2. Run A Survey

Once you pick a site, you will need to have a survey run by a company that specializes in convenience stores with gasoline such as MPSI or New Image Marketing.

A good survey will provide you with the figures that you can take to the bank, usually plus or minus 10%. Without the sales figures that an existing store can provide, most banks will be a bit leery about making a loan.

A good survey will provide you with gallons sales per month and inside sales per month. If you are planning to offer a car wash or food service then ask for those to be included in the survey. A survey company has hundreds of convenience stores loaded into its database.  They will pull the demographics of your site, compare it to similar sites and provide you with your customer’s propensity to buy. Will they purchase pizza or fried chicken? How many carwashes would you sell per day?

A high performance carwash would cost up to $165,000. The building could cost $200K. A c-store will cost between $1.2 million and $2 million not counting the land. At these levels, one would not consider a site that could not pump 150K gallons per month.

Important Documents: Get a Complimentary Single-site Evaluation Tool (SET) and Sample SET Survey by answering a few questions. Just fill out our Convenience Store Prospect Form and when you hit submit you'll get access to these valuable document which will help in your planning.