If you sell to local businesses, your easiest sale is to an owner who hasn’t opened yet. They have a lease, a contractor and a target date, and they still need insurance, payroll, internet, signage, cleaning, supplies, a website and someone to keep the books. Six months after opening, most of those slots are filled and the owner has stopped taking meetings.
This guide uses restaurants, bars and cafés as the example. They’re among the most common new storefronts, they leave the clearest paper trail, and they buy from a longer list of vendors than most small businesses. The method works for salons, gyms, clinics and shops once you change the words you search for.
The signals a new business leaves, in order
Before the sign goes up, an owner has to form a company, lease a space, get plans approved and pass inspections. Most of those steps leave a public record or something you can see from the sidewalk. For a restaurant they tend to arrive in roughly this order. Some places skip steps and big build-outs take longer, but the sequence holds well enough to plan around.
1. A business registration
The owner forms an LLC or corporation with the state, or files a trade name (a DBA). This is often the first record of all, sometimes before a lease is signed, and on its own it tells you little. The company name may be a holding name unrelated to the sign, the address may belong to a lawyer or registered agent, and plenty of registrations never become a storefront. Treat it as a hint and wait for a second record.
2. A leasing sign or tenant announcement
A “leased” rider on a for-lease sign, brown paper over the windows, a dumpster outside a vacant unit. Shopping center owners and commercial brokers often announce new tenants on their own sites and social pages.
3. Building and tenant-improvement permits
This is the most useful record for a seller, because it ties the project to a real address. A build-out permit usually lists the address, a short description of the work, the contractor and an estimated job value. Descriptions are terse, so search for words that mostly appear on food jobs: restaurant, kitchen, hood, Type I hood, grease interceptor, grease trap, walk-in cooler, change of use, tenant improvement, café, taproom, brewery.
A 1,800-square-foot taqueria moving into a former sandwich shop might appear as nothing more than “interior alteration for restaurant use, new hood and grease trap.” That one line is a lead.
4. A health permit application or plan review
In many places a new food business sends its kitchen plans to the local health department before it builds, then applies for a food permit before it opens. Where these records are public, they confirm the place will serve food and often say what kind of operation it is.
5. A liquor license application
If the place will serve alcohol, the owner applies to the state liquor authority, and many states also require a notice posted at the premises or published so neighbors can object. The application often carries the trade name the public will see, and it tells you the owner is spending real money, since a liquor license is slow and often costly. A liquor notice taped to a papered-over window is about as clear a signal as you’ll find.
6. Sales tax and sign permits
The business registers for sales tax before it sells anything, and some states publish new permits. A sign permit is often the first city record with the public name at the exact address. By then the place is usually well into its build-out.
7. Final inspections and the certificate of occupancy
The building inspector signs off, the fire inspector checks the hood suppression and exits, the health department does its opening inspection, and the city issues a certificate of occupancy. The place is now weeks away, too late for most build-out vendors.
8. Online and hiring signs
Then come the signals anyone can see: a Google Maps listing (often a few weeks before the doors open), a new Instagram account posting construction photos, job posts for servers and line cooks, a soft opening, the first reviews. If your service starts after opening day, like marketing, repairs or bookkeeping, these still put you ahead of everyone waiting for the grand-opening banner.
| Signal | What it tells you | How early | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business registration | A company exists | Earliest | Often no real address; many never open |
| Leasing sign or announcement | Something is coming to this address | Early | Rarely says what kind of business |
| Building permit | Address, scope of work, contractor | Months ahead | Vague descriptions |
| Health plan review | It will serve food | Months ahead | Not public everywhere |
| Liquor application | Trade name, alcohol, a bigger budget | Usually mid build-out | Only places that serve alcohol |
| Sign permit | Public name at the address | Mid to late build-out | Easy to miss |
| Final inspections | Opening is close | Weeks ahead | Late for most vendors |
| Maps listing, hiring posts | It’s real and nearly open | Last few weeks | Everyone else sees it too |
For the restaurants, bars and cafés we’ve followed to opening day, our data shows new places typically file about 76 days before they open. That window goes quickly, so each week you catch a place earlier is another week to win the account.
How to watch the signals yourself for one town
For a single town, you can do all of this by hand.
- Pick one town and one kind of business. Start where you already have customers, so new leads sit on a route you drive anyway.
- Find your city’s permit search. Look for a weekly report of permits applied for or issued. If there’s only a search box, search by date range and permit type instead of by address.
- Find your state’s business search. It’s built to look up one company by name, so use it to check names you’ve already found.
- Check the state liquor authority’s pending applications, if it posts them, for your town.
- Check the local health department’s site for plan reviews or new food permits. What’s posted varies a lot.
- Drive or walk the main commercial streets once a week. Look for papered windows, contractor trucks, “coming soon” banners and posted liquor notices.
- Read the local paper’s openings column, neighborhood social groups, shopping center tenant pages and broker announcements.
- Put everything into one spreadsheet, one row per address.
That last step matters more than any source. The same restaurant can show up as a holding company on its registration, a bare street address on its permit and a trade name on its liquor application. File by business name and you’ll count it three times. File by address and every record lands on the same row, so you can watch one place move from permit to opening.
What it costs in time
Count the hours before you commit. Setup takes a day or two: finding each source, learning how each search works, and working out which permit types and words matter in your town. After that, one mid-sized town takes a couple of hours a week if you stick to it, roughly an hour reading new filings and an hour on the drive.
The hidden time goes into reading vague records (“interior alteration, commercial” could be a dentist or a ramen shop), matching records to each other, and checking old rows. Did that place open, stall, or quietly give back the lease? A sheet nobody updates turns into a list of dead leads within a couple of months.
For one town it’s a fair trade. If a new account is worth a few thousand dollars a year to you, two hours a week pays off the first time it lands one.
Where it breaks down at scale
The hand method gets harder quickly as the territory grows. A 25-mile radius around a suburb can take in a dozen cities plus unincorporated county land, and each runs its own permit system with its own search, wording and schedule. Some publish clean weekly lists. Some post scanned PDFs. Some let you look up one address at a time.
- Every new jurisdiction adds setup time and another weekly check.
- The noise grows faster than the leads. Most permits are re-roofs, water heaters and office remodels, and most new registrations are consultants and holding companies.
- Matching gets harder, so you count one place twice or miss that a permit and a liquor application belong together.
- Status falls behind. You can’t drive past 80 storefronts a week to see which ones opened.
- You miss places changing hands. When a new owner takes over an existing restaurant there’s often nothing to see, only a new registration or liquor filing at an address that already has a kitchen. Those owners buy a lot (a new POS account, insurance, payroll, often new signs) and are the easiest leads to miss.
- Sources break. A city moves its permit search, a weekly report stops over the holidays, and you don’t notice for a month.
This is where most people either shrink the territory or pay for a service that does the matching. Both are reasonable.
How to work the list
Once you have the list, sort it by stage. The stage tells you whether to reach out this week, next month or not yet.
Sort by stage
Registration-only rows are a watch list. Rows with a building permit or a liquor filing are the core of the list for anyone selling setup services, equipment or contracts. Rows near final inspection are urgent for food and drink suppliers, cleaning and marketing, and usually too late for build-out work. Just-opened rows belong to services that start after day one. For restaurants, our guide to new restaurant leads goes stage by stage through which vendors buy when.
Find the person
Public filings rarely give you a good way to reach an owner, and you shouldn’t go hunting for a home address or a personal cell number. Reach the business the normal way:
- Stop by during the build-out. The general contractor or site supervisor is usually there on weekdays, knows when the owner comes by, and will often pass along a card.
- Check the business’s own website, Instagram or Facebook page for a contact or hiring email.
- Ask the landlord or leasing agent, especially in a shopping center. They want the tenant open on time.
- Once the place shows up on Google Maps with a phone number, call it.
Say something short and specific
An owner in a build-out is juggling a contractor, an inspector and a lender. Keep the first contact under a minute and tie it to their timeline. This works as a walk-in or a note left with the contractor:
“Hi, I’m [name] with [company]. I saw the restaurant going in here and wanted to drop off a card. Most new places set up [what you sell] a few weeks before their opening inspection, so whenever you get to it, I’d be glad to send a quote. No rush today.”
Then follow up when the stage changes instead of every Monday. The liquor application posts, the sign permit lands, the opening inspection passes: each is a natural reason to get back in touch (“Saw your sign permit went in. Are you still sorting out [what you sell]?”). For what to say once you’re in the room, see how to sell to restaurants.
Keep the sheet simple
One row per address, with these columns: address, name on the filing, name on the sign, type of place, stage, first seen, latest record and its date, how to reach them, last contact, next step and date, and outcome (won, lost, never opened).
On Monday, pull new records and update stages. Tuesday through Thursday, make visits and calls grouped by area. On Friday, mark what opened, what stalled and what you won or lost. After a few months the outcome column shows which stage your deals close at, and you can spend more of your week there.
Mistakes that waste a good list
- Pitching a registration with no address. There’s nobody to sell to yet.
- Walking into a place that just opened in the middle of lunch. Come between 2 and 4 in the afternoon.
- Treating every permit as a lead. Read the description, and drive past when it’s unclear.
- Contacting an owner at a home address found in a filing. It’s a quick way to lose the account before you have it.
Where Coming Soon Project fits
Coming Soon Project does the watching and the matching for one kind of business: restaurants, bars and cafés. It puts each project’s public filings together as one place per address, shows the stage it has reached, and adds new records to its timeline as they come in. It covers 96 metros in 18 states and right now lists 8,815 places that haven’t opened yet, plus restaurant addresses changing hands to new owners.
See what’s opening near you
Free: the first 5 places within 50 miles of any ZIP code.
It has two limits. If you sell to salons, gyms or retail shops, it won’t help, and the method above is still your best bet. And it shows business names only, never owners’ names, home addresses, phone numbers or emails, so you’ll still reach each place through the contractor, the landlord, its own pages or a listed phone number.
Without paying, you get the first 5 places on any city page, ZIP page or ZIP search, every place’s page with its stage and a timeline of its records, and the Friday Drop, a weekly email. Pro membership, $39.99 a month and cancel anytime, shows every result within 50 miles of any ZIP code, sends a daily email alert for up to 25 ZIP codes at the distance you choose, filters by type of place and stage (or leaves out places with a liquor filing), and exports any search to a spreadsheet with links to each place’s page, a Google search and its Google Maps listing when it has one.
Every new restaurant in your territory, every morning
Pro members get a daily email for up to 25 ZIP codes, every result in every search, filters by type of place and stage, and a spreadsheet of any search. $39.99 / month, cancel anytime.
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