From idea to opening day

A San Francisco liquor license is two jobs running at once. The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control decides whether you get the license. The City decides whether your use is allowed at that address in the first place. Operators who treat those as one process lose months, because the state application assumes a premises you are already entitled to occupy.

Deciding body:

California ABC, plus SF Planning

Typical range:

4 to 9 months

Conditional use authorization is a discretionary approval. The Planning Commission is not checking boxes, it is making findings, and it can say no to a project that satisfies every numerical standard in the code. That is the part operators underestimate.

Deciding body:

SF Planning Commission

Typical range:

5 to 10 months

If there will be live music, a DJ, dancing, or a cover charge, the Entertainment Commission is in your project. Which permit you need depends on how loud, how late and how often, and the difference between a Limited Live Performance permit and a full Place of Entertainment permit is the difference between a straightforward filing and a hearing with neighbors in the room.

Deciding body:

SF Entertainment Commission

Typical range:

3 to 7 months

Cannabis retail in San Francisco is a location problem before it is a licensing problem. Buffer requirements, district controls and the equity framework narrow the viable set of addresses dramatically, and most of the sites brought to us do not survive a screening.

Local body:

SF Office of Cannabis, plus Planning

State body:

Department of Cannabis Control

The most expensive mistake in this business is signing a lease for a space that cannot become the business you are planning, or that can only become it eighteen months late. By the time permitting reveals the problem, you are paying rent on it.

When to call us:

At the letter of intent

Turnaround:

Days, not months

Most of the projects we take over are not stuck because someone made a dramatic mistake. They are stuck because an application is sitting in a queue nobody is working, or because two agencies are each waiting on the other, or because a correction notice arrived six weeks ago and nobody translated it into a task.

First step:

Full file audit

Usual finding:

Waiting on the wrong thing