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Choose the Best Location For Your Business Using Heat Mapping


7 min read

The location of your business is often crucial to its success. You need to consider where your clients live, work or hang out, where your suppliers are located, what other businesses are in the area and the costs associated with operating in that location...just to name a few. And as your business grows and changes, you might need to consider additional locations to complement your original site.

Why not use tools like heat maps to make a data-driven decision on the best location?

A Case Study in Heat Mapping a Business Location

This gutter cleaning and roof restoration business was looking to expand and, as part of its growth strategy, required new business headquarters.

The company provides a range of property maintenance services – mostly focused on roofing – to both residential and commercial clients across Melbourne and Brisbane.

Propella.ai was engaged to help the client make an objective, data-driven decision on the optimal location. While a number of factors played into this decision, proximity to revenue 'hotspots' was a key influencing factor.

Identifying Revenue Hotspots

The Propella team was able to extract job and sales history from the client’s field service system and ensure that all jobs were appropriately geo-coded (latitude and longitude coordinates assigned). The team then ran the data through visualisation software to provide a geo-spatial representation of job activity for the business.

Visualisation software to provide a geo-spatial representation of job activity for the business

Heat Mapping

Once the job data had been properly geo-coded and plotted on map visuals, the team created a heat map of all Melbourne jobs over the past 12 months, using the invoice amount as the dependent variable. This allowed the business to definitively observe (for the first time) where the "money was coming from" (i.e. sales) over the past year.

Using a heat map to choose business locations

Quantifying Data Using Clustering

While the heat map helped to visualise the areas of greatest sales activity for the business, applying clustering allowed the company to quantify the hotspots in terms of aggregated sales over the period. This was really the final piece of the puzzle.

Quantifying data using clustering

Choosing the Best Business Location

Following this data-driven process, our client was able to confidently identify the suburbs they should target for their next business site.

Using data to choose new business site

The next step was to review of available properties in the target suburbs, knowing that these areas represented the optimal location for their next headquarters.

Growing a business requires huge amounts of research, planning and forecasting. Strategically using data to help drive decisions around growth and operations is a great way for business owners to set up the best platform for business success and confident decisions.

Get in touch with BlueRock if you’d like to discuss how to use data to make great business decisions.

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