It's 4:45 PM --- you've been up since 5 AM and you're ready to go home. You get a call out of the blue - asking for a "quick analysis" of a particular piece of geography for a new location for your company. What data can you quickly get your hands on so that you can form an intelligent position, and how do you use all those reports, anyway?
Site
location is part art and part science. One needs to understand the current
business landscape, the demographics of the area, the traffic patterns and as
much as possible about future plans for development. And, a little bit of basic
math helps, too!
Basic concept: Primary Trade Area
The
primary trade area is actually exactly what one might guess it to be. It is the
main area that most of your customers are coming from. Depending upon the
frequency of your sales cycle and the uniqueness of your products and services
in the market, you make some assumptions about how far your prospects are
willing to go to get to your location.
For
convenience locations such as grocery stores, gas stations, coffee shops and
banks, people generally don't travel too far (relatively speaking) from their
point of origin. The opposite is true for destination locations, such as
specialty restaurants, theme parks, specialty clothing stores, et al. Distance
willing to travel is actually a function of availability of goods and services
and population density.
Translated
into practical terms, a person in an office in Manhattan is more likely to get
cash from the nearest ATM (within a block or two) where as a homeowner on an
Iowa farm may have to travel 10 miles to get to the closest bank branch in
town.
How do you determine your Primary Trade Area?
You
could take a map out of your car, stick it on the wall, and throw darts, OR,
you could spend a little time with a mapping package and do some neat
calculations.
If
your business isn't very dynamic, you don't need to reassess your trade area
more than once a year. If you are growing, it makes sense to make mapping out
your customers relative to the prospective pool of prospects a company metric.
There
are lots of advanced calculations that take into consideration the competition,
traffic patterns, store attractiveness and prospect population, but if you
don't have much time or competitor data, the best way to get a handle on your
customers is to plot them out on a map and see where they live. Then, depending
upon whether your consider yourself to be a convenience location or a
destination location, you determine where the closest 50 - 80% of your
customers live (or work). Use 50% if you are more of a convenience location and
go out anywhere from 65-90% to determine your primary drawing area for
destination locations.
Determine
how far people will walk/drive to come to your location. "Ring
studies" are called that because the mapping person puts circles around
around the location and calculates the number of customers and prospects that
exist within each mileage band. Another way to look at your customers is to ask
for a drive time isochrone....that is, a unique polygon shape that follows the
road network that shows you how many minutes most customers need to drive to
get to your location. (Picture a city with 5 major roadways convening at the
city center. A drive time isochrone might look like a star shape because people
driving fast on the major roadways can get in faster than those in the more
congested (and lower speed limit) side streets.
Convenience
locations are generally 5 minutes or less in the dense suburbs, and can be up
to 20 or more out in the more rural areas. There are more detailed ways to
calculate trade areas - but if you're looking for something quick that most
people understand and won't question you'll get the basics straight so that you
can say something like:
"70%
of our customers come from within 7 miles of the store, that's about a 15
minute drive time."
Now what?
If
you have one location, then when you are expanding you know that you have been
successful with this particular location and can at least use your current
assumptions to review the proposed site. If you have several locations, then
classify your stores first by type, profitability, size, or other metrics, then
lay out the distance and drive time data in a spreadsheet. You're starting to
build some intelligence!
Next step, buy data.
Census
data is great, but it is dated. Populations are constantly changing in relation
to the economy of an area. If you are serious about understanding and growing
your business, don't rely on free or cheap estimates. Spend a few hundred
dollars and get what you need so that you can confidently approach the bank (or
your spouse, boss, investor etc.) with information you can hang your hat on.
Here's
what I usually recommend for a good understanding of the potential for a site:
Each report is about $50 depending on where you buy it from, and most of the
time it is packaged so you can expect to pay between $250 - $500 for a series
of site reports that you can use over and over to assess or market a property.
1.
Census counts, current year estimates and five year projections for current
population and current households. Include population described by segments
such as Education, Home Value, Occupations, Race, Language spoken
2.
Income distribution, net worth
3.
Lifestyle/Lifestage assessment
4.
Traffic counts
5.
Business counts
6.
Relief map (shows the terrain)
7.
Market Potential Estimates
8.
Consumer Expenditure, Retail Sales reports
...then analyze it!
So
you have the data, now what? Analyze it. What I mean is take some time to study
the reports and pull out factors that are important to your business. Make some
basic assumptions given what you know. Here's a little secret: no one approach
is *right*. No one can predict the future -- no one. But what you can do is
estimate based on what you know and prepare for scenarios that might play out.
There
are several ways to estimate potential. You can take a bottoms up or a top down
approach.
An
example of bottoms up logic might work like this: I am starting a new
restaurant. How often do people eat out in my area? (Market Potential) How much
do they spend on food outside the home?(Consumer Expenditure data) If X percent
of the population eats Y food, how far out do I have to get Z customers? What's
my gross sales if I get 5% of the available prospects to come in one time?
twice? monthly? What's the turnover in population in my area? Is the area
growing? Are people moving away at a rate higher than the county, the state,
the metro?
An
example of tops down logic might start out with an assumption that you need to
bring in $xx,xxx/month to meet your profitablilty goals. You then calculate how
many customers you need based on your average service/product cost. Look at
similar businesses to get a demographic profile (list of characteristics) of
your most likely prospects -- then create a few reports assuming that people
can drive 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1/2 hour or more to your location.
Site
location isn't brain surgery, but it does require spending some time to think
about the factors that can make or break a business. Arm yourself with a few
reports. Run them for your area as well as for areas that you know are
successful. Make up a little formula to help you estimate your potential and
use the reports to fill in the blanks. Use Excel to create comparisons between
what you know and what you estimate.
Whatever
you do, don't get "analysis paralysis". The biggest problem with any
business planning is pouring over data and market information trying to get an
exact prediction of success. Follow your gut, use the data to support your
intuition or to make you think harder about various scenarios that might play
out.