Waygood, a charitable organisation providing affordable art studios and promotional support to budding artists in the North East was moving offices and studios to an old historic building being renovated in the centre of Newcastle.

Part of the renovation included a proposed space for a courtyard and street front café bar to serve the Waygood staff, artists based at the site, visitors and the general public.

Waygood required a feasibility study carried out to determine the costs associated with completing the café bar development and the likely income and profit returns in order to establish the payback period.

• Review Consultancy was instructed to complete a “stage one” feasibility, strategy and development of the proposed Café Bar.
• Included within the study was a review of all potential competition within the city, assessing the range of offers, tariffs, opening times, promotions, standards, etc.
• The study was commenced by establishing what all the stakeholders and potential customers were looking for from the potential service, establishing the likely customer footfall and demographics.
• Two existing local café bars were engaged in the research to add credibility to any proposed figures.
• This research was then used to prepare a proposed service offer (Vision) that was used as the basis of tentative franchise operating costs to compare against the likely in-house operated service costs.
• In addition tentative equipment quotes were gathered for the facility development itself based on a draft design to fulfill the proposed service Vision.
• The study concluded with the creation of various costed business models and options appraisals for the Waygood Board to consider and determine their preferred future route.

In the end, as a result of the very historic nature of the building and the extreme pressure on the overall budget, the Waygood Board decided to postpone the café bar development to concentrate resources and budgets on their core development of the required offices and studios first.