Date Posted: 11/8/2012 2:53:03 AM
Posted By: fly1234 Membership Level: Bronze Total Points: 15
How do you get your clients through the door of your business? Basically, this question is asking how to identify a good location for your business. They always say 'location' but they never tell us anything beyond that. So we are, often left wondering which steps might be useful to take, when identifying a good location.Furthermore, a good location is usually expensive in terms of rental cost. A bad one is cheaper, due to less traffic involved. Every business needs good traffic to succeed. Improved infrastructures such as roads, for example tend to encourage settlements which convert to potential customers. A practical example would be the recently constructed Thika Road supper-highway, which has attracted investors such as Nakumatt holdings Ltd, real estates among others.Irene Dickey, a lecturer in management and marketing at the University of Dayton's School of Business, says there are only three most important factors namely; "location, location, location". She goes ahead to affirm that there are a plentiful of sophisticated location analysis tools out there that captures data on traffic patterns,demography, lifestyle and nature of competition.Retailers may ask several questions before they can set up their premises. For instance, they would want to know the optimum level of traffic related to the specific target trade area, the overall type of traffic, or if there is a way to measure traffic pattern once the consumers are inside the store.Entrepreneurs might find it a daunting task when it comes to all the jargon that comes with determining a good location. They might want an easy formula that's practical enough to guarantee traffic.We call it 'Neighborhood traffic generators'. It is simply a concept where a new retailer doesn't shy away from a competitor, rather, he sets up his business near his competitor to enjoy ready traffic that the competitor is attracting. This is a way of saving on advertisement cost, which has already been covered by the competitor. It can turn out to be a frustrating experience when one opens a store in an isolated area. Carlos Silva, co-founder of Memphis Championship Barbecue in Las Vegas, says, "We opened our first business in the middle of nowhere, and we had to work to get people to go to it". However, if they had only set up their business premise within the central business area, they would have saved on the cost of advertisement.Many entrepreneurs thing that it is rule of thumb to establish a premise in a non competitive area. What they don't know is that they end up spending a lot of money in advertisement costs. Because at the end of the day, they have to tell people where they are and that is a cost that could have been covered by the competitor.
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