Coming from 14 years in retail site selection, is that a consulting practice or just a resume

Question

I spent fourteen years doing site selection and trade area analysis for a grocery chain, mostly drive time modeling, cannibalization studies, and go/no-go on individual boxes. Left that world and I'm trying to work out whether the skill converts into a consulting practice or whether it only had value inside the company that owned the store data.

The honest constraint is that most of what made me good at it was proprietary. I had loyalty card data, transaction level, so I could see actual trade areas instead of modeled ones. Outside, I'd be working off mobile location data, and the vendors I've priced quote 15k to 40k a year depending on coverage.

Who would buy this? My guess is developers doing grocery-anchored retail and net lease investors underwriting a single tenant box who want an independent view on whether the tenant survives the lease term. But I don't know if the net lease buyers pay for that or just trust the credit rating and the corporate guarantee.

And I have no idea what to charge. Inside the company a site study was a two week exercise with no price on it.

Rena Expert · Accepted Answer

The buyers you named are real but they behave differently. Developers doing grocery-anchored retail will pay for a trade area study because their lender or their anchor tenant asks for one, and that work runs 8k to 25k depending on how much field work and how many competing sites. Net lease buyers are a harder sell. A lot of them do trust the credit and the guarantee, and the ones who don't are usually buying non-investment-grade tenants where the question is franchisee-level unit economics rather than trade area geometry. That second group is a smaller market but they pay better per hour because the analysis is genuinely scarce.

The third buyer you didn't list is the tenant side. Franchisees expanding into a new metro, regional operators without an internal real estate department, and the private equity sponsors who own them. They have the same go/no-go problem your old employer had and no team to answer it.

On data, don't sign a 40k annual contract to find out if there's a business. Several mobile location vendors sell per-study or per-market pulls, and some will do a pilot for a few thousand. Your first three engagements should be priced to cover the data pull with a real margin on your time, so structure the data as a pass-through line item in the engagement letter rather than burying it in the fee.

What will actually bite you is that your fourteen years of judgment was calibrated on one banner in one set of markets. Grocery drive times don't transfer cleanly to quick service or medical, and a client will ask you about a category you haven't modeled in the second meeting. Decide now whether you say no to that or learn it on their money, because doing the latter badly once is how a specialist practice dies.

ehernandez74 · Answer

The pass-through structure rena-expert mentions is worth getting exactly right in the letter. If the data cost is inside your fee, a client who asks for one extra market has just cut your margin, and you'll resent it by the third request. Name the per-market data cost and the per-market analysis fee separately.

kevin_lombard · Answer

Question from the outside since I don't know this world. If the loyalty card data was what made the analysis good, and you can't get it now, is the outside version of the study actually worse than what you used to produce? Because if it is, I'd want to know how you plan to say that to a client without talking yourself out of the engagement.

Coming from 14 years in retail site selection, is that a consulting practice or just a resume

3 replies