Choosing Your Next Ten Locations: Site Selection With Data for Multi-Outlet Brands

The first few outlets of a brand are usually chosen by the founder, on instinct and local knowledge, and many of them work. The trouble starts at outlet six or sixteen, when the founder can no longer walk every street and each decision is made a little differently. That is when brands begin to open stores that close within a year.

The fix is not to remove judgement. It is to make the same judgement the same way every time, with a scorecard.

Start from the outlets that work

Before scoring anything new, look at your existing outlets. List the best and the worst, and write down what each location had: the catchment, the footfall, the frontage, the neighbours, the rent. The patterns in that list are your brand’s real requirements, and they are often different from the ones in the brochure.

The scorecard

We score every candidate location on seven things. Weight them for your format: a dessert kiosk and a family restaurant care about different things.

1. Catchment. Who lives and works within your delivery radius, or within a ten-minute drive or walk. The size of the population matters less than whether it is your customer.
2. Footfall. Count it yourself, at your peak trading hours, on a weekday and a weekend. Footfall at 11 am tells you nothing about a bar.
3. Visibility and access. Can the storefront be seen from both directions of traffic? Is there parking, or a place for a delivery rider to stop?
4. Co-tenancy and competition. Good neighbours bring the right crowd. Direct competitors next door can help or hurt, depending on whether the street is a destination for your category.
5. Occupancy cost. Keep rent and maintenance within roughly 10–15% of what the outlet can realistically turn over. A cheap space on a quiet street fails this test as surely as an expensive one.
6. Cannibalisation. Map your existing outlets and delivery zones. A new store that mostly takes orders from your own nearest outlet adds cost, not revenue.
7. Practicalities. Power load, kitchen exhaust, drainage, licences and fit-out time. These rarely decide a location, but they regularly kill one after the decision is made.

From map to shortlist

With the scorecard in place, the search becomes a funnel:

• Find the gaps. Map where your customers are and where your outlets are not.
• Shortlist streets, not spaces. Score three times as many streets as you plan to open outlets, and keep only the top third.
• Then look for space. Search for vacant or soon-to-be-vacant units on those streets, including off-market ones.
• Visit only what scores well. It saves weeks of site visits.

Use what you know about demand

A street’s rent is set by how many brands want it. GVS tracks over 600 brand requirements, so we know which categories are chasing which streets and what they are prepared to pay. That tells a brand how much competition it faces for a space, and tells an owner what the space can command. You can try a simple version in the rent check on our Enterprise page.

Close the loop after opening

Every outlet you open is a test of the scorecard. Compare each new outlet’s first six months against its score. Where the score was wrong, change the weights. After a few rounds, the scorecard starts to predict which locations will work, and expansion becomes far less of a gamble.

Where GVS fits

Our leasing desk finds and negotiates the space, and our site selection service does the analysis behind the choice: catchment, footfall, rent benchmarks and a ranked shortlist. Brands planning several outlets can brief the desk or book a strategy call.