Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Raoul Didisheim · Didisheim Consulting · August 2026
Two things get sold here and they are not bought by the same person. A build or a growth program is bought by whoever already owns marketing. A fractional marketing seat is bought by a founder who has just worked out that nobody does. This map covers where both sit across the US market, who signs inside each segment, and roughly how many companies there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Owner-led employers, 50 to 250 people
The center of the fractional market. Big enough to need a plan that survives contact with a revenue target, too small to fund a senior marketing team around it, so the function reports straight to the founder and gets the founder's spare attention.
Who signs: founder or CEO, president, COO, and the one generalist marketing manager who has outgrown the seat.
100,000 to 120,000
US employer firms in this workforce band
Mid-market employers, 250 to 999 people
Where a marketing leader already exists but the digital work is larger than the team that has to deliver it. These buy programs and builds rather than seats, and they can fund a piece of work without a board conversation.
Who signs: CMO or VP of marketing, head of digital, ecommerce director, head of demand generation.
27,000 to 28,000
US employers in this workforce band
Sponsor-backed companies and their portfolios
Small by count and unusually valuable, because the person who signs owns several operating businesses at once. Value creation teams buy marketing help centrally and install it across the portfolio. Worth being straight about a limit: ownership is not recorded in any public employer register, so these are identified one at a time rather than filtered.
Who signs: operating partner, head of value creation, portfolio marketing lead, group chief of staff.
Roughly 11,000 to 13,000 companies
currently sponsor-owned in the US, drawn from private market coverage rather than a public register, so treat it as an order of magnitude
Professional and technical services firms
Accounting, engineering, legal, specialist consulting. High-consideration purchases where the website carries the whole credibility argument, and where nobody inside the partnership wants to own it. They also buy from someone who has run agencies rather than from an agency.
Who signs: managing partner, practice lead, business development director, chief growth officer.
40,000 to 50,000
US professional, scientific and technical services employers at 20 or more people
Multi-site consumer services and care groups
Location-led businesses where digital performance is counted in appointments rather than impressions. Long-standing sites, fragmented tooling, and a marketing owner who is usually also the operations owner, which shortens the decision considerably.
Who signs: chief growth officer, director of marketing, regional operations director, practice or group owner.
12,000 to 15,000
US multi-site health care and consumer services employers at 50 or more people
The gap between marketing leaders
The sharpest trigger in this market and the one nobody can buy a list of. A departure, a first outside raise, a new revenue target with no plan behind it. The company is not in the market at all until the week it is, and then it moves faster than any other buyer on this page.
Who signs: founder or CEO, board member, incoming head of sales.
No public register
read from role changes and company events one at a time; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
Referral selects for network overlap, not for fit. In advisory work it reaches the slice of the market that already touches a firm, and it is silent about the rest. The segments above run to well over a hundred thousand US employers. The ones outside your network are not unqualified, they simply have no way of knowing you exist.
2
Two offers, two doors, and only one of them is a marketing door. A build or a growth program is bought by a marketing owner who is looking. A fractional seat is bought by a founder who is not looking for an agency at all, because in his head the problem is a hiring problem. Same firm, different message, different list.
3
This is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A senior marketer leaving, a funding round closing, a sales target being set without a plan under it. Those moments are visible from outside if someone is watching a few thousand companies for the signal, and invisible if you are waiting for the right person to think of your name.
4
Sponsor-owned portfolios turn one relationship into many companies. The operating partner buys once and installs across the group, which is the closest thing to distribution that exists in advisory work. It is a named list rather than a segment you can filter, and it stays open precisely because building that list is work most firms will not do.
Built from public federal registry data covering US employers and establishments, current to the most recent published year, and counts are banded deliberately. Workforce bands use published employment sizes, so they indicate scale rather than an exact staff count. Sector codes are self-reported. Ownership structure and leadership changes are not covered by any public register and are described rather than counted.
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