Our story

We built the platform we needed to defend our own numbers.

GrowthFactor started as a consulting team helping retailers with site selection. We lived the same spreadsheet nightmare—and watched our clients walk into committee unable to explain where the numbers came from.

Boston-based. MIT-backed. Trusted by teams who have to defend every recommendation.

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GrowthFactor founders graduating from MIT

Born from real work, not a whiteboard

The founding team was consulting for Books-A-Million on site selection. Evaluating locations meant pulling data from Placer, Esri, CoStar, census databases, Google Sheets, and three other tools—then copy-pasting it all into a spreadsheet, running VLOOKUPs, and hoping nothing broke.

The analysts were spending more time assembling data than analyzing sites. And when it came time to present? “Trust us, the model says yes.” No one could explain why one site scored higher than another. No one could defend the recommendation.

So we stopped consulting and started building. One platform that replaces the entire toolkit—with scoring you can actually explain when someone asks “where did this number come from?”

Other services hide behind black-box models that are hard to trust. The beauty of GrowthFactor is they make site selection incredibly simple, and give us clear unbiased recommendations.

Mike CavenderCo-Owner and Head of Real Estate, Cavender's Western Wear

Leadership

We’ve been in the committee room. We know what it takes to defend a recommendation.

Founders who built the platform alongside a President who’s scaled national retail brands. We’ve sat across from skeptical CFOs and boards—and we’ve been the ones in the corner office. We built GrowthFactor to survive those conversations.

Clyde Christian Anderson

CEO

Grew up in a retail family, evaluating sites since age 15. Went from walking store floors to Wells Fargo investment banking, then BDT & MSD Partners. Built GrowthFactor because he saw the gap between how real estate decisions should be made and how they actually are.

MIT MBAWells Fargo Investment BankingBDT & MSD Partners

Off the clock: Peloton, board games, and a stint as a competitive Magic: The Gathering player. By his own assessment, a mediocre D3 football player at UChicago.

Rick Vanzura

President

Twenty-five years as a C-suite retail operator. Scaled Wahlburgers from a single location into a $100 million brand as CEO. Held senior roles at Panera Bread (EVP & Co-COO), Freight Farms (CEO), GameStop (Chief Strategy Officer), and Borders Group (President of divisions). Joined GrowthFactor to lead go-to-market and customer expansion.

Harvard MBACEO, WahlburgersEVP & Co-COO, Panera Bread

Off the clock: 45 miles a week of running (often spotted huffing and puffing along Hull beach), guitar as a perpetual work-in-progress, and family.

Raj Shrimali

CTO

Has been building AI systems since age 16. Spent years at Deloitte building predictive models for Fortune 500 companies—and watched those models get treated as black boxes that nobody trusted. GrowthFactor’s fully inspectable scoring is his answer to that problem.

Deloitte AI ConsultingFortune 500 Predictive ModelsMIT

Off the clock: been writing code since his dad first sat him down at age 6. Eats, sleeps, and breathes AI.

Sam Hall

COO

Operations specialist who’s seen how enterprise tools fail at the implementation level. Cut his teeth at Bain & Company, then ran operations at Chord Commerce. Knows that the best platform in the world is worthless if teams can’t get live in a day.

Princeton EngineeringBain & CompanyHead of Ops, Chord Commerce

Off the clock: licensed pilot (now too cautious to fly), 5-handicap golfer, and on the steering committee for OpenMinds—a nonprofit working on energy access and emissions reduction.

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How we think

If you can’t explain it in committee, you shouldn’t recommend it.

That’s the principle behind everything we build. Every score traceable. Every recommendation defensible.

Defensibility over cleverness

Our scoring shows exactly why a site gets the grade it gets. No black boxes. No “trust us.” If you disagree with a score, you can see the inputs and adjust the weights. Try that with a black-box tool.

Your workflow, not another tool

Every feature exists to eliminate a tool from your stack. Not to give you one more thing to log into. If we can’t replace at least two of your current tools, we haven’t earned a seat.

Live in a day, not a quarter

Implementation is where most enterprise software fails. We’re live in one day—no IT project, no six-week onboarding. Your team should get value in their first session, not their first month.

By the numbers

What happens when site selection actually works

expansion rate increase

Cavender’s went from 9 new stores to 27 in one year

hours saved per analyst per week

Books-A-Million eliminated the spreadsheet shuffle

700

sites evaluated in 72 hours

BAM used GrowthFactor during the Party City bankruptcy

10X

more sites to committee

TNT Fireworks opened 153 locations in under 6 months

From the founder

We’re building the operating system for retail real estate

We hit $1M in recurring revenue before we raised a single dollar of venture capital. Clyde on what actually happened—and where we take it next.

Clyde Christian Anderson, CEO5 min read

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