Firehouse Subs Refines Real Estate Strategy with Buxton

>> JOHN NAMEY: My name is John Namey with Firehouse Subs. We’re based in Jacksonville, Florida. We’re a franchise driven concept. We have 630 restaurants open. Our expansion plans for this year are to open 130 restaurants. Those will be evenly distributed throughout the continental U.S. As part of our contract with Buxton, they ran a U.S. potential for us, which gave us a view of the entire continental U.S. where our restaurants could be located. Using that, along with other tools that we use and by going into the market to driving the markets we are able to determine how many restaurants each market will support. When franchisees bring potential sites to us to evaluate, we use Buxton to make sure that that location is in the right part of the trade area. So, we will use SCOUT, evaluate where the concentrations of core customers are and make sure that the location is properly positioned within the trade area. We chose Buxton after looking at many companies because of the depth of information that they had available. We’ve had a great deal of confidence in the level of research that went into gathering information and the platform that they were able to provide us to evaluate the information we collected. I would recommend Buxton to other restaurant chains for developing their growth strategy and, in fact, have recommended them.