What Does It Cost To Open Your Doors?

I've noticed a trend on Instagram lately. Perhaps you have too. Independent retailers sharing the reality behind the scenes. The rent. The wages. The VAT. The utilities. The card machine fees. The website costs. The software subscriptions. The insurance. The music licence. The endless list of expenses that most customers never see when they walk into a beautiful shop.

The reaction is usually the same. People are shocked. Most customers have no idea what it costs to keep a shop open these days. And that's perfectly understandable. Customers shouldn't have to think about any of that. They should be able to browse, discover and buy things they love without worrying about our electricity bill.

What strikes me about many of these posts, however, is that they stop just before the most important question. Once you've added up all those costs, what do they actually mean? What does your business need to earn?

I think many business owners avoid this question because they're worried about what they might discover. What if the number is bigger than expected? What if it feels impossible? What if it confirms something they'd rather not know?

But here's the thing. The number already exists whether you calculate it or not. Not looking at it doesn't make it smaller. It simply means you're navigating without knowing where you're trying to get to.

When I graduated from university at 21, I had absolutely no retail training whatsoever. I had a degree in Archaeology and Prehistory. My boyfriend had a degree in Law. His retail experience amounted to about a year's worth of Sunday afternoons on the Asda delicatessen counter. Mine was even less impressive. I'd done dog walking, babysitting, waitressing and multiple paper rounds. I’d made and sewn my own products and sold them at craft fairs, but I'd never had any retail training, no advice, no guidance. Looking back, it wasn't much to go on. And back then there was no internet to find it out either. When we’d set up the business halfway through my A levels, I’d helped my parents with every element but we’d relied exclusively on guesswork to buy and price and display products.

Mind you, even when I left for university, I'd written my first letter home With a list of instructions. Telling my parents what they should and shouldn't be doing in the shop. God only knows what made me think I had a clue, but apparently I wasn't short of opinions!

Throughout my degree, every time I came home for the holidays I'd end up overhauling the shop. I'd stay up until the early hours tidying displays, sorting stock, pricing products and moving things around. When my boyfriend came to visit, he joined in too.

Back in Sheffield, we'd spend our days studying and our evenings wandering around the city's independent shopping streets. We'd peer into shop windows, talk about what worked and what didn't, discuss what we would do differently and watch how shops changed over time.

Some always looked fresh and busy. Others always seemed dusty and tired. We never imagined we'd end up running a shop ourselves. I loved my degree. I found it endlessly fascinating. I did work experience in our local Museum, alongside the county archaeologist helping to map and catalogue archaeology. My dissertation analysed Mesolithic flint knapping scatters in relation to local topography. Looking back, it was all about human behaviour. I just didn't realise how it related to retail at the time.

Meanwhile, back at Narborough Hall, my parents were doing everything they could to keep the place going. They’d always had to do extra projects on the side as two teaching salaries weren’t enough to keep the building afloat. While i was growing up my dad bought and sold antiques. My mum made celebration cakes and did outside catering. We rented rooms to student lodgers.

Eventually the front rooms of the Hall became an art and antiques gallery. At one point we even had a café. The work was relentless. The profits were not. I remember encouraging my parents to close the café while I was still at university. My mum was getting up at 5am to bake cakes before driving twenty miles to her full-time teaching job. My grandma staffed the café for free.

Some days the takings were £12. It simply wasn't sustainable. The reality was that my parents were running out of steam. The Hall was expensive to maintain. The shop was contributing something, but nowhere near enough. Huge parts of the ground floor had been given over to the business. We lived in a much smaller kitchen and living area that my mum jokingly called "the caravan" after years of having the run of a much larger house.

When I graduated, I just had a feeling the business could do more. Not because I had a grand strategy. Not because I had retail training. I simply felt there had to be a better way. So I sat down with my dad and we did the sums.

Everything went in. The mortgage. The bills. The maintenance. The VAT. The utilities. Everything.

Then we looked at our typical margins and worked backwards. Eventually we arrived at a figure. What did the shop need to turnover each day in order to achieve our goal? And the goal was very simple. The business had to become self-sustaining. The business had to support the Hall. The business had to cover all the costs. And the business had to enable my mum to leave teaching. That was the destination. Everything else came afterwards.

Looking back, it was probably the most important business exercise I've ever done. Not because it gave us all the answers. Because it showed us what to aim for. A lot of business owners think they need a map. Actually, before you can have a map, you need a destination.

It's a bit like setting sail without knowing where you're trying to get to. You can work incredibly hard, battle storms and spend every waking hour at the helm, but if you don't know where you're headed, there's a good chance you'll spend a lot of energy going nowhere in particular.

Once you know what your business needs to achieve, everything else starts making more sense. Margins. Pricing. Displays. Products. Customer behaviour. You stop asking, "Do customers like this?" and start asking, "Can this help get us where we need to go?"

And here's the surprising thing. Most people feel relieved once they've done the calculation. Not frightened. Relieved. Because uncertainty is often more intimidating than reality.

With a lot of hard work, we made it work. Over the years the business became capable of supporting itself, supporting the Hall and dealing with the inevitable surprises that come with a 400-year-old building. At one point we spent £30,000 repairing the roof.

Old buildings don't care whether you've had a quiet month. Fortunately, by then, the business could handle that kind of challenge. The purpose of finding your number isn't to make you feel bad. It isn't to tell you your dream won't work. It's the opposite. It's to give you a destination. Because once you know where you're trying to get to, you can start drawing a map.

And that's what we'll look at next.