Entitlement · Permitting · Licensing — Los Angeles
Entitlements, permitting, and land use consulting for Los Angeles operators. One consultant carrying the agency-facing work from the zoning question to the open door.
Most projects do not stall because someone did the work badly. They stall because a submittal went in out of order, a condition went unread, or a department was never told the project existed. That is the part we own.
How it works
The sequence is the whole product. Get it wrong and you pay for it in months.
We pull the zoning, verify the use, and check whether the address qualifies for the fast, ministerial route. This is a half hour of work that routinely changes a project by eight months.
You getA written route and a fixed feePlanning, Building & Safety, Fire, Public Health, and the State all want different things and none of them talk to each other. We file together, track every open comment, and chase each to closure.
CadenceA written update every weekAuthorization gets recorded, conditions get cleared, the license gets effectuated. Then we hand you the conditions you now operate under — in language you can actually follow.
MilestoneOpen for businessThe fork in the road
Los Angeles zoning data flags certain addresses for a ministerial alcohol path — approved on published criteria instead of at a public hearing. We check yours before we quote anything.
Services
Liquor licensing is where most of our work starts. It is rarely where it ends.
The liquor license itself — and the local authorization the State will not issue without.
Type 41, 47, 20, 21 and license transfers. We set the ownership tier at intake, prepare the application, run Live Scan, order the radius map, mail the notice, post the premises, and carry the file through the protest period to effectuation.
Owners file with the State first and then discover the City has not authorized the use. The State will not issue until local authorization is recorded, so the City track sets your opening date — not the State. We file both together.
Everything a food and beverage tenant needs between the lease and the first cover.
The ministerial alcohol clearance where the address qualifies, health plan check, and the Certificate of Occupancy that ties it all off — sequenced so no department sends you back to one you already cleared.
A change of use into a restaurant quietly triggers grease interceptor, ventilation, accessibility and occupancy work that was never in the build budget. That belongs in feasibility, not in your third correction notice.
Sidewalk and on-street seating, and the alcohol service that goes with it.
Revocable permits through Public Works, accessory outdoor seating approvals, owner authorization, and the path-of-travel details that decide whether your patio passes on the first inspection.
Serving alcohol on a new patio is two filings, not one — the State premises diagram has to be amended and the local authorization extended to cover it. Miss either and the patio opens dry.
Retail tobacco licensing, and the conditions that come attached to it.
Local tobacco retailer permits, proximity requirements, and renewals — filed alongside your business license and any liquor license on the same premises, because the agencies will look at them together.
Tobacco and liquor at the same address get reviewed as one story. Filed in the wrong order, an approval you already hold becomes the reason the next one is denied. Sequence is the whole game here.
The discretionary approvals — the ones decided by a person, not a checklist.
Conditional use permits, zone changes, variances and density bonus. Case filing, findings, radius noticing, and representation through the hearing to a written determination.
Findings written to get through a hearing and findings written to survive an appeal are not the same document. We write the second kind the first time, because the neighbor who objects does not stop at the hearing.
The analysis that tells you whether to take the site at all.
What the parcel is actually zoned for, what it can become, and what that will cost you in months — delivered before you sign a lease or open escrow, while the answer can still change your decision.
By the time a correction notice tells you the parking does not work, you are already the tenant. Feasibility is the cheapest work we do, and finding it out in plan check is the most expensive.
How we quote
You get a fixed fee against a written scope before anything is filed. Here is what that means in practice.
Our fee is set before work starts and does not move because the file turned out to be complicated. That risk is ours to carry, not yours.
What the City and the State charge is never folded into our number. You pay those directly, at cost, and we never mark them up.
Invoices are tied to real events — filing, issuance — not to hours logged or to the calendar turning over.
If the City moves the goalposts, you get a written change order explaining what changed and what it costs, before the work happens.
Project intake
Written response within one business day: the likely route, a realistic timeline, and a fixed fee for a defined scope.