Which markets to open next: a ranked list, not another spreadsheet

Challenge

A national retailer with 200+ locations had customer addresses and sales by store, but no trusted answer to "where should we grow next?" Each region used different spreadsheets. Some teams drew arbitrary circles on a map. Roughly one in five customer addresses couldn't be placed on a map reliably. Expansion meetings took weeks to prepare, and leadership still disagreed on priorities.

KPI targets

• Clean enough address data that 95%+ of customers can be placed on a map
• One ranked shortlist of expansion markets that growth and real estate agree on
• Cut expansion meeting prep from weeks of manual work to opening a dashboard
• Refresh rankings automatically every week, with no more quarterly map exercises

Approach

1. 1.Week 1: Agreed on the business question ("where are we missing easy wins?") and audited address and sales data quality
2. 2.Week 2: Cleaned and standardized customer addresses; flagged low-confidence matches for review
3. 3.Week 3: Mapped each store's real customer footprint from transaction and visit data (not guesswork radius circles)
4. 4.Week 4: Scored every market: local demand vs. how much share the brand already captures; flagged overlap with existing stores
5. 5.Week 5–6: Built the automated weekly pipeline, dashboard, and handoff docs so their team runs it without us

Production artifacts

• Clean customer location table the whole company can trust
• Per-store "where our customers come from" footprint analysis
• Weekly ranked expansion shortlist with plain-English flags (e.g. high demand, low share, near existing store)
• Automated data pipeline with alerts when address match quality drops
• Runbook for refreshing data and adjusting scoring weights

Outcomes

• Expansion decisions moved from quarterly spreadsheet debates to a single weekly view
• Address data reused by marketing for regional campaigns
• Client name and store-level detail not disclosed per engagement terms

Stack