unless it can show the fault was not present at purchase [4].

Here is the clarification worth pinning above your till, because it is the one independent shopkeepers most often get wrong in the customer's favour at their own expense: the 14-day cancellation right is a distance-selling right and it does not apply to a face-to-face sale in your shop. If a customer buys online or by phone you must refund them if they tell you within 14 days of receiving the item that they want to cancel, they then have a further 14 days to return it, and you must refund within 14 days of getting it back, including standard delivery [4]. If they walk in, hold the helmet, try it on and buy it, you owe them nothing for a change of mind. A goodwill returns policy is a perfectly good commercial choice — but choose it, price it, and do not believe you are obliged to it.

Licences that may apply, depending on what you sell

• Food. Energy gels, bars and drinks make you a food business. Registration with the local authority is required at least 28 days before trading and is free [5].
• Second-hand goods. If you take trade-ins or sell refurbished bikes, many councils require a second-hand goods dealer registration under local legislation — for example a one-off £13.50 registration for the life of the business, with the certificate displayed where customers can see it and transaction records kept for at least two years [6]. The regime rests on local Acts and byelaws so it genuinely differs between councils; ask yours specifically.
• Alcohol. Not needed for this plan, but if the "bike shop with a bar" idea ever arrives, selling alcohol on a permanent basis requires a premises licence from the licensing authority under the Licensing Act 2003, plus a designated premises supervisor who holds a personal licence [7]. That is a different business with a different application, not an add-on.

Employment

From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, with £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds and £8.00 for under-18s and eligible apprentices [8]. Almost all workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, which is 28 days for a five-day week and pro-rated for part-timers — a Saturday-only assistant is entitled to 5.6 days [9]. On pensions, you must automatically enrol staff aged 22 to State Pension age who earn at least £10,000 a year [10]; the minimum total contribution is 8% of qualifying earnings with at least 3% from the employer, on the 2026–27 band of £6,240 to £50,270 [11]. Your Saturday assistant at eight hours a week earns below the £10,000 trigger, so they are not eligible for automatic enrolment — but you still have duties to assess them, write to them and let them opt in, and employer's liability insurance is required from the first employee.

Name and IP

Search the trade mark register for "Spindle & Spoke" before you spend £2,800 on signage, not after. Secure the domain and the handles the same week. If you incorporate, registering the company name is not the same thing as owning the brand.

Tax, Invoicing & Admin

Structure. As a sole trader you can start trading immediately without registering, with a Self Assessment obligation once you earn over £1,000 in a tax year, but you are personally responsible for every debt of the business — unlimited liability [1]. A limited company must be registered before it trades and limits your liability to what you have put in, at the cost of filing accounts and a company tax return [1]. Corporation Tax is 19% on profits of £50,000 or less and 25% above £250,000, with Marginal Relief between [2]. For this plan the decisive factor is not tax, it is the lease: a landlord will frequently ask a new company for a personal guarantee, which hands back the limited liability you incorporated to get. Decide this with an accountant before you negotiate the lease, not after.

VAT is a growth cliff, and you should see it coming. Registration is compulsory once taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or if you expect to exceed it in the next 30 days; if you have already crossed it you have 30 days from the end of that month to register [3]. This plan runs at roughly £71,000 to £83,000 a year, so you start below the line and approach it. That matters more than it sounds: your highest- margin line is labour, which is standard-rated, so crossing the threshold means either absorbing VAT out of your own margin or raising service prices by a fifth in one step. Model both before you get there, and note that turnover management around a threshold is a legitimate planning question rather than a shameful one.

How VAT works once you are in it. Retailers do not have to calculate VAT sale by sale. The retail schemes — Point of Sale, Apportionment and Direct Calculation — let you do it once per return, can be joined at the start of any VAT period without telling HMRC, and can be combined with Cash Accounting and Annual Accounting but not with the Flat Rate Scheme [4]. Point of Sale is the obvious fit for you if your EPOS records the rate at the till, and children's cycle helmets are a reminder that not everything in a bike shop carries the same rate.

The admin that actually bites

• Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. Sole traders and landlords are being phased in by qualifying income: £50,000 for 2024–25 from 6 April 2026, £30,000 for 2025–26 from 6 April 2027, and £20,000 for 2026–27 from 6 April 2028 [5]. On this plan's turnover you are in scope, so pick software that can do quarterly updates now rather than migrating later.
• PAYE from the first employee, including the Saturday assistant, with payroll software, real-time reporting and a written statement of employment particulars.
• Goods in trust. You will have customers' £2,800 bikes on your premises overnight. Confirm in writing that your policy covers them, at their value, and say so on your job sheet.
• Separate business bank account and a weekly reconciliation. A workshop takes deposits, holds part-paid jobs and sells small items for cash. Reconcile EPOS to bank every week from week one.
• Job sheets that are also records. Every job written up with parts, labour, the fault found and what you declined to do. It is your defence under the Consumer Rights Act, your service-reminder database and your evidence in a dispute.

Tech, Hosting & Security

A one-mechanic shop needs four pieces of software and is routinely sold fourteen. What actually matters:

• Workshop booking with deposits and automated reminders. This is the most valuable system in the business, because it protects bench hours and generates repeat work without you doing anything. Choose it before you choose the till.
• EPOS that records the VAT rate per line. Not urgent while you are below the threshold, decisive the day you cross it. Compare the total merchant cost including terminal rental and settlement timing, not the headline rate.
• A card-outage plan, written down. Know what you do when the terminal drops on a Saturday morning, before it drops on a Saturday morning.
• Google Business Profile, then one page. Hours, address, phone, services, prices, photographs of the bench. A single page that loads instantly on a phone beats anything larger for a fifteen-minute catchment. You do not need an online shop; you would be competing with the people who supply you.
• Physical security is the real security question. You will hold customers' bikes overnight. Shutters, anchors, a monitored alarm, and an insurer who has seen your actual arrangements. A break-in that takes six customer bikes is a reputational event as well as a claim.
• Offsite backup of the boring things. Job history, customer list, supplier accounts, the lease, the schedule of condition photographs, insurance documents.

Regional Compliance & Privacy

Three layers apply, and they are easy to confuse because they are administered by three different bodies.

The Valuation Office and the billing authority. Rateable value is set by the Valuation Office; your council calculates and collects the bill from it [1]. Relief is not automatic in the sense of being invisible — Small Business Rate Relief is one of fourteen schemes listed by GOV.UK, alongside rural rate relief, improvement relief, transitional relief, supporting small business relief and hardship relief [2], and you should check with the council which ones your unit qualifies for rather than waiting to see what arrives. Two things to verify in writing before you sign a lease: the current rateable value of the exact unit, and whether the council will treat a workshop-led bicycle business as wholly or mainly retail for the lower multiplier [3].

The local authority for planning, food and trading. Class E use, food business registration 28 days before trading, and any second-hand goods registration all sit with the council, and the second-hand regime in particular differs between areas because it rests on local legislation. These requirements vary by local authority. Confirm the specifics for your actual address with the council that covers it, and do not rely on a summary — this one included.

Consumer protection and data. Trading Standards, hosted by your local authority, enforces the consumer side: prices displayed as a single total a consumer actually pays, accurate descriptions, and the Consumer Rights Act obligations in section 11. On data, a customer list of names, phone numbers, addresses and bike serial numbers is personal data and UK GDPR applies regardless of how small you are — you need a lawful basis, a retention period, consent for marketing messages, and the discipline not to collect what you have no use for. A service-reminder database is a legitimate interest with an easy opt-out. A newsletter to everyone who ever bought a tube is not.

Risks & Common Pitfalls

• Winter, and only 2.4 months of cover. The largest risk in the plan, and the one the arithmetic in section 06 exposes. Four quiet months against fixed costs that do not move, with a working-capital buffer short by roughly £2,400. Sell the winter in advance or hold money back from the fit-out.
• Taking the bigger unit. Crossing £15,000 of rateable value ends Small Business Rate Relief entirely [1] and adds roughly £5,900–£6,700 a year before a penny of extra rent. The most expensive decision in this plan is a decision about square footage.
• Assuming the retail multiplier applies. The lower retail, hospitality and leisure multiplier requires the property to be wholly or mainly used for a qualifying purpose [2]. Budgeting 38.2p and being billed 43.2p is about £780 a year you did not plan for on a £15,500 rateable value.
• Signing a contracted-out lease without understanding it. No security of tenure means your fit-out, your signage and your local goodwill sit on land you have no right to stay on [3]. It may still be the right deal — but it is a priced decision, not a formality.
• Dilapidations at the end of term. A full repairing obligation on an older unit, with no schedule of condition, is how a tenant who traded profitably for five years ends up with a five-figure exit bill.
• The owner is the business. One qualified mechanic is your entire capacity and your entire differentiator. A broken wrist closes the shop. Decide now who can open the door and hand back finished work without you.
• Drifting into bike stock. Every quiet week produces the same temptation, and it converts a 67% blended margin into a 35% one financed by you [4].
• Refunding change-of-mind returns you do not owe. The 14-day cancellation right is a distance-selling right [5]. Give goodwill deliberately, as a marketing cost you have chosen, not because you think the law requires it.

Action Plan: 30 / 60 / 90 Days

This plan assumes a March opening. Work backwards from that and the sequence below lands you on the front edge of the service season with money in the bank.

Days 1–30 — decide the unit, and spend almost nothing

• Check the rateable value of every shortlisted unit yourself and rule out anything above £12,000 unless the rent saving exceeds the rates cost [1].
• Email the billing authority with the addresses: confirm the rateable value, confirm Small Business Rate Relief eligibility, and ask whether a repair-workshop-led bike shop is treated as wholly or mainly retail for the lower multiplier [2].
• Email the local planning authority: confirm the unit's existing lawful use and whether your workshop activity sits within Class E [3].
• Count footfall on each frontage yourself — three weekdays and a Saturday, in your intended trading hours.
• Audit the seventy-customer book: distance, last job value, repeat count. This is your revenue forecast and nothing else is.
• Launch the servicing-plan offer to that book now, before you have premises. Prepaid commitments are the cheapest capital you will ever raise.

Days 31–60 — get the paperwork right before the money moves

• Instruct a solicitor on the heads of terms. Establish whether the lease is inside or contracted out of ss.24–28 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, and price that answer [4].
• Commission a photographic schedule of condition before occupation. Get three years of actual service charge figures.
• Decide sole trader or limited company with an accountant, specifically in the light of any personal guarantee the landlord wants [5].
• Register the food business at least 28 days before you sell a single energy bar [6], and ask the council about second-hand goods registration if you will take trade-ins [7].
• Insurance bound: public liability, employers' liability, stock, tools and goods in trust at full customer-bike values.
• Choose the booking system, then the EPOS. Set up PAYE. Open the business account.
• Hold £3,000 back from the fit-out specification. Write down that you have done it and why.

Days 61–90 — fit out, open, and measure the right things

• Fit the workshop first and to full capability; the retail front thin and deliberately under-stocked.
• Google Business Profile complete, with workshop photographs and "e-bike diagnostics" in the description, live before opening day.
• Second mailout to the seventy with a suggested booked slot each. Winter maintenance evening booked with the road club.
• One trade or fleet account signed before you open.
• Open on a Saturday in March, at full price, with published fixed-price service tiers.
• From day one, record four numbers weekly: chargeable bench hours, average job value, counter transactions against people through the door, and prepaid plan count. At day 90, compare daily takings against the £276 break-even in section 06. If bench hours rather than demand is the ceiling, you have a good business and a hiring decision. If demand is the ceiling, you have found that out in a month you can still trade out of.