There are several challenges in starting a brand new business. Many challenges might arise on this adventure taken with big dreams. One of the most important of these challenges is finding the perfect location for your small business. No matter what kind of business you want to start, finding the location that best fits your customer base puts you ahead of your competitors. Let's dive deep into this scenario from a dental practice's perspective.
You may be a fresh graduate, and after spending years of training and effort, you may want to open your own dental clinic. Or you may want to relocate your current clinic. Regardless of your current situation, the location where you open your dental clinic matters a lot. After all, no one wants to swim against the current while building a client base?
In this blog post, we will look at the best locations to open a dental clinic in Arizona, specifically in Tempe. After examining the population of all the census block groups within the city, we will do a competitor analysis by plotting the locations of other clinics on a map. Finally, we will find the number of residents per dental clinic in each area to find most underserved areas and make a suggestion for your brand new dental clinic.
Let’s look at the population by small regions called census block groups (CBG) first. In the map below, areas with low population are shown in red, whereas dense areas are depicted in green.
As you can see from the graph, the population density in the peripheral regions is slightly less than in the center regions. Understanding the population density is a good start but by itself it does provide not enough information to help with our decision. Let’s examine the distribution of dental clinics with respect to CBGs in our next map.
We mark the current distribution of dental clinics by adding them as black dots. You can see the locations of our competitors (other dental clinics, in this case) spread around the city overlaid on top of population density. The empty areas in the upper left part of the map are an airport and a golf resort, respectively. This map starts to give us some ideas about areas where population is high and number of competitors are low. These are the best candidate areas for our new business.
Now we'll start to use some analytics calculations to hone in on the best locations. We'll do this by calculating the density of dental practices for each census area.
Before examining the dental clinic density according to CBGs, it is useful to understand how we are calculating the density values. In this case, we use two distinct location data; the first is the latitude and longitude of dental clinics, whereas the other is the latitude and longitude of the center points of the CBGs. In order to identify the nearby dental clinics for each CBG, we calculate the distance of each block from all dental clinics. We continue this calculation for all CBGs on the map. Then, we obtain the distance of each CBG to all dental clinics in the vicinity. In the last stage, we find the number of dental clinics located within 3 miles range of each CBG and compare it with the population of that CBG.
More details on how to calculate the density metricsThe result of this analysis is the following map where promising areas for dental clinics are green and not promising areas are yellow and red.
Let's examine what the map means in more detail. Here we compare the number of dental clinics close to each CBG to the population of that CBG. This is our dental density metric that takes the population of area and number of dental practices nearby into account. Next, we plot the density values we get from dark red to dark green for each CBG. The darker red the CBG is, the more dental clinics located around it. Whereas the darker green the CBG is, the lower number of dental clinics relative to the population.
When we examine the population per dental clinic in CBGs, we see that dental clinic densities in the north east part of the graph are relatively higher. Moreover, we can notice that the number of dental clinics per population is lower in the east center left part of the map. Based on this analysis, we can suggest that East part where we have most green areas might be a good place to open a dental clinic!
This is how data and analytics can help you make your location decisions. In our custom reports we add more details to our analysis by examining income distribution and age by blocks. This way candidates areas for the best location to open a dental clinic would decline even more. If you want to have a location analysis done for your new business and to know the region where you will open your new location better than anyone else order you custom analysis here.