Firehouse Subs Optimizes Market Planning With Buxton’s SCOUT Tool

>>JOHN NAMEY: Hi, I’m John Namey, Vice President of Real Estate Services for Firehouse Subs. One of my favorite things about SCOUT is that when we are looking at a particular site for a franchisee, I have the opportunity at my desktop to zoom in and be looking at exactly the same images, the same information that the area rep at a franchisee or my Real Estate Manager is looking at. So, I’m in Jacksonville, my Real Estate Manager is in Phoenix, Arizona, and we’re talking about a particular site we can zero into the exact same spot, all the data that I need is there. The actual documents get uploaded and put into a push pin that’s on that particular location. It connects with the Google Earth so I can zoom in to this specific site, I can go into a street view and look at it. We can talk very particular about a piece of real estate without me being there and get a good understanding of it. SCOUT helps us from a strategic planning standpoint or a growth standpoint when we want to look at a secondary or a tertiary market that we maybe haven’t visited or already evaluated, or we want a U.S. potential through SCOUT that will tell us if the area meets our minimum criteria for our customers. Another great feature of SCOUT for us is our executive summary, which when we run that on a particular location will give us the actual core customer count for that particular location and compare it against the targeted core customer count. So, we run this executive summary and it will tell us how many households are indexing well with us for that Buxton urban density area and then how many are actually there, and so whether it’s indexing positively or negatively for that area. It does that for both households and for employees or businesses.