The One Critical Thing That Gets Overlooked When Searching for the Best Site for a Business

The One Critical Thing That Gets Overlooked When Searching for the Best Site for a Business

If you are a business owner or real estate site selection manager, there are a lot of things keeping you up at night. When you are ready to expand that business, there are even more. All those worries may lead you to overlook one critical factor that will determine the best site for a business.

If you are looking to expand your business, you already know that there are dozens of factors that go into the location decision. Parking, rent, visibility and zoning are just a few of the issues that you will be grappling with. Those issues are not nearly as important as the potential customers that you will be serving. The habits and characteristics of the people who live in the immediate vicinity of your potential location will predict your success or failure with much more accuracy than any of these other factors. Surprisingly, many expansion plans fail to properly account for that critical component when decisions are made.

You already have the recipe for success

It may not be a surprise that people – your potential customers – are the critical factor that determine the best site for a business. But what may surprise you is just how much you can learn about the people who live in a particular area.

Data sets and psychographics can give us a vivid picture about people and their habits and beliefs. We can use that information to determine just exactly which ingredients combined to create success in the past. Once we know which combination of ingredients worked in the past we can use that to help predict which will work in the future – just like following a recipe.

Past success – and failures – can predict the future

When you are looking to relocate – or open a new location – using that recipe for success can be your secret weapon, helping to guide you and avoid pitfalls that may lead to costly mistakes.

At OpenDoorData our proprietary site selection system has been used to create models – a recipe for success, if you will – for dozens of companies. Utilizing the performance records for a company’s existing locations, we can identify the most important human factors that drive success.

Thanks to the powerful data collection methods available today, it is now possible for you to know a lot more about people and the purchasing decisions they make than ever before. We can identify factors well beyond the usual demographics of household income, age and marital status.

We can then use what we know about those factors to identify possible future locations that replicate that environment. On the other hand, we can also use the same modeling to determine factors that may be inhibiting success and we can use that information to help you avoid locations that may hold hidden obstacles.

A new business? No problem

If you’re starting a new business you won’t have past history to rely on and you may think that without that roadmap to look back on, your future plans are unpredictable – but that’s not true. Whether you are starting an Italian restaurant, a jewelry store or a movie theater, businesses similar to the one you are starting can be used to determine the same recipe for success. Although the modeling may look slightly different, the same data points and demographics can be used to drill down and suggest a number of potential locations where the profitability and viability of your new business are much more likely.

Ready to determine the ingredients of your recipe for success and use them to choose the best site for a business? Click here to schedule a free consultation with the data scientists of OpenDoorData.