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YOU never know, you just might get lucky. Like Bill Pintner.
One day last year, while peering at a five-year-old aerial photograph of Topeka's busiest trading area, he spotted a patch of dirt along the main drag. It was easily big enough for the buffet-style restaurant he intended to erect. Still, he sighed. Surely by now someone had stuck a store there. He drove by anyway to take a look, and was stunned. The lot was still vacant.
Pintner quickly reached the property's owner, a well-off farmer who had hung onto the land for sentimental reasons. Now, amazingly, he wanted to get rid of it. "Ten years ago I would have picked that site," happily declares the 40-year-old chief executive of Golden Corral Midwest, a franchisee of the family restaurant chain in Wichita, Kansas. "I guess it was just a combination of luck and being in the right place at the right time."
Finding a killer site in an unfamiliar region should always be so easy. It's more likely you'll face many hurdles finding the spot for a profitable restaurant. Some hurdles, like selecting the best city, are relatively easy to leap. Others, like predicting expected sales, are tougher to clear. But clearing all of them on schedule is critical if your company's chief development goal is to beat competitors to the best sites.
Once upon a time, moving into a new region was fairly simple. You'd read up on the market, prowl it with a sharp broker, kick some dirt, and (hopefully) negotiate a price. The routine was pretty much the same wherever you went. More often than not, your restaurant was the first of its kind in town--or, at least, it was different enough to stimulate sales and profits. There was nothing particularly scientific about the process. Nor was there anything brutally competitive about doing business.
Those days are gone. Now, when looking for a new site, you are expected to ponder myriad variables, from median income to average age to the number of family households. And the demographics are only part of it. Beyond that, there is an array of site selection techniques that experts claim will boost your chances of picking the right spot. They range from computer modeling programs...