Count the tools
The typical site-selection stack, described plainly, is a duct-tape job. One tool for traffic counts. Another for demographics. A spreadsheet for scoring. A map app for visualization. And then a final spreadsheet whose only job is to combine the output of all the others into something a committee can look at.
Each tool is good at its one thing. That is the trap. Best-of-breed sounds like rigor, but what you have actually assembled is five sources of truth that do not talk to each other, held together by copy and paste.
The seams are where it breaks
The problem was never any single tool. It is the seams between them. Point solutions fail to talk to each other at the speed the business demands, and teams that committed to fragmented, best-of-breed stacks a few years ago are now facing painful re-platforming decisions as a result.
Every seam is a manual handoff, and every handoff is a chance for the number to drift. The traffic figure in the scoring sheet is a week older than the one in the traffic tool. The map shows a site the combining spreadsheet has already dropped. Assembling the picture takes longer than analyzing it, and the picture is stale by the time it is done.
What best-of-breed actually costs
The cost does not show up as a line item, so it hides. It shows up as the analyst who spends a day stitching outputs instead of evaluating sites. As the committee meeting that opens with fifteen minutes of reconciling which spreadsheet is current. As the decision that cannot be defended a year later, because the reasoning was scattered across five tools and none of them kept it.
Fragmentation feels like sophistication while you are buying it. It feels like friction every single day you use it.
The case for one spine
The alternative is not a worse version of each tool. It is the same work run on shared data underneath, as connected modules instead of stitched point solutions. When screening, mapping, weighted scoring, underwriting, risk, and approvals all run against the same records, the seams disappear, because there is nothing to stitch.
That is the bet MyDealTeams makes: one spine for the whole deal, not four tools and a combining spreadsheet. Site selection is one tab of it. The traffic figure, the demographics, the score, and the map are the same record, so the picture is never assembled and never stale. It is just there.
MyDealTeams is free during Early Access: Community free, Pro $69/month, everything free while we are in Early Access. Nothing to lose, and a deal team to organize.
Sources: [Tomasz Tunguz: suites vs point solutions](https://tomtunguz.com/suites-point-solutions/) · [PassBy: retail site selection software](https://passby.com/blog/retail-site-selection-software/)