Good decisions start with good data. When retailers, restaurants, banks, healthcare providers, and other operators evaluate a new market or a specific site, the quality and breadth of the data behind that decision matters.
For decades, we’ve built forecasting models and site analyses for clients of every size — work that’s given us a practical view of which datasets hold up and which can speed up an expansion decision. We stay agnostic on providers: we’ll recommend what can help and our clients make the final call.
Most of that work draws on two kinds of data. First-party data comes directly from clients: store locations, size, opening dates, site characteristics, performance, customer information, and more. Third-party data, licensed from outside providers, fills in the rest of the picture with demographics, mobility, traffic, competition, and dozens of other signals that help put a location in context.
Not all of these datasets feed directly into a forecasting model. Many of them live inside Kalibrate Location Intelligence (KLI) for a different reason: to give teams a single place to view the data that informs a decision, so they can evaluate markets and sites faster without pulling from fragmented sources and platforms.
There are a lot of third-party datasets out there, and each one has its own strengths, blind spots, and best-fit use cases. That’s what this series is about. Over the coming weeks, we’ll go category by category, looking at what different datasets are good for and how teams actually use them to run their businesses more efficiently.
(A quick note on language: we work with a wide range of operators, from retail and restaurants to banks, credit unions, childcare centers, and healthcare providers. For simplicity we’ll refer to “stores” and “sales” throughout the series, but these datasets apply across many business types.)
Want to hear more before the series kicks off?
Join our live webinar on September 2, Market Planning: Data sources that inform portfolio strategy. We’ll walk through several of the datasets that can strengthen how you evaluate markets and prioritize decisions.
