They also make bankers moist. This is no doubt due to the fact that if you get one of those mammer-jammer area surveys from ESRI for $500 a pop all the information is presented in terms of 5, 10 and 15-minute isochrones. Speak their language, they'll speak yours. I get the sense that the isochrones I did were like the only ones our banker had seen in years.Isochrones (areas of equal travel time) never fail to look cool:
Confirm your numbers. If you can point to a study that says "10% of white males between 18 and 24 go paintballing regularly" and then whip out isochrones that capture exactly how many white males are within a 15 minute isochrone, it takes arithmetic to determine what your likely annual capture of white males between 18 and 24 are. YOu certainly aren't guaranteed their business but you have a reasonable expectation that short of loyalty to somewhere else or personal animosity towards you, they're coming to you first. With veen's help I was able to determine exactly how many likely consumers there were among any given location. More than that, I was able to determine how many consumers there were among our competition and then, thanks to the wonder of Washington State vital statistics data, calibrate how many births any given birth center should have vs. did have. This allowed me to not only get a good estimate for our own practice, but also see which practices were leading or trailing the statistical norm. Finally, we were able to perform the same analysis on Los Angeles, my wife's old market, to demonstrate that she was outperforming the statistical mean by a factor of seven. When you're able to say "this practitioner has historically outperformed the statistical mean by a factor of seven but will be profitable even if she underperforms the statistical mean by a factor of five" you have an easier time getting a loan.
Geo-information and analysis is wholly underrated, across the board. Pretty much every question that starts with 'where' can be answered better with GIS somewhere in the process. But Esri is worse than Adobe and competition is non-existant so the industry doesn't really grow. There's no "Photoshop" for geo. Well, maybe Google Earth Pro, but that's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. I actually made the above by using Esri's new network analysis service. With the new fancy-schmancy ArcGIS Pro, they've not yet added the functionality to use your own network to calculate isochrones. (Totes an accident u guis.) It's paid, it's customizable, faster and better. If I had that back then I would've saved days if not weeks of struggling. However, the above image was €6 out of my free €10 (120 ischrones x 5 ct) and they have no sensible way for me to top that up other than to argue with a sales rep. Glad I did that right on the first try...
Google Earth Pro is deprecated. They pulled all their useful data because they don't want to support the product anymore. All the realtors were super-salty but the fact of the matter is, Google Earth mobile uses a different engine and Google didn't want to cross-pollinate. Google Earth Desktop is dead man walking; there hasn't been an update in years. I managed to trick ESRI's sample server into giving me drive time polygons in .kml format but I cannot for the life of me stumble across the particular server backdoor and keyword bullseye to find the links...