You have outgrown the space. What funds a buildout, a month of two rents and the week you are closed?

The visible cost is the movers and the deposit. The real cost is the list around them: a buildout to make the new space usable, an overlap month or two when both leases are running, the signage and the utilities setup, the marketing to tell customers where you went, and — the one every guide leaves out — the days the business is closed or at half capacity while the shelves are in a truck. For a small commercial space, the total commonly runs from several thousand dollars to the tens of thousands, and the overlap and the closed days are where the surprise lives.

A tenant improvement allowance is the landlord paying for some or all of the buildout, amortized into the rent or simply given, because a leased-out unit with a good tenant is worth more than an empty one. Free rent for the first month or two is the same logic. Both are normal in commercial leasing and both are negotiated before signature, not after. A tenant who asks for a buildout allowance and two months free is not being difficult. A tenant who funds the landlord's improvements out of an advance is.

What the lease does not cover — the overlap rent, the deposit, the movers, the IT and phone cutover, and a buffer equal to a week or two of payroll and fixed costs for the days you are not fully trading — is a working capital loan or a line of credit on your current location's deposits. Decision in about a day, money in one to three business days, amounts around half to one and a half times a month's deposits.

Send the new lease and the old one with the statements. A funder reading a signed lease at a larger space, next to a year of growing deposits, is reading a business expanding; the same request with statements alone is an unexplained amount.

A bigger space usually needs more of whatever the business runs on — racking for a warehouse, a longer cooking line, more stations, more lifts — and all of it is an asset. Equipment financing over two to seven years with the vendor paid directly is far cheaper than putting the fit-out on the same advance as the movers. Two applications, two days apart.