A café comes up for sale near you. The listing reads beautifully: established for years, prime pitch, loyal regulars, "£180,000 turnover", and a price that looks like a bargain against what a fit-out from scratch would cost you.

Buying a going concern can be the smart move. You skip the extraction quotes, the months of building work, the terrifying wait for your first paying customer. If you want to see exactly what you're avoiding, I've laid out what it really costs to open a café from a bare unit, and none of it is small.

But the accounts a seller hands you tell you what happened. They don't tell you what you're actually buying. And what you're actually buying is four things: the lease, the kit, the team, and the habits. Only one of those is on the listing.

Here's what to check before you sign anything.

The turnover claim is a marketing number until you prove it

The figure at the top of the listing is the one number the seller most wants you to believe, and the one you should trust least. "£180,000 turnover" on a sales particular is not evidence. It's an ask dressed up as a fact. Before it means anything, back it with three things that are hard to fake:

The POS exports. Ask for twelve months of daily sales straight out of the till, not a summary typed into a spreadsheet. Real till data has the texture of a real business: quiet Mondays, mad Saturdays, a dead fortnight in January, the coffee-to-food split, the average spend per head.
The VAT returns. If the business is VAT registered, the returns filed with HMRC are the closest thing to a sworn figure you'll get. What the seller claims to you should reconcile with what they declared to the taxman. If it doesn't, ask why, and listen very carefully to the answer.
The bank statements. Card takings land in the account. Match the deposits against the POS. Gaps that only ever appear in cash are worth a long, cold look.

If a seller won't hand over POS exports and VAT returns, that's your answer. A healthy café has nothing to hide in its till data. Get your accountant to reconcile all three before you get attached.

Then do the thing no spreadsheet can: sit in the café and watch it trade. More on that at the end, because it's the most useful hour you'll spend.

The lease is either the real asset or the real trap

The lease is often the most valuable thing you're buying. Occasionally it's the thing that quietly sinks the whole deal. Read it before you fall in love with the tiling.

Four things decide which one you've got:

Remaining term. Two years left is a very different purchase to twelve. A short remaining term means you inherit a renewal negotiation almost immediately, and the price you're paying should reflect that. If you've never run one, the levers that actually move money at lease renewal are worth reading before you buy, not after.
Upcoming rent reviews. A review landing next year can turn a workable rent into an unworkable one the moment you take over. Find out when the next one falls and whether it's upwards-only.
Repair obligations. A full repairing and insuring lease can hand you the cost of a new roof or a failed shopfront three years in. Know what you're on the hook for before it becomes your problem.
Landlord consent to assign. You cannot simply take over the lease because the seller says so. The landlord almost always has to consent to the assignment, and they can attach conditions, a rent deposit, or a guarantor requirement. The seller can agree everything with you over a handshake, and the landlord can still say no, or say yes with strings that change your numbers.

The kit: the espresso machine and the fridges are the expensive surprises

Walk the equipment with a notepad and a slightly cynical eye. Shiny is not the same as serviced.

Two things are where the money hides:

The espresso machine. A commercial two-group machine is thousands to replace and thousands to rebuild. Ask for the service history. When were the group heads last done, the boiler descaled, the pressure checked? A machine that "works fine" but hasn't been serviced in three years is a bill waiting to land in your first quarter.
Refrigeration. Under-counter fridges, the display chiller, the walk-in if there is one. Refrigeration dies without much warning and takes stock with it when it goes. Age and service history matter more than how clean the front looks.

Get the age, last service date, and any warranties on everything that plugs in. Then price the two or three most likely failures as if they'll happen in year one, because on a tired café one of them usually does. That number belongs in your offer.

The debts and contracts that travel with the business

Depending on how the deal is structured, you may inherit more than the good bits. Squarely solicitor and accountant territory, but know what to ask about:

Supplier accounts. Any outstanding balances? Any account on stop? A seller who's been stretching their coffee roaster's payment terms to flatter the cash position is handing you a strained relationship along with the beans.
Committed contracts. Equipment leases on the ice machine or coffee machine, a long POS contract, a waste contract, a hygiene or linen contract, a card-terminal rental. Some are multi-year and hard to exit. Get the list, the end dates, the exit costs.
Deposits and prepayments. Rent deposit, utility deposits, any gift vouchers or loyalty balances customers can still redeem against you.

None of this is on the listing. All of it is real money.

The team transfers with its terms attached: TUPE

If the café has staff and you're buying it as a going concern, the employees almost certainly transfer to you under TUPE, on their existing terms and conditions, with their continuous service intact.

You don't get to quietly reset everyone to your preferred contract. Holiday entitlement, pay rates, notice periods, length of service for redundancy: it all comes with them, and there are consultation obligations that are expensive to get wrong.

This is the second thing that bites, alongside lease assignment, and the one buyers most often don't see coming. A good team is one of the best things you can inherit, but you get them as they are, not as you'd design them.

Goodwill is worth less when the owner is the goodwill

Here's the uncomfortable question to ask about any well-loved café: how much of that warmth is the business, and how much is the person selling it to you?

If the regulars come in for Sue behind the counter, who's known their order for nine years, then a chunk of the "goodwill" you're paying for walks out the door with Sue on completion day. The name over the door didn't build that loyalty. She did.

That doesn't mean don't buy it. It means price the goodwill honestly and think hard about the handover. A seller who'll stay on for a few weeks to introduce you to the regulars and the suppliers is worth far more than one who hands you the keys and disappears to Spain.

If you're an existing operator buying this as a second site, be doubly wary of the habits you're inheriting, because you can't be in two places at once. Everything I learned the hard way about what breaks when you go from one café to two applies double when the second site comes with someone else's undocumented routines baked in.

The other thing that leaves with the owner is the true cost picture. The seller knows, in their head, what a flat white and a slice of cake cost to make at today's supplier prices. You don't, yet. One of the first jobs after completion is to recost every line from the real invoices, because the margins on the old menu were built on the old owner's deals. That invoice-to-recipe rebuild is exactly what CostingBrik was built to do, and it's the fastest way to find out whether the business you bought makes the money the listing promised.

The observation week beats any spreadsheet

Do this before you exchange, and more than once.

Sit in the café. Not for ten minutes with the seller hovering. Buy a coffee, take a corner table, and watch. Do it on a Tuesday morning, a Friday lunchtime, and a Saturday, in the rain and in the sun.

Count the covers. Count how many actually buy, and roughly what they spend. Watch how long the queue gets and how fast it clears. Notice whether it's mostly coffees or coffees plus food, whether the staff look happy, whether the machine is limping.

You'll learn more about whether "£180,000 turnover" is real from three visits at different times than from any set of accounts. The books can be tidied. A quiet Tuesday cannot.

What you're actually buying

You're buying the lease, the kit, the team, and the habits. The listing shows you one of them and puts a hopeful number on top. The accounts are the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

So verify the turnover against the till and the VAT returns, confirm you can actually take the lease on, price the tired kit honestly, and remember the team comes with its terms and the goodwill may walk out with the owner.

Then sit in the corner with a flat white and watch the place run. Only one of those four things is on the listing. The other three decide whether you bought a business or a very expensive lesson.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.