How does a business grow from a single location run by its founder to a brand you might see on any street in the country? The secret often lies in deciding which streets are right for the business.
For the nation’s largest chiropractic provider, location analytics has cracked this growth code.
The Joint, a fast-growing franchise business, has nearly doubled the number of clinics it operates over the last four years, and now performs 14 million patient adjustments annually in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Senior management and franchisees consult maps powered by geographic information system (GIS) technology to decide which markets to enter and how best to reach customers.
Across the company, from advertising teams to market analysts, location intelligence informs the mission of delivering convenient chiropractic care to a growing number of US markets.
“As of year end, we had 967 clinics open and operating,” says Jake Singleton, chief financial officer. “But I can tell you where the next 900 are being targeted based on our maps and data.”
Finding a Brand’s Best Customers Through Market Analysis
GIS technology helps The Joint’s decision-makers answer two questions fundamental to every retail or service business: Where to open, and how to market there?
Success hinges on understanding the distinct traits, habits, and patterns of local consumer groups.
“Every year we look at, Who are our patients now? Where are they coming from? What type of backgrounds are they coming from? What types of demographics are in those neighborhoods?” says Max Bourque, The Joint’s manager of real estate analytics and a GIS power user. “We’re constantly evolving the model to understand, who is our best patient now?”
Fourteen percent of US adults have seen a chiropractor in the last year. Around half are a good fit for The Joint’s subscription-based business model. Bourque and analytics director Richard Matthews, who holds a PhD in geography, create profiles of the company’s ideal patients based on traits like income levels, age, and lifestyle preferences.
Those personas help the team identify other promising markets for franchise expansion.
“We can be highly precise in determining where we need to go in terms of a trade area because we are identifying areas with enough density of prospective patients that mirror some of our best patients we are already servicing,” Singleton explains.
The Joint now uses location intelligence to tailor advertising messages based on how patients commute and their technology preferences.
Location data also undergirds a formula used to calculate the ROI potential of each clinic based on variables like population, usage, and penetration rate.
“It is truly a scientific approach to real estate,” Singleton notes.

We really became strategic and data-specific on...the placement of these clinics.
When Convenience Is King, Location Matters
Since its 1999 start in Tucson, Arizona, The Joint has built its success on a distinctive health-care business model: no insurance, just flat monthly subscriptions. Members of its nearly 1,000 franchises can drop in anytime for a quick spinal adjustment—much like concierge medicine, but faster.
This convenience-first approach means one thing is critical to success: locations must slot perfectly into customers’ daily routines.
Matthews and Bourque have honed their GIS-based market analysis into a trusted methodology, but there are nuances to every site selection. It’s not as simple as identifying the three or four best customer personas and then looking for concentrations of those groups on a national map.
A key customer segment in a large coastal city—say, single, white-collar professionals—may barely show up on the map of a smaller Midwestern region. Similarly, as populations migrate, a once-reliable customer base may dwindle, challenging a franchise to find new clients.
To ensure that its location intelligence stays accurate, the analytics team updates personas annually, plugging new data into its GIS maps. Recently, Bourque has developed ways to share this location insight with colleagues throughout the enterprise.
“Part of the job is really learning how to communicate maps to people who…don’t read them on a daily basis,” he says. That’s a common theme among new business analysts who share insights across departments.
To assist senior decision-makers, Bourque built a GIS portal with self-serve dashboards. With these maps, managers of large territories monitor franchise regions available for sale, areas with the highest ROI potential, drive times for patients, and other KPIs.
For franchisees and salespeople, Bourque creates infographic one-pagers that include maps and demographic facts on specific markets, including metrics like median household income, population density, and education.
These insights help franchisees replace guesswork with market analysis grounded in location data. “They feel like instead of just running in blind and opening a Joint clinic office, they’re actually seeing what the potential is and seeing where the pitfalls are,” Bourque says.

Armed with market analysis about various personas, franchisees are better able to select sites based on the types of stores and retail centers core customers prefer.
Fine-Tuning Site Selection and Charting the Next Chapter of Growth
Once a franchisee has targeted a particular market, Bourque analyzes specific sites.
Visibility is key for a Joint clinic to thrive, so larger locations tend to draw more customers than those with less square footage. Nearby outlets associated with healthy living, like organic grocers, make for desirable retail neighbors.
Based on these and other attributes, Bourque grades shopping centers based on their suitability for The Joint brand, just as he rates larger trade areas. It’s all part of the GIS-powered science that informs business growth and franchise success.
As the company aims to break into its last untapped regions—namely, the Midwest and Northeast—marketing is becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle.
In the Southwest, where strip malls are common and brand awareness of The Joint is already strong, a highly visible location can do a lot of heavy lifting in attracting clients.
In a densely populated place like New York City, The Joint will be courting different demographic slivers than it has elsewhere in the country. To expand into major East Coast cities, The Joint will be marketing to personas like urban millennials.
The company expects GIS technology to play an important role in identifying and reaching those customers. Personas have been key to The Joint’s national expansion, and now they’re poised to fuel the company’s next stage of growth.
“Using them from a consumer marketing perspective,” Singleton says, “puts us in a much stronger position to attract patients and help improve their quality of life through routine and affordable chiropractic care.”