Great Clips, the world’s largest and fastest growing salon, has more than 3,000 salons throughout United States and Canada. Great Clips’ franchise success depends on a growth strategy that is driven by rapidly opening new stores in the right locations and markets. The company needed to analyze the locations based on the requirements for a potential customer base, demographic trends, and sales impact on existing franchises in the target location. Choosing a good site is of utmost importance. The current processes took a long time to analyze a single site and a great deal of labor requiring intensive analyst resources was needed to manually assess the data from multiple data sources. With thousands of locations analyzed each year, the delay was risking the loss of prime sites to competitors and was proving expensive: Great Clips employed external contractors to cope with the delay. Great Clips created a site-selection workflow application to evaluate the new salon site locations by using the geospatial analytical capabilities of Alteryx. A new site location was evaluated by its drive-time proximity and convenience for serving all the existing customers of the Great Clips Salon network in the area. The Alteryx-based solution also enabled evaluation of each new location based on demographics and consumer behavior data, aligning with existing Great Clip’s customer profiles and the potential revenue impact of the new site on the existing sites. As a result of using location-based analytic techniques, Great Clips was able to reduce the time to assess new locations by nearly 95 percent. The labor-intensive analysis was automated and developed into a data collection analysis, mapping, and reporting application that could be easily used by the nontechnical real estate managers. Furthermore, it enabled the company to implement proactive predictive analytics for a new franchise location because the whole process now took just a few minutes.

Questions for Discussion
1. How is geospatial analytics employed at Great Clips?
2. What criteria should a company consider in evaluating sites for future locations?
3. Can you think of other applications where such geospatial data might be useful?