Analytics, AI & strategy for owner-run businesses
Big-company intelligence, built for your business.
Your fractional intelligence department: the business and marketing intelligence big companies rely on, right-sized for owner-run businesses, in plain language, and done for you.
11 questions · about 3 minutes · no email required
43.5% of US GDP comes from small business. See why that matters.In plain English
What does The Aperture Method do?
We dig into your numbers, your customers and your market, tell you where the money actually is, and give you a live dashboard to run the business from. Built for owner-run companies doing $5M–$20M, usually with more than one location or territory, done for you, in language you can act on.
Every consultant says they’ll help you grow. We show you exactly where, using graduate-level analytics, spatial intelligence and real market data.
Smaller than that? Start with an Aperture Snapshot.
$447,658 of US GDP produced by American small business, every second.
Run rate from BEA, Q2 2026. Not a live reading.
The problem
What is it costing you not to know?
You can tell me last month's revenue to the dollar. Now rank your products, your customers and your locations from most profitable to least, after the real cost of serving each one. Most owners cannot, and it has nothing to do with ability. Nobody ever built them the view.
That gap has a price. A long tail of products quietly loses money once you count the labour. Some of your most demanding customers cost more than they pay. The busiest location is often not the most profitable one, and it is usually the one the next expansion gets modelled on. None of it shows up in revenue, and the profit line at the bottom of the P&L adds the winners and the losers together before you see them.
It is not a failure of management. A company can pass several million in revenue while the decisions are still being made from spreadsheets, accounting reports and hard-won instinct, because that is the size at which a finance and strategy function still costs more than it can be shown to return. The information is already in the business. What is missing is the person whose job is to put it together.
A business can be profitable overall and still be profitable in spite of itself.
See how a Business X-Ray finds itWhy a firm like this exists
The Aperture Method™
What is The Aperture Method™?
One methodology, five components. The Aperture Method is the whole system, a repeatable path that takes a business from a first honest assessment all the way to a living, visual intelligence platform. Engage a single component when that's all you need, or run the full Method. Either way, you work with the same senior partner throughout.
The arc: from analysis to a living platform
MBA-grade analytics
Profit drivers, forecasting, segmentation, break-even and optimization, applied to your business.
Spatial intelligence
Geographic intelligence plus deep demographic & human data, age, sex, income, households, and spending, mapped to trade areas and exactly where your customers are.
A living data platform
Every layer brought together on one always-on, visual dashboard you run the business from.
Start here · Aperture Insights™
Not sure where to start? Begin with a Business X-Ray™.
A fixed-fee read of your whole business across seven lenses. Broad by design rather than deep: it names your likely #1 constraint and tells you exactly where the digging needs to happen: the numbers, the market, or the plan.
- A seven-lens read of the whole business
- Your #1 constraint, clearly named
- Your Aperture Score™, a baseline to track
Fixed fee of $4,500, counts in full toward the Method if you continue within 60 days · real insight in its first weeks.
Where it points you: the five components
Start anywhere
Do I have to buy the whole thing?
No. Take one component, or the whole Method. Every component is a complete engagement on its own, and a step in the larger arc. Pick where it hurts most today, or let the Business X-Ray choose for you.
Why we're different
How is this different from a consultant, a CPA or a data vendor?
It sits in the corner no one else occupies. Plot the market on two axes, strategic depth and spatial intelligence, and one quadrant sits empty. That's where Aperture lives.
Local advisors, CPAs & DIY
Close and affordable, but not doing the quantitative or spatial work.
Aperture
Graduate-level analytics AND spatial intelligence, done for you, at your size.
GIS, marketing & data vendors
Maps, demographics, and lists, but no strategy to turn them into decisions.
Big consultancies
Real strategy, but no GIS, and priced and staffed for the enterprise.
MBA-grade strategy & analytics →
Big consultancies don't do GIS for small firms. Marketing and data vendors don't do MBA-grade strategy. Aperture is the only firm that brings graduate-level analytics and spatial intelligence together and builds it for owner-run businesses.
How it works
How does an engagement actually work?
You start with clarity and end with a system you run the business from. Every engagement starts the same way: a low-risk diagnostic that shows you exactly what you need. From there, take one result or the full path. Either way you finish in the same place: Aperture Atlas, your live intelligence platform. You work with the same senior partner throughout.
Step 01 · Aperture Insights™ · Start here
Start with the Business X-Ray.
A seven-lens read of where your business stands today, broad by design, not deep. It names your likely #1 constraint, gives you an Aperture Score to measure from, and tells you exactly where the digging needs to happen. The way in, and the whole of Step 01.
Fixed fee · $4,500
Book your Business X-RayUnder $5M in revenue? The Aperture Snapshot is the same seven lenses read from your documents, for $1,950, and it counts in full toward the X-Ray.
Step 02 · Go deep on one
Take a single component.
This is where the depth lives. Engage Analytics, Intelligence or Compass as a fixed-fee project, the numbers, the market, or the plan, when you already know which one you need. Complete on its own.
From $8,500 per deep component
Browse the five componentsStep 02 · The full path
Run the whole Method.
All five components in sequence, from the first honest assessment to a living platform you run the business from. The complete transformation.
Full engagement · from $25,000
See the full MethodStep 03 · Where it ends up
Then you run the business from Aperture Atlas™.
A project ends. A system doesn't. Atlas is your live platform: the Scoreboard, your Market Maps, drive-time trade areas and forecasts, always current. It is where the whole engagement stays alive, and it is the point of the exercise.
Single location
$900/mo
2–4 locations
$1,500/mo
5+ locations
$2,500/mo
6-month minimum, 30 days' notice thereafter · pay annually and get 12 months for the price of 10.
See the platformOpening a location or entering a new market? A standalone Site Selection Study scores candidate sites and territories on real geography, trade areas, drive times and demand, before you commit. A second location, a new city, a wider service area. Fixed fee, $18,000.
How we do itIndicative pricing: every engagement is fixed-fee and scoped to your business before you commit.
Aperture Atlas™ · the platform
What do I still have when the engagement ends?
Where the analysis comes alive. Aperture Atlas is the Geographic Intelligence Platform at the end of the arc, your market, customers, competitors, and performance on one live, interactive map, powered by SyncPoint AI. When an engagement ends, Atlas keeps running: the dashboards, Market Maps, and forecasts stay current, and they're yours to keep.
A live revenue forecast: Atlas doesn't just show your numbers, it continuously projects where the business is heading.
The proof
What does this look like on a real business?
Lumina Medical Aesthetics
A growing three-clinic med-spa. Revenue climbed 61% in three years while profit stayed essentially flat. All five phases ran end to end, and the constraint that explained it was new-patient retention, not pricing and not demand. The full report is attached so you can check the arithmetic rather than take the summary on trust.
Lumina is a worked example built to demonstrate the Method, not a client engagement, and it is labelled that way everywhere it appears. No client work is published without written permission.
A Business Methodology
The
Aperture
Method™
Big-company intelligence, built for the businesses everyone else ignores.
From the book
Big companies don't outgrow you because they're smarter. They outgrow you because they can see. Their numbers, their customers, their market. Your business already has the data; this book is about turning it into decisions.
Fenwick How
Executive MBA Student · Mays Business School, Texas A&M University
Business · Strategy
Aperture Press
978-1-9600000-1-2
Drag the book to spin it →
The book · in progress
The methodology, written down.
The Aperture Method is becoming a book, the full system laid out end to end: why owner-run businesses are the last ones without real intelligence, and the five-component path that brings a business into focus, from the first honest assessment to a living platform you run the company from.
Written by Fenwick How, founder of The Aperture Method. In progress now.
Before you book
What owners ask before the first call.
The seven that come up almost every time, answered plainly. If yours is not here, ask it and it will be answered by the person who would do the work.
What does it cost?
Everything is a fixed fee agreed before any work starts. The Business X-Ray is $4,500, and it counts in full toward the Method if you continue within 60 days. Below $5M the way in is the Aperture Snapshot at $1,950. A single deep component is $8,500. The full Method is $25,000. Aperture Atlas, the live platform, starts at $900/mo, and its terms are a 6-month minimum, 30 days' notice thereafter. No hourly billing, and no invoice you did not see coming.
Is my business the right size for this?
It is built for owner-run companies doing roughly $5M to $20M in revenue, usually with more than one location, territory or profit centre: big enough that the decisions carry real money, small enough that a large consultancy is not interested and would not be worth it if they were. Below $5M we offer one product rather than the whole ladder, the Aperture Snapshot at $1,950, and if even that is not the right fit we will tell you so.
How long before I see anything useful?
The Business X-Ray produces real findings in its first weeks. A full path from first data to an agreed plan usually runs six to ten weeks. A single component is typically a few weeks on its own. Nothing is held back until a final presentation: you see the work as it lands.
Do I need clean, organised data to start?
No, and almost nobody does. We work with what exists and improve it as we go. Messy books, a spreadsheet someone built two years ago and a point-of-sale system nobody has ever exported are all normal. What a business does not measure is information too, and it is often part of the answer.
Who actually does the work?
Fenwick How leads every engagement start to finish, and stays accountable for what reaches you. You are not handed to a junior team after the first conversation. Where a piece of work calls for a specialist, GIS build-out, valuation, tax or legal, he brings in someone vetted for it and still signs off on the result. The Method is what makes that workable at this size: every engagement runs the same five phases with the same instruments, so the analysis arrives structured rather than improvised. It is AI-assisted where that makes it faster or sharper, and every conclusion is reviewed and signed off by a person before it reaches you.
Is my financial information safe?
Yes. Data is handled on a least-access basis, stored securely, and covered by written terms signed before anything is sent. It is never sold, shared, or reused for another client. Everything built on it, the models, the dashboards and the working files, is yours to keep.
What if I am not ready to commit to all of it?
Start with the Business X-Ray and decide afterwards. It is fixed fee, low risk, and its whole job is to tell you which parts of the Method you actually need, including the possibility that you need less than you thought. It counts in full toward the Method if you continue within 60 days. If you would rather just ask a question first, that does not begin anything.
Last reviewed . Fees and timings on this page are current as of that date.
Free for schools · grades 8–12
Aperture Business Lab™
See the Business. Find the Opportunity. Make the Decision.
A 50-minute guest-speaker session for economics, business and career classes. Students get a card describing a real business and fifteen minutes to find the one thing holding it back, which is the same question we get paid to answer. No fee, nothing sold to students, any school that will have us.
See your business clearly. Then watch the strategy run.
Start with the Business X-Ray, a fixed-fee, low-risk first step that shows you which components you need.