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.
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 for us incredibly simple, and give us clear unbiased recommendations.
The team
We’ve been in the committee room. We know what it takes to defend a recommendation.
Real estate operators, not just technologists. We’ve sat across from skeptical CFOs and boards. We built GrowthFactor to survive those conversations.
Clyde Christian Anderson
CEOGrew 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.
Raj Shrimali
CTOHas 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 glass box architecture is his answer to that problem.
Sam Hall
COOOperations 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.
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 Buxton.
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
3X
expansion rate increase
Cavender’s went from 9 new stores to 27 in one year
25
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 150+ locations in under 6 months
Built in the USA
GrowthFactor is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Our team, our data infrastructure, and our analyst network are all US-based. We believe where you build matters.
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