Before signing: payback, delivery reach, rain days

Is payback modeled on your city? Flagship cups, turns, and lunch mix rarely travel to tier-three labor and footfall. Ask for three-month revenue bands, headcount, and peak/off gaps in same-tier cities—not a national average. Teams that treat holiday peaks as daily baselines open to find cup counts reachable while wages and utilities aren’t. Clarify sample weeks, whether platform take-rates are netted, and whether rent is shop-lease or co-op split before the math maps to your town. Lock tax-in/out and whether riders are in headcount—don’t discover a definition gap at month-end reconcile.

Is service radius written down? Fresh, café co-ops, and night stalls break when distance creeps—spoilage, late drops, and after-sales rise together. Lock cut-offs, cold-chain kilometers, and who owns prep versus bad fruit in the clause or on the same listing screen. Captains renewing care less about pretty commission sheets than who pays when fruit spoils and whether window slips get advance notice. Verbal “we cover the whole county” blows up end-mile crates on holiday peaks. Add-order cut-offs, address-change rules, and whether rain delay counts as breach belong in the same annex as radius.

Rain, off-season, outages—riverside fears weather, hillside fears empty dayparts, produce fears holiday logistics. Last-year downtime days, weather thresholds, temporary canopies or indoor fallbacks, and temporary machine plans beat story-only decks. Stall holders fear three wet peak nights with stock sitting; café co-ops fear empty rainy lunch seats on full payroll; fresh-cut fears “arrives today” with no van. Annex language cuts one shouting round; “we’ll see” adds two diligence calls. Who calls the stop, who clears the floor, who loops local authorities—write it so partners can put dates on their own calendars.

Ask the three in parallel—don’t wait for their pitch deck. Same-tier revenue bands first, radius and spoilage annex second, rain/off-season downtime rules third. Mark blanks as “to fill”—not cold water, just separating a useful meeting from a signable pack. Use the project page for facts; still run real materials, contract text, and site walks through official paths. Don’t treat a first-impression strip as the full diligence file. Some founders print a one-page checklist—half filled before the visit, half after—beats chatting on vibes alone.

Two edge questions get skipped often: training days to hold a shift, and who pays for peak-season extra people or machines. Hillside café co-ops stall when cup peaks were verbal and machines weren’t there at open; night-market co-ops stall when rain days still billed full stall fees. Edge items in the annex smooth renewals and reconciles. Local policy, weather, and audiences vary—same-tier numbers are inputs, not constants to paste into your open plan. Apprentice or barista coaching cycles, how wrong drinks are logged, where standby staff come from—clear those before you lock your open calendar.

On site, don’t only shoot photos. How long lunch queues run, how many dinner turns, whether rain leaves standing water, where cold-chain vans unload—eyes and a watch catch it. Match floor notes to the pitch page: what lines up, what’s blank, and the second call has handles. Diligence isn’t killing the deal; it’s splitting “nice story” from “who covers the day you can’t keep up.” After one pass on the three, you know whether to book a second site visit or send counsel the contract.

Keep flipping pages and filing intent—just don’t stake your calendar and preloaded stock before the dirty work is on paper. Payback, radius, rain-day ops—after the three you at least know whether their annexes are complete. Completeness doesn’t force a yes or no; it decides whether the next talk is mood or clauses.