People ask me how much it costs to open a salon, café or bar in the UK. The honest answer is: more than the pretty mood board suggests, and less than the scariest internet forum thread claims — if you plan the money in the right order. After opening Sips Nail Spa & Bar sites and founding other companies, these are the cost buckets I treat as non-negotiable.
Separate “build” money from “open” money.
Founders often budget for the room and forget the weeks after the doors unlock. Fit-out, furniture and equipment are one pile. Stock, wages before the till settles, insurance, card fees, soft launch marketing and a cash buffer are another. If you only fund the build, you open broke. I now write two totals on one page: money to get ready, and money to survive the first 90 days of trading.
Fit-out is the line that moves.
Quotes change. Lead times slip. Something behind a wall is never what the drawing promised. On every Sips site I left margin in both money and calendar for the unknown. Doing parts of the build myself helped me understand where cash was going, but it did not remove surprises. Budget a contingency you are willing to spend without panic — then protect it. Eating the contingency on nicer lights is how openings get delayed.
Kit and stock scale with the concept.
A nail spa and cocktail bar needs two kinds of kit and two kinds of stock. A café needs a different mix. List every piece of equipment that must work on day one, then every consumable that must be on the shelf. Price them from real supplier quotes, not catalogue optimism. Include spare glassware, towels, cleaning kit and the dull items guests never photograph. Running out of basics on a Saturday teaches you faster than any spreadsheet.
People cost money before they earn it.
Training weeks are not free. Uniforms, induction time, shadowed shifts and a slow first fortnight all hit cash before the team is efficient. Hire for the roles the room actually needs at opening, not the org chart you hope to have in year three. One strong opener who can train others beats a full roster of people who still need you for every decision.
Licensing and professional fees belong on the critical path.
In England and Wales, premises licensing, planning use and related professional advice are not optional decoration. They take time and fees. Put them in the budget at the start, not as a surprise in week twelve. A beautiful room that cannot trade the way you imagined is an expensive lesson. I treat this work as part of the product, the same way I treat layout and pricing.
Marketing is a line item, not a hope.
Opening week buzz fades. Set aside money for a soft launch, clear photography, a simple booking or walk-in path, and a way to ask happy guests to come back. You do not need a huge agency. You do need a plan that does not rely only on friends turning up once. Track the cost of getting a guest in the door against what they spend and whether they return.
The buffer is the real “startup cost”.
The number that saves businesses is the cash reserved for things you have not thought of yet. Delayed supplier. Quieter first month. A piece of kit that fails. A hire that does not work out. I would rather open slightly smaller with a buffer than open grand and fragile. Pride wants the full vision on day one. Survival wants proof the model works, then a controlled expansion.
How I use a 26-week plan.
In Launch Your Venue I map the work from idea to opening night across roughly half a year, because rushing the money questions is how founders paint themselves into a corner. The book walks through costs, sequencing and the practical checks I wish I had written down earlier. If you are comparing concepts — salon, café, bar or a hybrid like Sips — start by listing every cost that must be true for the room to open, then every cost that keeps it open while trade finds its feet. Write the list before you fall in love with a colour palette. The palette can change; the cash order should not.
Get the playbook on Amazon in paperback or Kindle. For the operator lessons behind the numbers, see what I learned opening Sips and what running several businesses taught me.