Choosing the right location for your business is easier with a site selection report.
Location matters when it comes to retail business success. Ask any retail or B2C business owner of any kind. The bottom line is that, if you run a business that requires you to meet your customers face-to-face to showcase merchandise, make service calls, or process transactions, the where of your business is at least as important as the what or how.
It is unfortunate, then, that so many companies underestimate some of the most important site selection factors or to gut feeling.
MindEcology’s site selection services take the guesswork out of where to situate your new restaurant, store, or office by carefully analyzing the location characteristics that lead to success and then finding locations that exhibit those characteristics. The ideal location profile is never the same for any two companies. In fact, even two companies operating within the same industry niche still likely have very ideal location profiles.
A serene lunch & coffee destination-Sage Coffee, South Congress Avenue/Austin, TX
The link between choice of location and business success is clear. In our experience, there are three* primary factors that influence desirability of any given candidate location:
* location success for some types of businesses can also hinge upon a fourth factor: its relative proximity to large or "big box" stores. For example, choosing to locate one’s business in a shopping center that also contains one or more major chain stores can attract large amounts of foot traffic to the center, which helps out other businesses in the area.
In our experience, most companies going through a site selection decision-making process make the mistake of focusing solely on factors #1 (quality of facility) and #2 (accessibility) while largely ignoring factor #3 ("who" lives and works nearby). This is unfortunate, since demographic and psychographic factors vary greatly by geographical area.
MindEcology can develop a prioritized list of prime locations for your business based upon the all-important "who" factor, which is the makeup of the people who live and work there. Learn more about MindEcology’s SitePoint technology.
Our site selection process essentially involves three phrases. For companies with a history of existing stores in operation, we take the following steps:
We start the target market analysis by analyzing your business model and producing a set of demographics, psychographic and geographic factors that are likely to be associated with a business like yours. We then complete the remainder of the process as outlined in #3 and #4 above.
At MindEcology, we firmly believe that site selection recommendations are only valuable when the information presented can be understood and acted upon without requiring a Ph.D. in information science or geography. We pride ourselves in presenting our results to your team in clear, actionable terms.
Specifically, our site selection analysis for your business will results in three primary deliverables:
Once you have received the results of our analysis, you can work with your internal real estate team or a commercial real estate broker to make your final selection choice(s) based upon quality of facility and accessibility factors.
The steps that we take in the site selection process in many ways mirror that of our best customer profiling process. The main difference is that, instead of analyzing historical customers, we are analyzing the demographic or other attributes of the historical (i.e., existing) locations. Our goal is to find correlations between these various attributes and the success of these existing stores.
For companies that have fewer than 100 existing locations, our site selection process involves the application of traditional statistical techniques in order to find meaningful patterns.
For companies that have more than 100 existing locations, we often choose to apply machine learning techniques in order to find predictive patterns in the data.
Our process involves both Data Discovery and Predictive Modeling techniques.
Thinking of conducting a site selection analysis for your new store, restaurant or office? Contact MindEcology today to learn more about the benefits of engaging us for our site selection services.
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