Coffee Shop Feasibility Study in the Colorado Springs, CO Metro Area

Colorado Springs coffee: a record with a lot held back

SBA's file for coffee shops and snack bars in Colorado Springs is thin where it counts, and honest reading starts there. What does print is clear enough: $11.6 million across 39 approvals, FY2017 through FY2026, a 1.49x location quotient, seventh place in the local mix, 7 of 39, and a national position of 42 of 612 metros. Cafes take a bigger share of lending here than they do across the country, and that tilt is the page's lead finding.

Loan size in Colorado Springs: $329,200 at the median (1.37x nationally) and $95,200 to $423,000 through the middle half. Franchise flags cover 46.2% of loans, so about as many operators sit outside a brand system as inside one.

What SBA keeps back

Nearly everything else in the cell is suppressed, as the cohort is small. The 7(a) and 504 tallies for Colorado Springs coffee are held back, and nothing stands in their place. SBA's thin-cohort rule removes both loss rates from Colorado Springs coffee. The result is a page without loss measures, and the blanks are not zeros. The cell shows no holder table and no county table. Of all the years, only FY2018 prints: 5 loans and $1.6 million. Nine other years are held back, so the series cannot show whether coffee lending in this metro is rising, falling or lumpy.

For a reader, that means the page can size a typical request and place coffee within local lending, but it cannot say who lends, where within the metro, how the loans split by program or how they performed. A project county that the 2023 delineation does not recognise for Colorado Springs drops its loans from the record on this page.

What a Colorado Springs coffee study has to test

Because the loan record is thin, the study carries more of the weight. It has to count traffic and commuter flows past the particular site, military and campus demand where relevant, and the cafes and drive-throughs already competing for the same morning trade. The build-out budget is checked against the $329,200 midpoint, sales and margin after any franchise royalties must cover debt service, and the appraiser values the cafe as a going business together with its lease. The final deliverable bears the signature of Daniel Smith, MAI, and says nothing that could be read as a pledge of approval.