Tampa-based technology company SiteZeus has announced its latest partnership with Tijuana Flats, adding to a long line of restaurant industry giants it currently helps to better find where companies should open new locations.
The company, founded in 2014 and launched in 2016, will deploy its tech across Maitland-based Tijuana Flats' 120 locations. It has already helped the company avoid two locations they otherwise would have chosen.
"It turns out we were ignoring some key factors, and we didn't realize it until we ran the sites in SiteZeus and revenue potentials came back low," Eric Taylor, Tijuana Flats' VP of real estate and development, said in a statement. "SiteZeus showed us that those weren't the best trade areas and that we would be making a $1 million mistake if we developed there."
The company uses a number of data sets, ranging from who the franchisees are to traffic patterns and the company's marketing budget.
"My brother and I learned about good locations and bad ones; the most important thing analysts can help you identify are false positives, where the positive is it's a good store but it's false because it will be a poor performer," SiteZeus CEO Hannibal Baldwin said. "Our platform does a lot more than that, but there is nothing more important our platform can do."
SiteZeus was originally founded after Baldwin and his brother, Keenan, worked alongside Yogurtology's co-owners Jordan Levy and his brother-in-law, Ean Mendelsohn.
"That pain of site selection had us create an internal model, and then we thought, 'Others have to need this, too,'" Baldwin said. "We were naive in that we thought no one was solving that issue, but that naivety led us to innovate and create an experience no one else had. With us, you take a spreadsheet, upload data, and 10 minutes later have a modern machine."
The company has now built up its customer base to over 100 entities, including Subway, Burger King and Pollo Tropical. Adding the players to the roster helped Tijuana Flats eventually pull the trigger on the partnership, after years of casual discussions.
"It reached the point where our platform had matured enough and the timing was right with existing contractors," Baldwin said. "We were able to present the latest iteration of our model and platform to them — we do a proof of concept and once we showed them that, and they saw the model, that drove a lot of the decision."
The company is currently headquartered at Tampa-based innovation hub Embarc Collective, with an employee base of about 50 working from across North America. Baldwin's hope is to continue to work out partnerships in the next 18 months, adding an emphasis on businesses in the retail, health care and other brick and mortar store spaces.
