Coen Markets kicks off a new chapter of growth with A.I.-driven insights

4 min read

Posted by SiteZeus

on October 20, 2022

One of the largest convenience chains in the Pittsburgh region, Coen Markets opened its doors in 1923 and now has over 60 locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Much more than your average c-store, Coen offers a wide range of amenities that include state-of-the-art coffee bars; ice-cold beer caves; dine-in seating; drive-thrus; free air; and a full-service kitchen serving its famous chicken, pizza, pepperoni rolls, and hand-crafted drinks. Their unique concept has long been popular with the locals — and has generated lots of growth potential.

If you’re not growing, you’re dying; this is the mentality of Coen Markets. After almost 100 years in business, the brand has not lost its drive in the slightest, continually adapting to evolving consumer behaviors, technology, and population shifts. Their real estate team is currently pursuing strategic infill growth and refining its existing portfolio for maximum revenue, with plans to enter new markets also in the works.

We’re focusing our future on building what we call new-to-industry stores to compete with some of our larger competitors in the area.”

— Adam Lazenga, Finance and Real Estate Manager

Increasing revenue without all the risk

When it came time to find a location-intelligence partner to grow with, Coen prioritized precision, in alignment with its judicious approach to investing. SiteZeus’ expansive offerings and high accuracy rate made for a perfect match that complemented the team’s professional experience.

We’re a midsize firm, so we’re very price conscious. We can’t afford to cast a wide net and miss on one or two sites like some bigger firms can,” said Adam. “We need to make sure the sites that we’re investing in are winners. We’re trying to take as much risk out of the process as possible.”

As an emerging brand eager to see results, the team also looked for speed and ease of use in its new partner. The real-time analyses, clean interface, and ongoing support offered by SiteZeus have enabled the brand to accelerate its market-planning process.

In particular, Adam found that consistent outreach from SiteZeus’ client success team led to a smooth implementation process and helped the brand get the most out of the analytics:

Our support contacts, Hassan and Sean, were able to leverage their experience with other clients to cut out some pain points and recommend what to include in our analyses. Being able to connect with them every other week and walk through things has really helped flatten the learning curve.”

And since all SiteZeus subscriptions come with unlimited model updates at no extra cost, Adam and his team could rest assured knowing they would be basing their high-stakes decisions off of the latest data. Armed with instant answers from their custom A.I. model, Coen was ready to dive in.

The brand is taking off — but where should it land?

First things first: finding the right area. With SiteZeus’ white-space analysis solution, Site Sonar, Coen quickly pinpointed the high-potential trade areas within its reach.

The Site Sonar tool is allowing us to fill in the gaps within our current markets to really get our name and brand out there,” Adam explained.

From there, the team is just a click away from a custom sales forecast, or Zeustimate, for any prospective location. And they’re able to run projections on a large number of broker-recommended locations without the time-consuming hassle of manual entry! Adam’s team uploaded these potential sites to the platform en masse for instant analysis:

We’ve been able to mass import all the sites we’ve been considering into SiteZeus and get a Zeustimate for each, then take the top 10 percent to pinpoint regions where we could grow our market share.”

A strategy rooted in diverse, dependable data

Coen recognizes that, while perhaps not as exciting as opening new locations, refining existing ones is just as important. There’s a lot that goes into selecting a site, and all those factors remain relevant down the road. But the market has certainly evolved since Coen’s inception, earning portfolio optimization a place in all strong market-planning strategies.

To evaluate the brand’s legacy stores, Coen’s real estate team leverages information like traffic counts and competitive analyses — which is why SiteZeus’ robust data exchange caught their eye. And having that data integrated into their model and housed in the same user-friendly platform made it that much more valuable.

We were trying to find tools that would allow us to look at traffic data, mobile data, and demographic data — not just to find future stores, but to really understand and evaluate our current portfolio. Our real estate advisors found some of these tools in other platforms we looked at, but SiteZeus had everything under one platform, one umbrella. We were also really interested in using the predictive capabilities.”

— Adam Lazenga, Finance and Real Estate Manager

Coen’s proactive optimization efforts are already generating results, allowing them to mitigate the risk of projects such as remodels by projecting the potential return on investment. The SiteZeus Sandbox serves as a testing ground for the team to validate or disprove their theories about which updates would boost store revenue.

The portfolio optimization tool shied us away from one of our remodeling projects because it indicated the change in performance wouldn’t be worth the cost,” Adam shared.

With its ability to help brands avoid making costly mistakes, the SiteZeus platform becomes an invaluable asset to even the most experienced real estate teams.

The future looks bright

Adopting advanced location intelligence has equipped Coen to take a holistic approach to market planning. Adam and his colleagues can now maximize the revenue potential of each market, outpace competitors, and save time.