Investing in a franchise looks an attractive proposition to give professionals the chance to build their own business utilising an already established brand.

As with any business the challenge still is to be profitable and grow. Investing in a franchise is not cheap, with the initial investment comprising of franchise fees, supplier fees, furniture and various equipment, not to mention staff. With this significant outlay and investment driving success quickly is key and one of the main drivers of this is your location.

Hence location intelligence is critical when assessing a potential new location for your franchise and its success. You may be considering a restaurant franchise for example; location intelligence helps you to determine the factors that make a franchise a success by analysing and visualising data on customers, the catchment area it covers, the residential and business population density of the area, how customers travel to the location and other data sets that you deem appropriate for your franchise to be successful.

In recent years data has become richer and companies have increasingly turning to location intelligence to ensure they are investing wisely – it is one of the biggest business strategy trends. Location intelligence involves assessing data and discovering patterns and correlations that allow for business scenarios to be built. In addition to this having a good understanding of how your potential customers live and move about enables you to curate your offering for them and look for areas to expand into.

Analysing results with other franchises help establish patterns that point to particular success factors, and a ‘ideal’ area profile can be built. What remains then is to find locations that match as realistically as possible to this profile.
Research by the International Data Corporation shows that companies using data in this way are ten per cent more profitable and five per cent more productive than those that do not.