Tallahassee, FL – GlobalMind and EarthSTEPS, LLC will provide the Florida Department of Health (Division of Environmental Health – Bureau of Onsite Sewage Programs) a statewide inventory of onsite sewage treatment and disposal systems in Florida.

Even though the work title may not be appealing, the results of the work have great benefits since it will help the Department of Health to determine the environmental impacts of the septic systems throughout Florida.  The team will use Geographic Information Systems and modeling to identify the systems throughout Florida.

GlobalMind provides information to support land and real estate decisions.  Its clients include land developers, real estate investors and government.  GlobalMind operates from offices in Palm Beach Gardens, Tallahassee and Port St Lucie, Florida.  More about the firm can be found on its website: www.1globalmind.com

EarthSTEPS, LLC  is dedicated to helping companies and homeowners that want to reduce their use of the planet’s natural resources and thus reduce the operating expenses.  EarthSteps is focused on reducing energy and water consumption, as well as promoting the use of green technologies.  More about the firm can be found on its website www.earthsteps.org.

In a recent article about Dunkin’ Donuts versus Starbucks I read an interesting piece of information. The customers who were in Dunkin’ Donuts told the reporter the reason they stick with Dunkin Donuts is because they are from the North East and Dunkin’ Donuts is what they are used to. The same is true for West Coast residents they tend to turn to Starbucks. How can this information help your business?

If you can pinpoint potential customers and market to them more efficiently, you will see better returns on your marketing investment. A tool that can help business owners better utilize their marketing dollars is GIS (Geographic Information Systems). In fact, you may have used Google Earth - a basic version of GIS technology.

GIS tools, such as Google Earth, use location information to help users make decisions. So, how could Google Earth help you understand your customer better and make more money?

First, map all your current customers to see where they are located. Next, use demographic data to find what households have roots in the North East. Data can be obtained from moving stats, relocation stats from State or County, or internaly collected data. Using color coding, the more intense red has a higher concentration of the target market, it is easy to identify high concentrations of the target market. So based on the high concentration of red and existing cutomers east of I-95, you can target a direct mail campaign to the area you identify.

Why would using Google Earth help direct mail? Couldn’t I just guess the area and send postards to those homes, sorta like trial and error? You could, but what if you guess wrong, how much would the mailings cost? A friend of mine decided to send postcard mailers to all the households within a 10 mile radius of her store.

The cost was an astounding $5,800 for the postcard and postage. I am not sure about you, but as a manager in a small business, $5,800 is quite a bit of money for one direct mail compaign. The large dollar amount also increases the break-even point, meaning more sales to cover the cost of the direct mail.

Instead, I offered to map her existing customer’s versus the county population. Then we tied in the female population under 30 years old. The ending result was the above illustration (blue and red). The darker red areas identify areas with higher concentrations of females under 30. Once we download the information and saw the total households, the total households were roughly 2,000. Instead of her direct mail costs totaling $5,800, the costs dropped to $1,160.

Now to turn on my marketing hat for a minute, direct mail typically has a return of less than 1%, which means of the 10,000 mailed, only 100 will respond. On the other hand, more targeted direct mail can have up to a 6% return or even higher. With a 6% return, on 2,000 households you could expect to see 120 people at the store. So, with 8,000 fewer households receiving the mailer we still managed to get a higher response! Also, since the mailer is targeted to the store’s target market, the customers tend to have a higher average sale per transaction.

You are probably thinking, that is all well and good for a store but my business is not based on a store front, how would GIS benefit me? GIS has been used by many different businesses for over 20 years. Companies such as McDonald’s and Wal-mart have been using the technology to count customer cars and determine new store locations. Insurance companies use GIS to measure their risk and market to areas with lower risk. A land developer uses the information to find their next project site. Land conservation groups use GIS to rank the land they want to buy. Shipping companies use GIS to route where their vehicles will travel each day. The possibilities are endless. If you have a question on location, GIS can help you answer it.

Taking information off a spreadsheet and putting it in a picture gives business owners the ability to make decisions within minutes instead of hours.

Checkout how you can implement Google Earth in your business: http://1globalmind.com/2008/02/13/google_earth_for_business/ 

Once you try it, post your results here. Have fun!

We’re big believers in the power of maps to communicate to people. After all a picture is worth a thousand words and probably worth ten thousand business reports. We think Google Earth and the technology it’s built on (Geographic Information Systems) are game changers for business. The problem to date has been that these great tools have been hard to use. Worse the pros in the field seem to want to make things too complex. We believe using maps for decision making in business (and government & non-profit, too) can be simple. To demonstrate we put together this tutorial on how maps can be used in an organization for free in a couple of hours.

With the right maps we can answer important business questions such as:

• Do you know where your customers are?
• How much money do they make?
• How old are they?
• Do they have kids?
• Do they own a home or rent?

How much do you really know?

Have you ever done a customer profile? What’s keeping you from doing one? Time…money…don’t know how?

Today, we’re going to put our customers on the map, get to know them a bit better and look at our market area. We’re going to cover the tools you need and where to get them, the map and demographic data that’s available to you and some ideas for how you can use Google Earth in your business. All of the tools and data we’ll talk about today are free so you can do this with your own customer list when you get back to the office.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our very own Kim Albritton will give a talk on using Google Earth for Small Businesses at the St. Lucie County Business Development Board on February 14.

A new way to search for land is here - Tycoon

With Tycoon you can:

1. Get an overview of the regulatory environment in each covered county with links to local land development code, regulatory agencies and general statistics.
2. Search for land based on criteria such as size, percent wetland coverage, zoning and current & future land use. We are not a listing service. We allow you to find land that meets your criteria—listed or not. You can save your favorite properties.
3. Locate local development experts from engineers and planners to attorneys, lenders and contractors. Tycoon will help you find the team you need to do the deal.

All of this is available to you for free(1). We’d love to hear your thoughts on the struggles you face in getting solid land and regulatory information.

(1) internet charges may apply

If you could assemble your project team for your next land development project from your desktop, would you? In my previous post, I introduced the ability to search for land through our new service Tycoon (www.beaTycoon.com). Not only will Tycoon allow you to search for property, but it will also provide decision critical information.

So what is the information? Tycoon provides searches to find land, links to get the local scoop and land development professionals to get the deal done!  We have already discussed how to search for land, but how can the rest of the site be used?

The biggest obstacle to a deal’s success is the ability to convert property from its current use to a new more profitable use. That means zoning and land use issues. Tycoon links to key regulatory sites in each county we cover.

We’ve taken the guess work out of finding experienced professionals. In each county, we’ve enlisted a select group of service providers. Our expert providers have specific experience in land development and investing. They cover all of the disciplines needed–real estate brokerage, finance, land planning, engineering, land surveying, title and many more.

Our vision is to become the leading source of information for land development.

Kim’s post this morning got me thinking about a little project we did last year with respect to Florida College Football recruiting.  Florida, during a good year, has the highest concentration of top ranked "Bowl Championship Division" (BCD) schools. Although FSU and Miami are struggling this year, the Bulls of USF and even the Golden Knights of UCF are looking like contenders for national attention (The Owls of FAU and Golden Panthers of FIU still have some work to do).

The reason why these schools are usually so good is because of the overwhelming number of nationally recruited prospects in our backyard. Those that are not recruited by or sign with Florida schools are quickly snatched up by their division rivals. During our project, we looked at the 2006 football rosters from the 7 BCD schools (UF, FSU, UM, FIU, FAU, UCF) and the hometown of those recruits to look for correlations, and oh did we find some interesting things out.

First we can look at the number of recruits per city. It should be fairly obvious that cities with large populations (Miami, Tampa, Orlando, etc.) are going to have more recruits because there are going to be more high schools with more students to choose from - even making the students in those schools more competitive amongst themselves.

I don’t know about you, but this graph does nothing for me. Anybody with Excel and the ability to walk through the chart wizard can come up with this. Let’s put it in a geographic perspective - because everybody loves maps, right?

The map shows the number of recruits per city as a circle with relative diameter.  We can see here that beyond the large population centers in the state, that Gainesville and Tallahassee have a significant number of recruits.  There are several reasons for this: the presence of nationally ranked schools which attracts talented coaching staff, summer camps hosted by those colleges and availability to recruiters. One thing this map does not show is that although Tallahassee and Gainesville have large numbers of recruits - no recruits from Gainesville went to FSU and no recruits from Tallahassee when to UF.

Beyond looking at the statewide recruiting results, we can look at distribution by region. In this image we use proportionately sized pie charts to show the number of recruits from various cities and their respective school. In the state of Florida, this is a quasi-neutral area–although you have heavy Gator populations in Lakeland and Bartow. I suspect that as USF gains respect on the national scene, we’ll see dramatic changes in these results in years to come.

We have gone further with this analysis and have even looked at recruits within individual high schools. We know that the rosters of the seven BCD schools contain 12 players from Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, 10 players from Glades High School in Belle Glade (typically a pipeline of top recruits for the Gators).

Maybe in the near future, we’ll begin to look at those recruits that leave our great state and see where they’re going. Does Georgia have a presence (9 Florida players on current roster) or NC State (20 Florida players)?

One of America’s most popular sports, football, and GIS work together.  To further illustrate just how important GIS is to everyone, the blog from Florida GIS Data posted about a GIS workshop in Texas.  The workshop will show how GIS can help analyze the number of hotels rooms and occupancy rates for Super Bowl XLV.

The analysis will then be used to determine how many new hotels need to be built and where to construct them.  Amazing right?  The workshop is put on by the University of Texas at Arlington, check it out.

Introducing Tycoon, the free site that allows users to search for land based on criteria such as parcel size, wetlands, current or future land use and zoning.

In my previous post, So you want to develop land?, I introduced how GIS can help search for land. Since we are so crazy about GIS and the wonderful things it can do, we decided to create a website that helps developers and investors find land.

Tycoon is still in development, but will be available in October. To stay updated on the latest developments, sign-up at www.BeaTycoon.com.

Now you can search foreclosures on Yahoo Real Estate. Go to http://realestate.yahoo.com/Foreclosures. You can search by address or zip code. This is another great example of how geographic visualization is changing the way we consume information. Not that long ago, you had to do manual research in-person at the courthouse.

Very cool.