How to count your local competition before you sign a lease

"There's nobody doing this in my area" is the sentence that starts more failed local businesses than any other. It is almost never true, and when it is true it is usually bad news: an empty market is more often a market without demand than a market waiting for you. Either way, the only honest answer is a count, and a count takes about two hours. Here is how to do one properly, with nothing more than Google Maps, a spreadsheet and a phone.

Draw the radius first

Competition is not "the city". It is the area your customers will actually travel across, or the area you can serve from one base. For a dog groomer, a café or a barber that is a ten to fifteen minute trip by the local means of transport: on foot in a dense European centre, by car in an American suburb, by motorbike in a Southeast Asian city. For a mobile service it is the drive time you can afford between jobs, which for a one-van business is rarely more than twenty-five minutes. For a specialist, a dental implant clinic or a climbing gym, people will travel further and the radius grows.

Write the radius down before you count. The number you get is only meaningful against the area it covers, and the temptation to widen the circle until it includes a gap is strong.

Count on the map, not in your head

Open Google Maps, search the category inside the radius ("car detailing", "pediatric dentist", "pilates studio") and keep scrolling until the results run out. Do it for the two or three ways customers would phrase it: "car wash" and "detailing" are different searches with different lists. Our Local directories hold the same data by country and city if you prefer a table to a map.

For every competitor, record five things in a spreadsheet: name, star rating, number of reviews, distance from your planned base, and whether they are open now or look dormant. Review counts matter more than ratings. Ratings cluster between 4.3 and 4.8 and tell you little. Review counts are a rough proxy for customer volume, because somewhere around one customer in thirty to fifty leaves a review. A competitor with 900 reviews has served tens of thousands of people. One with 11 reviews after three years has not.

Now read the list and answer three questions.

Is there demand? If the top three in your radius have hundreds of reviews each, the market is real and people pay for this. If nobody has fifty, be careful: either the category is new here, or the area does not want it, and only the first of those is good news.

How concentrated is it? Add up the review counts and work out the share held by the top three. A market where three names hold 70 percent of the reviews is one where customers already have a default; your opening offer has to be strong enough to make them switch. A market with fifteen similar operators and no leader is often easier to enter and harder to grow in.

Who is dormant? Listings with no reviews in the last six months, no photos newer than two years, or hours that say "temporarily closed" are competitors leaving. They are also your best source of information: call them and ask why.

Read the three-star reviews

Five-star reviews say "great service, lovely staff". One-star reviews are usually a single bad day. Three-star reviews are where the market tells you what it wants fixed: the detailer who was good but two hours late, the café with excellent coffee and nowhere to sit, the gym that is fine except it is always full at 6pm.

Read thirty of them across the top five competitors and tally the complaints. You are looking for one complaint that appears again and again and that you can credibly fix. "Faster", "more parking", "answers the phone", "open on Sunday" are real wedges. If you cannot find a repeated complaint that your plan addresses, your pitch is "the same as them, but me", and that is a Pivot at best on our rubric: competition and problem severity both score low.

Buy from the top three

Reviews are secondhand. Become a customer. Book the service, visit the shop, order the product, and note the price list, the wait, the upsells, how they handled the booking and what the place looked like. Ask a question an ordinary customer would ask and see how it is answered. You will learn more in three visits than in three weeks of desk research, and you will leave with the one number every local pitch needs: the going price.

Set your own price against it with a reason. Charging less than the incumbents with their volume is a route to a business that is busy and broke; charging more needs the wedge from the reviews to be visible on the first visit.

Check the costs they carry

The competitors' prices tell you what customers pay; the cost side tells you whether anyone is making money at those prices. Look up commercial rents for similar frontage on the listing portals, the licence or permit the trade needs and what it costs, and the going wage for the staff you will need. For a mobile service, add fuel, insurance and the equipment. The break-even calculator turns those into the number of sales a month you need; compare it with the volume the review counts suggest the leaders are doing. If you need more customers a month than the busiest competitor appears to serve, the plan does not close.

Write the one-page comparison

Everything above fits on a page: the radius, the count, the review totals and the top three's share, the repeated complaint, the going price, your price and why, the rent and licence figures, your break-even volume. That page is worth more than any business plan, because every number on it came from the market rather than from you.

It also makes the next step obvious. If demand is proven and a wedge exists, the question becomes execution and you can move on to the deposit test in our 30-day plan. If demand is thin or the leaders are strong and well-liked, the honest move is to narrow the idea (a service the leaders do not offer, a customer they ignore, a neighbourhood they do not cover) and count again.

A worked example

Suppose the idea is a mobile car detailing van serving office car parks in a mid-sized American city. The radius is a twenty-minute drive from home. The map search for "car detailing" and "mobile detailing" returns 23 operators, of which 14 look active. The top three hold about 60 percent of the reviews, with 410, 350 and 220 each, so demand is clearly there and so is a default choice. The three-star reviews repeat two complaints: late arrivals and no online booking. Buying from the top three shows prices between $120 and $180 for a full detail, and none of them offer a fixed weekly slot at a workplace.

That page tells you the wedge (punctual, bookable online, a weekly workplace slot), the price band ($120 to $150 is defensible; $89 is leaving money and credibility on the table), and the test: get one office park to let you set up, and see whether twenty cars book in the first week. If they do, you have a business. If they do not, you have spent a weekend and a tank of fuel.

That is the whole method. Two hours, a spreadsheet and a few bookings replace the sentence "there's nobody doing this here" with a number, and the number decides.