To choose a franchise location in the UK, start with who your customers are and work outwards to places. Find what your best sites have in common, search every neighbourhood for that profile, check competition, transport and the local business mix, and only then visit the shortlist and look at units. Footprint, our site-selection tool, does the searching across all 7,264 neighbourhoods in England and Wales in a few minutes.
Most franchise expansion conversations start with a place instead. Someone says "what about Bristol?" or "my mate reckons Leeds is booming", and suddenly the whole team is researching those two cities without asking whether they fit.
Sometimes the suggestion is spot on. More often you spend weeks on areas chosen because someone mentioned them. Here's a better order of work, in six steps.
Step 1: Work out what your best locations have in common
Most franchise brands have some units that do well and some that struggle. Their demographics usually tell you why, but hardly anyone compares them side by side.
Say your best units are all in areas with lots of 30 to 50 year olds, above-average incomes and plenty of family homes. Your weaker ones might turn out to be in busy town centres with younger residents and more rented flats. That pattern only shows up when you lay all your sites out together.
In Footprint you can add your existing sites and rate each one Strong, Average or Weak, or enter a figure such as annual revenue. Expansion mode then gives more weight to areas that look like your strongest sites. In our validation study, knowing where a chain's existing sites are lifted the share of hidden sites found in the top 500 areas from 25.8% to 33.8%. Ratings go a step further by telling Footprint which of those sites to learn from most; we haven't yet measured that on real trading data.
Step 2: Search all 7,264 neighbourhoods, including ones you've never heard of
Census 2021 covers 7,264 neighbourhoods (MSOAs) in England and Wales, each home to about 8,000 people. For each one you can see age, household make-up, employment, qualifications and housing tenure. Add the indices of deprivation and you have a decent picture of income too.
Once you know your profile, the question changes. Instead of asking about Leeds, you ask which neighbourhoods anywhere in England and Wales match your best units. That usually produces a very different shortlist.
Doing it by hand is slow. On a good week a person can properly assess about ten areas. Footprint scores all of them against your business description and explains its reasoning for each of the top areas, so you can see why somewhere made the list.
Step 3: How many competitors is too many?
Many operators treat competition as a headcount. Three competitors within a mile means too many. None means a great opportunity.
It's rarely that simple. Some areas have five direct competitors and every one is busy. Others have none for reasons that become obvious once you see the demographics.
A cluster of well-reviewed competitors usually means proven demand. It might also mean saturation, and you need context to tell which. Five coffee shops in a commuter hub with heavy daily footfall is a very different picture from five coffee shops in a quiet residential suburb.
Footprint checks competitors in any area against Google Places, with names, ratings and review counts. You run the check on the areas you care about, and you can remove entries or add ones Google missed.
Step 4: Check transport and draw a real catchment
This one catches people out. An area looks right on paper. Then you visit and find a car-dependent high street with no station and a patchy bus service, and the catchment shrinks straight away.
For businesses that rely on footfall, transport matters a great deal. Footprint scores connectivity from Office of Rail and Road and Transport for London station usage, NaPTAN bus stops and Department for Transport road traffic counts. It looks at how heavily a station is used as well as how close it is.
Circles on a map overstate how far people will travel. Footprint draws 5 and 10 minute walk catchments and 5, 10 and 15 minute drive catchments along real roads, around a high street or a pin you drop, and shows how many people inside each one match your target customer.
Some franchise models do well in car-dependent retail parks, and that's fine. Know which pattern suits yours before you commit to a lease.
Step 5: Read the local business mix
Existing businesses tell you a lot about an area's character. Plenty of retail and hospitality suggests established footfall. An area dominated by industrial units might suit a trade-focused franchise, and probably won't suit a consumer-facing one.
ONS UK Business Counts break every area down by industry. You can see how much food and drink, retail and professional services each one has. It's a useful filter that most location searches skip.
Step 6: Visit the shortlist and check each unit
Data gets you to the right streets. Choosing a unit still needs someone on the ground: walking the high street, talking to local agents and watching who passes at different times of day.
Before a viewing, "Check this unit" in Footprint pulls together the catchment, nearby competitors and neighbours, transport, planning constraints, flood risk, crime and a rent sense-check for a single address (Pro and Scale plans). Each unit then sits in a deal pipeline from viewing to opening day. Our post on site acquisition without a spreadsheet covers that part in detail.
Why experience alone has a ceiling
Good franchise consultants have visited hundreds of sites, and their instinct for a pitch is often right. Some can walk a high street for ten minutes and tell you whether a unit will work there.
Even so, the most experienced person knows a few hundred areas well. England and Wales has 7,264. However good your instincts, they only cover places you've already been. You can't have a feel for a place you've never heard of.
Running the data properly points that judgement at the right shortlist. It doesn't replace it. Footprint doesn't predict sales either. It tells you where to look.
Key points
- Start with a customer profile drawn from your best existing sites, and work outwards to places.
- Search all 7,264 neighbourhoods (MSOAs) in England and Wales, using Census 2021, deprivation and ONS Business Counts data.
- Read competition in context. A cluster of busy competitors can be a sign of demand.
- Judge transport by station usage and real walk and drive times, and be wary of straight-line circles.
- Visit the shortlist and check each unit before you sign anything.
- Footprint covers steps 1 to 5 in a few minutes and supports the viewings and deals that follow. Try a search or see pricing.