Aperture Intelligence™ · the Customer & Market Map
Where are your best customers, and where are the next ones?
The Customer & Market Map answers both on real geography, so a second location or a marketing budget stops being a guess. Fixed fee of $8,500.
By Fenwick How, Founder
BBA in Project Management, certified PMP, currently completing an Executive MBA at Texas A&M. He leads the work himself, start to finish.
What is a Customer & Market Map?
A Customer & Market Map segments your existing customers by what they are actually worth, then puts them on real geography: trade areas, drive times, demographics and competitive pressure. It shows where your demand concentrates, where it is going unmet, and which candidate site is the defensible one before you sign a lease.
The problem
What is the marketing budget actually buying?
Most owner-run businesses can tell you what they spend on marketing and roughly what came in. Very few can tell you which postcodes their best customers come from, which of them ever came back, or how far someone will realistically drive to reach them. So the budget gets spread evenly across a map that is not evenly worth anything.
The same blind spot decides much larger questions. A second location gets chosen because a site became available, a rent looked reasonable, or the owner knows the area. It is a six-figure commitment on a ten-year lease, made on the strength of familiarity, when the data to test it already exists and is mostly public.
And underneath both sits the quieter one. Businesses routinely spend to acquire more of the customers who cost them the most to serve, because the customer list has never been separated by what each group is actually worth over time.
You cannot spend your way to the right customers if nobody has worked out where they are.
The solution
How does a Market Map fix that?
By putting your own customers on a map before anything is recommended. Your addresses become coordinates, the coordinates become trade areas and drive times, and the result is laid against demographics, competitors and demand so you can see the gap rather than argue about it.
The analysis behind it
Not every technique applies to every business. Some need disclosures a private company does not publish, and some matter far more when the owner is also the payroll. The report says which ones were run, which were adapted, and which were not possible, rather than quietly leaving a gap.
What you walk away with
- The Market Map report: who your customers are and where they come from
- Trade areas and drive-time rings for every location you run
- White space: the areas with demand you are not serving
- The GIS package and layer guide, yours to keep
It runs on a customer list with addresses or postcodes and your marketing spend by channel. Two to three weeks. Addresses are converted to map coordinates and then deleted: the analysis holds no personal details.
See it live
Your market, on one live map.
Customers, competitors, drive-time trade areas and the things that move buyers, on one map. Press play to watch a year of growth, or select any hex for its numbers.
APERTUREINTELLIGENCE™Rain 30%
The proof
What does this look like on a real business?
A worked example, with the mapping and the site-selection analysis shown in full inside the report.
Lumina Medical Aesthetics
Mapping Lumina's own patients showed where the best customers cluster and where demand was going unmet. The newest clinic turned out to still be building its base rather than underperforming, and the strongest untapped trade area was the Energy Corridor: a data-backed answer to where do we grow next, rather than an opinion about it.
Lumina is a worked example built to demonstrate the method, not a client engagement, and it is labeled that way everywhere it appears.
Where the maps end up
The analysis does not stop at a PDF. The same trade areas, drive-time rings and demand layers carry into Aperture Atlas, the live platform, where they stay current instead of describing the market as it was on the day the report was written.
The alternatives
Why not just buy a demographics report?
Because a demographics report describes an area, and it will do that accurately for a few hundred dollars. What it cannot do is tell you which of your customers are worth having, or which candidate site wins once your own demand is on the map. Here is the whole landscape, side by side.
| Dimension | The Aperture Method | Large consultancies | Local advisors & CPAs | GIS & data vendors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quantitative depth | Graduate level | Graduate level | Rarely the quantitative work | Data, not analysis |
| Spatial and market intelligence | Yes, tied to the decision | Seldom offered at your size | No | Maps and lists, no strategy |
| Who does the work | Fenwick How, accountable start to finish | A team you did not meet | Your advisor, part time | A platform or a vendor |
| What it costs | Fixed fee, from $4,500 | Enterprise retainers | Hourly or per filing | Per report or subscription |
| What you keep | Models, dashboards and working files | The deck | Your accounts | A file export |
| After the recommendation | Stays until the strategy is running | The engagement ends | Ongoing, but not strategic | No follow-through |
The price
What does it cost?
$8,500, fixed, agreed before anything starts.
That covers the full customer, market and geographic analysis and the GIS package you keep. If you are weighing one specific site rather than mapping the whole market, the Site Selection Study is $18,000, fixed fee, per site-selection question, scoped to the candidate market before you commit.
Not sure this is the right component? The $4,500 Business X-Ray will tell you, and it counts in full toward the Method if you continue within 60 days.
Not ready to book? Ask a question first. Asking does not begin an engagement.
Under the hood
The frameworks behind it.
The same techniques big-company teams use, applied, in plain language, to your business.
PESTLE analysis
Scans the outside forces, economic, tech, legal, and more, that could help or hurt you.
CLV & cohort analysis
Measures what a customer is worth over time and how different groups behave, so you invest where it pays.
Value-chain analysis
Examines each step you take to deliver value, to find where you can cut cost or stand out.
Geographic intelligence (GIS)
Maps your customers and market on real geography to see where demand and opportunity concentrate.
Where it fits
One component of a five-part method.
Every component is a complete engagement on its own, and a step in the larger arc. Take this one, or run the whole Method.
Before you book
Questions owners ask about the Market Map.
Do you need my customer list?
Addresses or postcodes, yes, because that is what makes the mapping possible. Names are not needed. Addresses are converted to map coordinates and then deleted, so the analysis itself holds no personal details, and the terms covering that are signed before anything is sent.
What if I do not track where customers come from?
Most do not, and the data usually exists anyway, in the point-of-sale system, the booking system or the invoices. Finding it is part of the work. If it genuinely does not exist, that is a finding in itself and the first thing worth fixing.
Can this tell me where to open next?
The Market Map identifies the trade areas with unmet demand, which is the honest answer to where should we look. If you are choosing between specific sites and about to commit to a lease, the Site Selection Study at $18,000 scores the candidates properly. That is a bigger decision and it is priced on the decision, not on the effort.
Do I keep the maps?
Yes. You get the report, the GIS package and a layer guide explaining what every layer is and where the data came from. If you later run Aperture Atlas, the same layers carry into the live platform.
Does this work if I only have one location?
Yes, and it is often more useful. A single-site business is making the same decisions about catchment, marketing spend and expansion with less internal data to go on, so the outside data does more of the work.
How long does it take?
Two to three weeks once the customer data arrives. Geocoding is quick; the analysis and the honest reading of it are what take the time.
Last reviewed . Fees and timings on this page are current as of that date.