Forecourt design and shopfitting are the foundations of any forecourt business. After all, if the forecourt doesn’t look inviting or doesn’t advertise its services properly to passing traffic, then the business will fall at the first hurdle because nobody will come in. “The site needs to project an inviting appearance from the road and be easy for customers to use,” says Alec Cornish-Trestail, who runs forecourt design company ACT Design. “There isn’t one big secret to achieving this,” he continues. “It’s actually lots of little things and attention to detail. Retailers need to stand back and try and evaluate how motorists and customers see their site. Why do potential customers decide to turn in or not? And once they are on the site, how do customers view the facilities? Was it easy to park, use the car wash or the ATM?” The shop is the most crucial element on today’s forecourt and needs to be designed to give a high return for the space, with added features such as parking, cash machines and car washes all planned to complement the business. Cornish-Trestail – whose clients include the likes of the Frasers, the Touts and much of the Lakeside group, all proactive independent retailers who know the strength of the shop – says: “The main trend with service stations today is that the shop is getting bigger and bigger and is only restricted by the 3,000sq ft rule (forecourt shops are not allowed to exceed this size for unlimited opening hours on Sundays).” He adds: “All shops are different to a degree but most of them are built from scratch in order to achieve the ideal floor plan and size. Very often it is too complicated and expensive to convert existing buildings and at the end of the day you have a compromised design that doesn’t quite achieve the original aims of providing a first class c-store that can beat all the competitors in your area.” Spar Scotland’s forecourt business controller Ewen Chisolm agrees. He says: “As far as shopfitting and design are concerned, the whole forecourt side is taking its lead from the c-store sector so we look at what works in our c-stores and then trial that in our forecourts. “The traditional forecourt shop is too small for today’s requirements so we look to extend it or do a knockdown and rebuild to gain a shop of around 2,000sq ft.” Building a shop from scratch is not as indulgent as it might seem. Cornish-Trestrail explains: “Although new shops are expensive to build it is very easy to obtain an excellent return on your investment. For every £100,000 you spend on creating a new shop you only have to increase your turnover by £2,000 in order to achieve a 20% return on your investment. Even a £500,000 investment only requires an extra £10,000 per week of shop sales. A well-designed and developed shop should be able to achieve these extra sales figures easily. However, retailers should remember that new shops do take around two years to come up to running volume after extensive redevelopment works are carried out. “One last thing I would say is that you have to use specialised contractors. Don’t take short cuts when fitting out the shop if you want to see the returns.”