Programmatic Models

Recently I’ve been interested in finding a business investment – something like a B&B that allows me to put some of my retirement savings into a business that I have some control over its success.  The normal process for something like this would be to write a business plan or at least do some back of the envelop estimations for how much revenue is expected from the property.

The usual tool of choice is a spreadsheet.  And those are excellent ways to work through the numbers and visually see things.  However, the flexibility of a spreadsheet is somewhat limited for even more advanced analysis.

I wanted to take things to a different level.

What information could I get from looking at the market and scraping webpages that I could feed into a bigger model to see how other owners of similar businesses do.  By pulling in 1000+ comparables and running them all through a similar model to estimate each of their profitability it becomes possible to identify the traits of a successful business.

Applying this sort of ‘big data’ analysis is proving interesting.  There is an amazing amount of information freely available on the internet, but much of it exists in different silos.

In the example of running a B&B, there are lots of them listed on booking.com and similar travel booking sites.  These provide a partial picture of how popular a place is (from it’s availability) and the revenue (from the cost to stay there). Another big piece of the picture is the costs – which you can estimate by checking real-estate listings.  By putting all this information you can see many interesting things.

If your model is accurate then you can get answers to these questions:

• What percentage of B&Bs turn a profit each year
• Is there an optimal size / number of rooms
• which attributes of the property correlate most to it’s profitability

You can take a deeper dive into the best performing properties to see if they do something unique – do they have nicer websites / photos? Do they do aggressive advertising? Are they active on social media?  Answers to these questions can help you find the strategies that are working best in the market – and perhaps things that are a waste of time.

This type of analysis is something I think more people should be doing.  It provides some competitive advantage in terms of the information that you bring with you into a potentially big investment, and reduces the risk that you inadvertently buy a lemon.