Read local market evidence · printable packet

Local market evidence is what can be counted where the business operates; summarize it with an average and a range, strengthen it by repeating, comparing and connecting it to buyers, keep anecdotes and national figures apart, and state only what it supports.

Paper packet. Every task here also exists on screen, where it is checked automatically; answers written on paper are not assessed by Nydus. When you are back at a device, enter your answers there.

1. What you will learn

You will tell counted local evidence from anecdotes and national figures, summarize competitors' prices and foot traffic with an average and a range, compare a new site with a known one, turn foot traffic into buyers through a funnel, and state what a count can and cannot support.

2. What you already have

You can observe customers, ask them useful questions, count what they do and follow a funnel from people reached to people who buy. Strategy decisions — a new site, a new position, a price — need the same habits applied to the market around the business.

3. Words for this lesson

4. Count it locally, summarize it, and say what it supports

Small businesses rarely buy market research, and rarely need to. Much of what they need is local and countable. Dev can call five repair shops for their price of a standard service: 60, 65, 75, 50 and 90 dollars. The average is 340 ÷ 5 = 68 dollars, and the range is 90 − 50 = 40 dollars — which tells him where the market sits and how differently the shops position themselves.

Collect it the way the customers course taught: decide the question first, then count at the times and places that bear on it, then summarize. Keep counted evidence apart from the other things that arrive looking like evidence: an anecdote ('my friend says Mill Street is always busy'), a guess, or a national headline about spending, which says nothing about this street.

Then be strict about what the evidence supports. Monica's count of 280 people passing a booth on one Saturday morning supports a rough claim about that booth on Saturday mornings. It does not tell her about weekdays, about the whole market, or about how many of them would buy.

Term	What it means
Local market evidence	What can be counted or checked where the business operates: prices, foot traffic, inquiries, openings.
Average	The total of several figures divided by how many there are.
Range	The highest figure less the lowest.
Foot traffic	People passing a site in a given time, counted at the door or the curb.
Supports	The claim evidence is strong enough to back, and no wider.

Another way: table

Northside Repairs' price check.

Shop	Standard service, dollars
A	60
B	65
C	75
D	50
E	90
Average	68
Range	40

Another way: steps

Write the question the evidence must answer.
Count at the times and places that bear on it.
Summarize with an average and a range.
Repeat, compare with a known site, and connect to buyers.
State what the evidence supports, and size the next step to it.

5. The method, step by step, and how to check it

Write the question. 'Is Mill Street good?' cannot be answered by any count. 'How many people pass the empty store between 12:00 and 13:00 on a weekday?' can. The question decides what to count, where and when.

Count at the right times. For a lunch business, lunch hours on working days; for a Saturday market booth, Saturday mornings. Count in the same way each time — from the same spot, for the same minutes — so the counts can be compared.

Summarize. The average says where the figures sit; the range says how much they vary. A count of 180, 220 and 200 has an average of 200 and a range of 40; a count of 100, 300 and 200 has the same average and a range of 200, and deserves far less confidence.

Strengthen, then state. Repeat the count, compare it, connect it to buyers, then write one sentence saying what it supports.

To check a summary, the average must lie between the lowest and highest figures, and the range must be positive. To check a conclusion, ask whether it names only the place, the times and the thing that was counted; a conclusion that reaches beyond those has gone further than the evidence.

6. Strengthen it before deciding on it

One count is a starting point. Before a decision with real money behind it — a second site, a new booth — make the evidence stronger in three ways. Repeat it: count the same hours on several days, so one unusual Saturday does not decide. Compare it: count a site the business already knows at the same hours, so the new figure means something — Mill Street at four fifths of the current site's traffic is a number the owner can picture. Connect it to sales: foot traffic is not customers, and the funnel is the bridge — how many passers-by stop, and how many of those buy.

Write down where each figure came from and when, so the evidence can be checked and refreshed.

7. From people passing to people buying

Foot traffic becomes sales through two shares, each of the figure before it. Of 250 people passing a lunch counter in an hour, perhaps 20 percent stop to look at the menu — 50 people — and perhaps 40 percent of those buy — 20 lunches. Over a five-day week that hour brings 100 lunches.

The shares are the weakest part of the chain, because they cannot be counted until the business is open. The honest ways to find them are a short test — a pop-up table, a two-week trial at a market — or figures from a site the business already runs, adjusted for anything obviously different. A share borrowed from someone else's business, or assumed, should be written as an assumption and tested before a lease is signed.

8. Where local evidence comes from

Much of it is free and close at hand. The business's own records: inquiries turned away, ZIP codes on invoices, the times the register is busiest. Competitors in plain sight: price lists, menus, opening hours, what their reviews praise and complain about. Public records: the city's business license and permit lists show what has opened recently, and the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns counts businesses of each kind by county and ZIP code. Counting: foot traffic at the curb, cars in a parking lot, the line at a rival's counter at noon.

Each has a bias to name. Reviews come from the happiest and angriest customers; one day's count comes from one day's weather; license lists include businesses that never opened. Naming the bias is part of saying what the evidence supports.

9. Weather, seasons and ordinary days

Every count is taken on a particular day, and days differ. A rainy Tuesday empties a street that a sunny one fills; a street fair doubles one Saturday; the week before a holiday is not the week after. None of this makes counting useless. It makes it necessary to count more than once, on ordinary days, and to write down anything unusual about each day beside the figure.

The range is the owner's first warning. Three counts of 180, 220 and 200 agree closely, so their average of 200 can be trusted for Tuesdays of that kind. Three counts of 100, 300 and 200 have the same average and a range of 200, and the honest reading is that the owner does not yet know what a normal Tuesday looks like. More counts, not a cleverer average, are the answer.

A comparison site helps here too, because it shares the weather. If Mill Street and the current site both fall by a quarter on a rainy day, the rain explains it, and Mill Street's figure as a share of the current site's barely moves. That share is often the steadiest number in the whole exercise, and the one to carry into a decision.

Seasons matter most for businesses whose trade swings through the year. A plant booth counted in May will look far busier than the same booth in November; an ice-cream counter counted in January will look hopeless. When the decision will run for a year or more — a lease, a second booth — the counts should either cover the seasons that matter or be read against what the business's own sales records say about how much busier its best month is than its worst.

Finally, the owner's own presence can change what is counted. Someone standing on the curb with a clipboard is noticed; a count made from a café table across the street, or from a phone's tally counter while waiting for a bus, is less so. It is a small point, but it is one more reason to count the same way every time.

10. In the world: a bakery that counted before it signed

A bakery owner was offered a lease on a corner store near a commuter rail station. The agent said 5,000 people used the station every day, and the rent was set to match. Before signing, she counted.

On three weekday mornings she stood outside the empty store from 6:30 to 9:30 and counted people walking past on her side of the street: 410, 460 and 430, an average of 433 with a range of 50. Most of the station's passengers, it turned out, left by the other exit. She counted her existing bakery's door at the same hours: an average of 520 passing, of whom about 8 percent came in and 75 percent of those bought, about 31 customers a morning.

Applying the same shares to the new corner gave about 26 customers a morning — at an average spend of 7 dollars and a 60 percent margin, about 110 dollars of contribution a morning, or roughly 2,400 over a 22-day month. The rent alone was 3,000. She offered to take the store on a three-month trial at a lower rent to test the shares; the landlord refused, and she walked away. A coffee chain that took the lease closed it eighteen months later.

11. In the world: why landlords and lenders like counts

A dated, repeated count with a comparison site is one of the most persuasive things a small business can bring to a landlord or a lender, because it can be checked. An owner who says 'about 430 people pass on a weekday morning, against 520 at my current store' is believed far more readily than one who says the area is busy.

12. Where this goes wrong

Foot traffic is sales. It is people passing; the funnel connects them to buyers.

Evidence is for deciding, so decide what it would take first. Before counting, write the figure that would make the answer yes; otherwise any count can be read as encouraging.

A public record is always up to date. License and permit lists lag, and include businesses that closed or never opened; check a sample by walking past them before relying on the count.

13. Dev's price check

14. Neighborhood Kitchen and Mill Street

15. Monica's second booth

16. Your turn: Bright Home Cleaning's price check

17. Guided practice

Dev called five local repair shops for the price of a standard service: $59$, $60$, $76$, $45$ and $81$ dollars. What is the average price, in dollars?

18. Guided practice

Complete the worked solution: Neighborhood Kitchen counted people passing a possible Mill Street site between 12:00 and 13:00 on three Tuesdays: $240$, $320$ and $340$. Its current site averages $400$ at the same hour. Measure the new site.

19. Guided practice

Monica counted $307$ shoppers passing a possible second booth between 8:00 and 12:00 on one Saturday. What does that evidence support?

20. Practice

Neighborhood Kitchen is weighing a second site on Mill Street. Mark every note that is local market evidence.

21. Practice

Monica counted shoppers passing a possible second booth on three Saturday mornings: $130$, $190$ and $250$. At the same hours, her current booth had $230$, $270$ and $250$. Fill in the comparison.

22. Practice

About $400$ people pass a possible lunch counter between 12:00 and 13:00 on a weekday. From a pop-up test, the owner reckons $17$ percent of them stop to look and $20$ percent of those who stop buy. On those figures, how many lunches would the counter sell in that hour over a five-day week?

23. Somewhere new

A florist counted people passing a possible store each hour from 8:00 to 12:00: $56$, $53$, $55$ and $32$. Fill in the summary.

24. Lesson test

Lesson test: one question per skill, one attempt each, no hints. Your answers are checked when you submit.

25. Test question

Bright Home Cleaning collected five local competitors' prices for a two-bedroom move-out clean: $127$, $143$, $151$, $167$ and $174$ dollars. Fill in the average price and the range, in dollars.

26. What you can do now

You can gather local evidence for a strategy decision and say exactly how far it goes. Tell someone why one busy Saturday does not prove a site. Next: reading the world outside the business.

Working for the steps left to you

	Amount
New booth, average morning
Current booth, average morning
New as a percentage of current

	Amount
Morning's total
Average hour
Ten-to-eleven hour above the average

	Dollars
Average price
Range of prices

$\text{dated, with the firms' names}$

So it can be refreshed.