Customer Traffic Considerations During Competitor Disruptions

Episode 123:  Could a major competitor's sudden closure transform your business landscape? Find out how unexpected changes in your competitive space can significantly impact your customer traffic and revenue. This episode takes you through a fascinating local case where a major retailer shut its doors—not due to poor performance, but rather a landlord's decision. We dissect the ripple effects on surrounding businesses in a bustling shopping center, providing you with essential metrics to gauge how such changes affect your operations.

Equip yourself with actionable strategies to adapt and thrive amidst market shifts. We'll explore year-over-year sales changes, variations in product types, and time-of-day traffic adjustments. Learn how to identify and fill market gaps left by a complementary business's closure. Stay ahead in your financial planning by optimizing your resources and preparing contingencies for unexpected disruptions. Join us as we offer invaluable insights to ensure your business remains resilient and responsive to changes in your competitive landscape.

Episode outline:

1. What happens when a business change occurs to a competitor,
2. What metrics and planning considerations should you analyze, and 
3. We must be continually strategic in our analysis.

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Transcript

Stephen McLain: 0:05

What happens when another business in your competitive space makes a major change, for example, that business closes its doors? Does this affect the customer traffic for your business? Also, when analyzing customer traffic, is it only important to track your own traffic for changes, or are there other considerations? Changes to customer traffic or other customer behaviors can and will affect your traffic and your revenue. So be mindful and conduct your financial planning and analysis. Additionally, changes to your competitors and other businesses can do the same. How can you prepare for changes? Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Finance Leader Podcast, where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, S stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, facebook, instagram and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes, thank you.

Stephen McLain: 1:07

This is episode number 123, and I will be talking about how changes to a competitor or other business in your space can affect changes to your business and a few planning considerations for your finance teams. French General and President Charles de Gaulle said you have to be fast on your feet and adaptive, or else a strategy is useless. This week I want to briefly discuss an interesting situation that happened where I live and happens all the time all over, a major retailer closed a local popular store abruptly, not due to bad business but due to the building landlord wanting to bring in a different business into that space. It's a brick-and-mortar business that is in a popular shopping center filled with smaller businesses and national chain stores. The business that closed had the most floor space in the shopping center. It's a large business and, again, it was very popular. It brought in lots of traffic. Now this had me thinking Does this larger business bring in traffic to the other businesses in the shopping center? Well, of course it does. It has to. If you owned a business in the area, what would you be thinking and what would you do? Maybe in the analysis you may find out it doesn't affect your traffic and it's possible you might find other amazing insights to your customer traffic as it relates to this now closed business.

Stephen McLain: 2:27

If I'm a business owner in that shopping center, what should I be analyzing regarding traffic and other insights and what should I be planning for? Here are a couple things to think about. Are our customers the same in purchasing patterns and behaviors? Are we competing or complementary in the offers we have compared to the business that closed. If our products were complementary, meaning that our products and their products go together or are similar in branding or functionality, then can we add new products to our lineup to meet a possible gap. Here are some specific metrics to be analyzed.

Stephen McLain: 3:02

Now we want to look at year-over-year changes to daily sales, year-over-year changes to types of products sold, time of day, traffic changes and did your browsing non-buying traffic change? Here's another important question and issue to look at Did traffic seem to change for the entire shopping center? Is there less traffic overall, or did traffic stay the same but those who are shopping at the closed store? Have they moved over to other stores or another shopping center? For this analysis, you may have to purchase an additional tool. When analyzing traffic along with changes to our product sales in a year-over-year basis, we can better optimize the resources we have.

Stephen McLain: 3:44

What if, in our analysis, that traffic shifted from morning hours to afternoon hours? What would you do in your operations to meet this change in demand? This is a reminder that we need to be analyzing our customer traffic. No matter what type of business we have or type of industry. Traffic flows can change any time based on a number of variables. We need to be vigilant in our planning and financial analysis. Take nothing for granted, no complacency when we own a business.

Stephen McLain: 4:14

Now for action today. Do you know what you would do if a major change happened in your industry or nearest competitor, or even a business that is close in vicinity, and that this change affects traffic to your business? What is the plan? Are you already planning contingencies that this happens, or should you start planning now? And, more importantly, what business can have this effect on your business? Do you know your space? Please go to Finance Leader Academy for more resources. I offer a self-paced online course called Advance your Finance and Accounting Career developing a promotion strategy that sets you apart. You will also find several free resources to help you. Now that's financeleaderacademycom.

Stephen McLain: 4:56

Today I talked briefly about how changes to a competitor or other business in your space can affect changes to your business and a few planning considerations for your finance teams. This topic reminds me that we all need to be thinking strategically about our organizations. What external changes can affect traffic to your organization, how can you plan for it and what will you do when it happens? What analysis should you be doing on an ongoing basis? I hope you enjoyed the Finance Leader Podcast. I am focused on helping this community to become more confident finance leaders capable of transforming organizations. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. If this episode helped you today, please share with a colleague and leave a quick review. Until next time you can check out more resources at financeleaderacademycom and sign up for my weekly updates so you don't miss an episode of the podcast. And now you'll lead your team and I'll see you next time, thank you.