Enterprise-level analytics, AI & strategy for owner-run businesses
Big-company intelligence, built for your business.
We bring the financial, customer, market, and competitive analysis used by large companies to owner-run businesses: uncovering what's driving performance, where opportunities are being missed, and where to focus next.
Your business deserves the same intelligence as the companies 100× your size.
15 questions · about 4 minutes · no email required
The stakes
43.5% of the US economy runs on businesses like yours.
Almost none of it gets the analysis a listed company takes for granted. Not because the work does not apply at your size, but because nobody has been selling it to you. That is the gap this firm exists to close.
$447,658
of US GDP produced by American small business, every second.
Run rate from BEA, Q2 2026. Not a live reading.
See why that mattersThe 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 labor. 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 modeled 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™?
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. One methodology, five components: take a single one when that is all you need, or run the whole arc. Either way you work with the same senior partner throughout.
Every consultant says they’ll help you grow. We show you exactly where, using graduate-level analytics, spatial intelligence and real market data.
Built for owner-run companies doing $5M–$20M, usually with more than one location or territory. Smaller than that? Start with an Aperture Snapshot.
What it is built on
Three capabilities most firms make you hire separately.
Analysis, mapping and a live platform, run by one accountable lead, on one set of your numbers.
The numbers, properly read
Profit drivers, pricing, break-even and forecasting. Graduate-level methods applied to your accounts, not generic benchmarks.
The market, properly mapped
Where your customers are, who they are, and where the next ones live. Trade areas, drive times, income and spending.
A dashboard that stays yours
Every layer on one live view you run the business from, still current long after the engagement ends.
Each of the five components below draws on one or more of these three. The course codes on those cards are the graduate coursework already built into the Method: Fenwick is currently completing an Executive MBA at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School, and the Method is revised as each course lands.
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.
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, and finishes in the same place: Aperture Atlas, your live intelligence platform.
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.
Under $5M in revenue · Insights · Snapshot
Smaller than that, and still want the analysis?
The Aperture Snapshot is the same seven lenses as the X-Ray, read from the documents you submit. No interview, no triangulation against what the numbers actually show, and the Aperture Score it returns is marked provisional because it has not been tested. It is an honest read for a business that is not yet the size the rest of this page is built for.
It counts in full toward the Business X-Ray if you continue within 60 days. Not offered above $5M: at that size the X-Ray is the honest way in.
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.
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.
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
2–4 locations
5+ locations
Priced by location count, on a 6-month minimum, 30 days' notice thereafter.
Opening 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. A standalone fixed-fee study.
How we do itEvery engagement is a fixed fee, agreed and scoped before any work starts. No hourly billing.
See every feeAperture 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 labeled that way everywhere it appears. No client work is published without written permission.
A Business Methodology
Look Closer
The Aperture Method™
Big-company intelligence
for owner‑run businesses.
with Bradford Hepfer, PhD, CPA, and contributing experts
The book · in progress
The methodology, written down.
The Aperture Method is becoming a book, Look Closer: 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, with Bradford Hepfer, PhD, CPA, on accounting and finance, and contributing authors in marketing and technology. 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. No hourly billing, and no invoice you did not see coming. The way in is the Business X-Ray at $4,500, and it counts in full toward the Method if you continue within 60 days. Every other fee, from a single component to the full Method to the Atlas tiers, is published in full on the Pricing page rather than quoted here, so there is one place that can never disagree with your contract.
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 center: 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, 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, organized 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.
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.