Aperture Atlas™ · the Scoreboard
Is the strategy actually working?
Aperture Atlas keeps your numbers, your map and your forecast live, so the answer is on a screen rather than in next month's accounts. From $900/mo.
By Fenwick How, Founder
BBA in Project Management, certified PMP, currently pursuing an MBA at Texas A&M. He does the work himself, start to finish.
What is Aperture Atlas?
Aperture Atlas is a live platform carrying the KPIs that matter, your market and trade areas on an interactive map, and a rolling forecast. It watches for variance against plan, escalates what deserves your attention in a monthly one-page brief, and re-scores your Aperture Score so progress is measured rather than asserted.
The problem
How would you know if the plan stopped working?
Most owner-run businesses find out late. The month closes, the accounts arrive two or three weeks after that, and by the time anyone reads them the thing that went wrong has been going wrong for six weeks. Nobody is being careless. The reporting cycle simply was not built to catch anything quickly.
So the business gets run on a mixture of gut feel and month-old reports, and the numbers that would actually answer the question live in five different places. The point-of-sale system knows one part. The accounting package knows another. A spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand knows the third, and only they know how it works.
The expensive version of this is what happens to a strategy after it is agreed. A good plan gets delivered, everyone means it, and within two quarters nobody can say which parts were done or whether they worked. Not because the plan was wrong, but because nothing was watching.
A strategy that nobody is measuring is a strategy that quietly becomes a memory of a meeting.
The solution
How does Atlas fix that?
By making the answer permanent rather than periodic. The KPIs are defined once with their source, target, cadence, owner and thresholds, then wired to the systems you already run so the Scoreboard updates itself. When something moves outside its band, it is flagged and escalated to a person, not buried in a dashboard nobody opens.
What runs inside it
- 01
The live Scoreboard
The metrics that matter, in one always-current view.
- 02
OKRs & KPI management
Clear objectives and the few numbers that prove them.
- 03
Market Maps, kept live
Trade areas and demand, current rather than historical.
- 04
Rolling forecasts
Where the business is heading, not just where it has been.
- 05
Variance & anomaly detection
Flagged against baseline and plan, and escalated.
- 06
The monthly Signal Brief
One page: what changed, what it means, what to do.
- 07
Aperture Score, re-scored
Measurable before-and-after, not an assertion.
What you get, every month
- A live Scoreboard your team can open any day of the month
- Market Maps and forecasts that stay current on their own
- Anything outside its threshold flagged and escalated to a person
- A one-page Signal Brief: what changed, what it means, what to do
It runs on read-only access to the systems you already have, so nothing can be changed and nobody has to upload anything monthly. Standing it up takes two to three weeks. After that it is yours to run the business from.
The proof
What does it actually look like?
Two of the components are running live on this site, with real map data and a real forecast, rather than a screenshot of a dashboard.
The live components, on this site
The Market Map on the homepage is the real thing: trade areas, drive-time rings and where demand clusters, rendered live rather than captured as an image. The revenue forecast beside it is a working projection, not a picture of one. What you see there is what sits inside your Atlas, with your data in it.
Lumina Medical Aesthetics
The full worked example runs all five phases through to the Scoreboard, showing the KPIs that were chosen, why those and not others, and how the Aperture Score was re-scored at the end to prove the movement rather than claim it.
Lumina is a worked example built to demonstrate the method, not a client engagement, and it is labelled that way everywhere it appears.
The alternatives
Why not just buy a dashboard tool?
Because the tool is the easy part and it is not the part that fails. What fails is deciding which fifteen numbers out of two hundred actually matter for your business, wiring them to sources that will not break, and having someone read them every month. 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, 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?
From $900/mo, tiered by how many locations you run.
Single location, $900/mo. 2–4 locations, $1,500/mo. 5+ locations, $2,500/mo. Terms are a 6-month minimum, 30 days' notice thereafter, and you can pay annually and get 12 months for the price of 10.
Atlas is the one part of the Method that is ongoing, and it is the one part you should be able to cancel easily. The dashboards, models and Market Maps built during the engagement are yours to keep either way.
Not ready to book? Ask a question first. Asking does not begin an engagement.
Before you book
Questions owners ask about Atlas.
What does it connect to?
Read-only access to your accounting system, and to your point-of-sale, CRM or marketing platforms where they exist. Read-only means nothing in those systems can be changed by us. Where a connection genuinely is not possible, that source runs on a scheduled export instead, and the Scoreboard says which is which.
Who decides which KPIs go on it?
We propose them from what the earlier analysis found, and you approve them. Every KPI carries a source, a target, a cadence, an owner and the thresholds that turn it red. A metric nobody owns is a metric nobody acts on, so it does not go on.
Do I need the rest of the Method first?
It works far better afterwards, because the KPIs then come from evidence about your business rather than from a template. If you want to start here, we would want to run at least the Business X-Ray first so the Scoreboard is measuring the right things.
What happens if I cancel?
The terms are a 6-month minimum, 30 days' notice thereafter, so it is genuinely cancellable. Everything built during the engagement, the models, the reports, the Market Maps and the working files, is yours and stays yours. What stops is the live platform and the monthly brief.
Is this just automated reporting?
No, and the difference matters. Automated reporting sends you a number. Atlas compares the number to a baseline and a plan, flags what has moved outside its band, and a person decides whether it matters before it reaches you. The agents produce findings; only a person produces conclusions.
How is progress actually proved?
Your Aperture Score is re-scored against the same published rubric used at the start: same seven lenses, same twenty-nine sub-criteria, same anchors. That is what turns better into a number, and it is why the baseline taken during the X-Ray is worth having.
Last reviewed . Fees and timings on this page are current as of that date.