A New Business

I've been watching with great interest over the past few weeks as they've taken down an old building in Westwood Village, near my office at UCLA Extension. It was the site of a movie theater, but while the theater itself always seemed cavernous (with a huge screen, one of the largest pre-IMAX screens I ever saw), the lot itself is fairly small. Not big enough for an office building like the one I work in, for example; not even big enough for a modest strip mall. About the size of a gas station, in fact, which it might have been decades ago, but certainly not in recent times. The question is, if it were your property, what would you build there?

Westwood has a fair amount of resident traffic, from the neighborhoods just to the north, and it's about to get a lot more residents when the new development on the eastern side opens (up to 700 high-end apartment dwellers, or so I'm told). It also gets a lot of foot traffic from all of the people who work in the commercial buildings along Wilshire and Westwood blvd. And, of course, there are the occasional waves of UCLA students who will wander down from campus looking for something to do. I waste your time pointing out these three groups because the type of business you put on this space will depend (or should depend, anyway) on which group or groups you intend serve.

Residents, for example, will be looking for services that well-to-do people would like to have near their homes. Westwood already has three high-end markets (a Ralph's Fresh Fair, a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's that will open at the same time the apartments do), so another market probably isn't a good idea, but a dry cleaners, a video rental store, or a hardware store might be. There's already at least seven coffee houses and a dozen take-out restaurants in the Village, not to mention many regular restaurants that will provide take-out orders if you ask for them, so any of those businesses will find it fairly tough going. A bookstore might work, and an auto-repair business would certainly be handy, but there's not enough room for the garage, and several other bookstores have already tried to make a go of Westwood, only to fail and pull out.

Some of these same services would appeal to the businesspeople who work in the area; particularly a place where they could get their clothes cleaned, their shoes fixed, their cars repaired, and so on. A gas station would appeal to these folks, too, but the only remaining full-service station was driven out of the Village last year by the outrageously high rents. The business people would like any new lunch place, of course, but several new ones have opened in the past few months already. All of the other basics for people in this demographic (and the high-end residents demographic) are already covered; the Village already has a stationary store, two electronics stores, a bicycle shop, a barber shop, several drug stores, a couple of banks, a Kinko's, a doughnut shop, jewelry stores, cell phone stores, clothing stores, and food service establishments...

As for the students, the problem is that while they are a ready source of customers, most of them don't have a great amount of disposable income, and none of them want to purchase the same goods as the other two groups. Westwood already has bars, movie theaters, pizza joints and junk food stands, and even a couple of nightspots. Our generation kept several record stores afloat, but the iPod generation is downloading their music, and the only music store left is selling used and vintage discs -- including a fair amount of antique vinyl records.

Of course, once you've decided what type of business you'd like to launch, you've still got to plan out how. But that's a post for another day...