The five questions to answer before any new location

Before you sign for any new location, answer five questions: who would come, who already serves them, what brings them past the door, how easily they can get there, and what is changing around it. If you cannot answer one of them with something better than a feeling, you are not ready to decide. Most failed openings can be traced back to one of the five being skipped, usually the last.

These questions are short on purpose. They fit a shop, a clinic, a restaurant, an office for a service business or a depot. For each one, below, is what a reassuring answer sounds like, the answer that should make you stop, and the data that settles it. A worked example follows, then an AI employee that asks all five about every address you send it.

1. Who would come?

Name your customer first, then count them within the distance they would travel to you. For a daily need that is a walk; for a weekly shop, a short drive; for a specialist, much further.

• Reassuring: the people you serve, counted inside a realistic Travel area, are at least as many as around your best existing site.
• Stop: you can only make the numbers work by stretching the distance customers would travel.
• Check with: Demographics for residents by age, in the countries that have population figures (among them France, Canada, India, Thailand, Egypt and Australia; not the United Kingdom or the United States). Where there are none, use your own customer list.

2. Who already serves them?

Every customer you hope for is buying something similar somewhere today. Find out where.

• Reassuring: competitors are few for the people around, or many but weak, with low ratings and few reviews.
• Stop: a strong, well-rated rival sits a few doors away and targets exactly your customer.
• Check with: Nearby places for a count, chains and independents, and ratings inside the reach.

3. What brings them past?

Few people make a special trip to a new place. They pass it on the way to somewhere else: a station, a supermarket, a school, an office, a park.

• Reassuring: the anchors your customers already visit are within a couple of hundred metres, and the street is busy at the hours you would be open.
• Stop: the unit is on a quiet side of an anchor, facing a car park, or busy only at hours you would be closed.
• Check with: Nearby places for anchors; Mobility Footfall for how busy the spot is by hour and day, in people-hours, about 10 days behind, in most of the world from mid-October 2026 but not yet Australia.

4. How do they get there?

Being close on a map is not the same as being easy to reach. A main road can be a barrier for walkers and a jam for drivers.

• Reassuring: customers arrive the way your format needs: on foot for a small shop, by car with somewhere to stop for a large one.
• Stop: the road outside is jammed at your peak hour, or customers must cross a busy road with no crossing.
• Check with: Traffic Flow for live speed against free-flow speed and the jam factor on the roads next to the site (it gives speeds, not car counts), and EV charging if your customers drive electric cars.

5. What is changing?

A site is not a photograph. Rivals open, anchors close, new housing fills, roads are dug up.

• Reassuring: few openings of your kind in the last year, no anchor closing, new homes arriving around you.
• Stop: several rivals opened nearby this year, or the anchor you are counting on has closed or is shrinking.
• Check with: opening dates in xMap's places database, where a place has one; What changed on a monthly flow for closures; in covered US counties, Property changes for new owners and sales around the site.

The five questions on one made-up site

A made-up independent bookshop with a small cafe is looking at a corner unit in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Here is how its answers might read. None of these figures is real.

1. Who would come: about 14,000 adults live within a 10-minute walk, more than around the owners' first shop. Reassuring.
2. Who already serves them: no other bookshop within the walk, but nine cafes, three of them rated 4.6 or more. The bookshop is fine; the cafe side needs a reason to choose it.
3. What brings them past: a primary school and a supermarket within 200 m. Footfall is not available in Australia yet, so the owners stand at the corner on a weekday at 8:30 and a Saturday at 11, and count.
4. How they get there: mostly on foot; the main road two streets away slows at evening rush, which matters little for a walk-in shop.
5. What is changing: two cafes opened in the walk in the last year, and an apartment building is going up across the road. Mixed: more competition for coffee, more neighbours for books.

Four answers are reassuring and one calls for care. The owners decide to keep the cafe small and lead with the bookshop, and to ask the landlord for a break clause at two years.

Mistakes to avoid

• Answering only the first two questions because they are the easiest to count.
• Treating the last answer as fixed. Re-ask question five every month for the first year after opening.
• Using a city-wide average for any of the five. Every answer belongs to the reach of this site.
• Letting one strong answer drown out a stop. A great count of people does not rescue a site nobody can reach.

Asking all five with an AI employee

1. A New rows trigger on your candidate sheet: each address the property team adds starts a run.
2. Travel area, then Demographics: question one.
3. Nearby places twice, once for competitors and once for anchors: questions two and three.
4. Mobility Footfall and Traffic Flow: questions three and four.
5. xMap LLM: write the five answers in a sentence each, mark each reassuring or stop, using only the figures given.
6. Email to the person who added the address.

Within minutes of adding an address to the sheet, its five answers arrive by email, with the figures behind each. For a full monthly pack, see Expansion committee pack, every month; to keep question five alive after opening, Rival openings and closures every month.