How to price a new location's licensing

Ask an operator what a licence costs and you get a fee. Ask what it cost and you get a story about six weeks of rent on a closed building.

The fee schedule is the easy part and it is public. What is not public is the queue. A liquor licence in a slow county can take six to eight weeks after a complete application, and complete is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Model the delay, not just the fee. If your fit-out finishes in March and your slowest permit takes seven weeks, your opening date is May, and every plan that says otherwise is fiction.

The cheapest thing you can do is file early. The second cheapest is knowing which item is slowest before you sign the lease.