We recently connected with Abby Rocha and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Abby, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

We work exclusively with start-up and independent retailers looking to rent a space for their business — our clients, Pedal Retailers, are completely left out of the commercial real estate industry, and most of them don’t realize it until they’ve been burned. Most retail real estate brokers work with “insiders” – companies like Starbucks and lululemon who have very sophisticated in-house commercial real estate departments. Industry outsiders have a really tough time, and more often than not, get bad deals or inferior spaces as a result. So much of the notoriously high failure rate for new businesses can be attributed to bad real estate deals.

While the niche of first time retailers is, itself, underserved, the majority of Pedal Retailers are from marginalized communities who often don’t have access to the very straight, white, male commercial real estate industry. With every Pedal Retailer we represent, we challenge stereotypes about what successful business ownership looks like.

We recently represented a woman looking for a retail space for her thriving home-based business – a process art studio with classes for kids and events for adults. Despite the success of the business and the owner’s resume that included plenty of relevant retail management experience, she dismissed by multiple commercial landlords and brokers as a “housewife with a hobby.”

What this Pedal Retailer brought to the table should have been enough to rent a retail space for her business, but once she brought us in, we were able to present her in the way she needed to show up to be taken seriously. We worked with her to create a Powerhouse Business Plan and real estate strategy, and were ultimately able to negotiate a great deal on a high profile space in a best-in-class new mixed-use development. We could not be more excited to see her open for business and extend her mission of developing creativity and curiosity to a perpetually stressed-out and achievement-obsessed community.

Abby, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I founded Pedal Retail Advisors with my partner, Sheila, because I’d experienced the disconnect between the publics’ desire to patronize unique local businesses and the difficulty these same groups had renting prime retail spaces.

I started my career as a broker at one of the big commercial real estate companies, primarily representing large, institutional landlords on high profile mixed-use and lifestyle centers. I’ve always loved retail — both as a shopper and as a cultural observer. The stores and restaurants we patronize say so much about us, and there is SO MUCH that happens behind the scenes. I became fascinated by how very different the day-to-day job of a landlord and tenant are, and wanted to find a way to make the very landlord-centric commercial real estate industry serve tenants — retailers in particular — better.

We are proud to be the first and only company designed exclusively for first-time retailers, and we supplement traditional representation with business plan consulting, commercial real estate consulting and business coaching. We save Pedal Retailers $115,000+ on their lease deals, and through our process, we help them develop the skills and knowledge they’ll need to succeed in a long-term lease.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I first met my cofounder, Sheila, when we were both at other jobs — I was a retail real estate broker working for a big company, and she was the director of operations for a retail chain I was courting for a project. The deal became complicated, and ultimately fell through, but we were each impressed with the other through the process of trying to figure it out.

Years passed, and fate brought us back together when we were both independently working on the same business idea that ultimately became Pedal. A colleague had asked me for an introduction to Sheila, and not only did we piece together that we were working on the same business, we’d even used the same SquareSpace template for our initial landing pages. It must have been fate, great taste… or both!

Fast forward to today, there is no way Pedal would exist without both of us. Sheila brings the experience and perspective of a seasoned retailer to the table, which is invaluable in advising start-up Pedal Retailers on their real estate decisions. Equally important, we have great chemistry and a strong shared mission and vision for the company and where we can take it.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Retail real estate brokers assume first-time retailers are time wasters and tire-kickers… and not without reason. Lots of the time, they are. An aspiring retailer can line up days of space tours and be completely unprepared to actually transact, and there’s nothing to prevent this. On the contrary, public-facing “For Lease” signs actually encourage this. As an old school broker, I became adept at getting these people off the phone as quickly as possible when they called in about my listing. When someone is a commercial real estate outsider, they can’t conceal it. (Pro tip: if it says “NNN,” you say “triple net.”)

I’ve had to unlearn the snobbishness old school brokers show commercial real estate outsiders. Not understanding the system or the terminology does not make someone an unfit business owner. Before we started our company, there really was no other place first-time retailers could go to learn, and it just isn’t fair that they should have to learn the hard way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pedalretail.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pedalretail/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pedalretail
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pedal-retail-advisors/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pedalretail

Image Credits

Laura Metzler Photography