There were many factors such as the parking. Um the supermarket has a lot of parking. That's super important cuz people um want to know that they can find a space and a space to park and not have to um be crowded and there's, you know, feel comfortable coming into the store. The square footage that we were looking for based on what we wanted to do, that was uh an important factor when we were looking at a space.
And ideally, we would have wanted to to build a location, but for to start off, we thought it would be better to to have a space like this um in a commercial area. The lighting and the parking too, so people if it's at night and it's dark, people feel safe coming to the the space. The receiving area too. Yeah.
The receiving area in the back of the building. Um enough space for the trailers to come in and make their deliveries. And we can receive it in the back versus through the front door. We had actually bought a property already back in 2020.
Mhm. And it wasn't big enough for what we wanted to do. And there were other factors that really wouldn't allow us to do something like this of what we actually did. And so um a learning would be to to do some more investigation before you actually purchase something and make sure that it's the right uh option for what the business that you're trying to build.
Like uh how easy to go in car parking and then uh how we can handle some people's cannot handle like a big space to handle like the uh small people of uh amount and then uh how much we can handle or not need to be make sure So this is our second location as I said before. Um the first time it was just because the opportunity came up and the second time it was because I actually did want to be downtown. I knew that downtown was undergoing a you know revolving and uh and that they were trying to build our downtown back up. So, it was a desire of mine to be a part of that and I just felt like it was a better location for us to have more exposure.
We did work with the zoning department to make sure that we were in compliance. Um, a great resource of ours was my architect that we worked with. Um, the architect was recommended to us by the city of Battle Creek. Um, so we worked with the architect to we really leaned heavily on him, which was Cody Newman with Driven Design.
We leaned heavily on him and his expertise in architecture and working with the zoning and building department to make sure that we were in compliance all the way through our building object.
