The Spreadsheet Moment
I spent 15 years in retail real estate before starting GrowthFactor. In that time, I watched hundreds of site decisions get made. The good ones. The bad ones. The ones that nobody could explain after the fact.
The moment that crystallized everything happened in 2022. I was sitting in a committee meeting where a team was presenting a $2.1M build-to-suit opportunity. The analysis was a 47-tab Excel workbook. The demographic data was 6 months old. The competitive analysis was a list of names pulled from Google Maps. And the recommendation was based on the expansion manager's assessment that the trade area "felt right."
The site was approved. It opened 14 months later. It underperformed projections by 35% in Year 1.
Nobody was surprised. Not really.
The Problem We Saw
The retail site selection process hasn't fundamentally changed in 30 years. The data sources have gotten better. The demographic providers have added more variables. But the analytical workflow — collect data, format it, present it, debate it, decide — remains essentially manual.
This creates three problems. First, it's slow. A thorough site evaluation takes 4 to 6 hours of analyst time. When you're evaluating 200 sites a year, that's a full-time job just on initial assessments. Second, it's inconsistent. Different analysts weight different factors. The same site can get a strong recommendation from one evaluator and a pass from another. Third, it's disconnected. The data lives in spreadsheets, the decisions live in emails, and the performance outcomes live in a different system entirely. Nobody is closing the loop.
What We Built
Raj, Sam, and I started GrowthFactor in 2023 with a simple thesis: the site selection process should be as rigorous and data-driven as the financial underwriting that happens downstream of it.
We built a platform that scores every site against five standardized lenses. Demographics, Competition, Accessibility, Visibility, and Economic Indicators. Each lens generates a component score. The components roll up into a GF Score between 0 and 100. The score doesn't make the decision — the expansion team does — but it provides a consistent, objective starting point for every evaluation.
Then we wrapped the scoring engine in a workflow tool. Deal Dashboard for pipeline management. Deal Dropbox for broker submissions. Shareable Maps for stakeholder communication. The goal was to give expansion teams a single system for the entire site evaluation lifecycle, from initial lead to committee presentation.
What We've Learned
Two years in, the biggest lesson is that the technology isn't the hard part. The hard part is changing how people make decisions. Expansion teams that have been successful for decades are understandably skeptical of a score that claims to encapsulate their market knowledge in a number.
The teams that get the most value from GrowthFactor aren't the ones that blindly follow the GF Score. They're the ones that use it as a starting point — a way to quickly identify which sites deserve deeper analysis and which ones can be screened out early. The score doesn't replace expertise. It amplifies it.
That's the vision we're building toward. Not AI that makes decisions for people, but AI that makes people's decisions better. Faster. More consistent. And ultimately, more profitable.
What's Next
We're investing heavily in predictive analytics — using the performance data from our customers' existing locations to build models that forecast what a new site will generate. It's the next logical step: from "Is this a good site?" to "How much will this site produce?"
If you're in retail expansion and this resonates, I'd love to talk. Not a sales pitch — a conversation about how the industry is changing and where you see the biggest opportunities and challenges.
That's how GrowthFactor started, after all. With a conversation.