Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for German Dziebel · Frontera Project · August 2026
Strategy and market-entry work is almost always sold through reputation: the engagement arrives because someone already knows the name. That channel reaches the slice of the market that overlaps a career, and it is silent about everything else. This page is everything else. Who buys judgment work in the US, who signs for it, and roughly how many of them there are. It describes the market rather than your practice, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Large US employers, 500 people and up
Where outside strategy is a funded line with a named sponsor rather than a favor. Slower to enter and worth more once entered, because the same team tends to buy research, positioning and transformation advice in sequence rather than one at a time.
Who signs: chief marketing officer, chief strategy officer, head of insights and consumer research, head of corporate development, and the CEO on the larger pieces.
20,000 to 21,000
US firms with 500 or more employees, out of roughly six million employer firms in total
The upper mid-market, 100 to 499 people
The band that has outgrown running on instinct and has not yet built an internal strategy function, so the work gets bought rather than absorbed. About one in a hundred US employer firms sits here, which makes it small as a share and large as a number, and decisions are made by one or two people in weeks rather than quarters.
Who signs: CEO or founder, VP of marketing, head of growth, head of product, and the operating partner where a sponsor is involved.
60,000 to 90,000
US employer firms in the 100 to 499 band; the range is wide because published estimates of this band disagree with each other
Companies arriving in the US from outside it
The clearest fit for cross-border work and the hardest group on this page to enumerate, because a foreign parent's US entity registers like any other US company. There is no public list of companies that just arrived. They are identified through hiring, filings and office openings, one at a time, which is why the segment stays underworked by everyone.
Who signs: US country manager or general manager, head of international at the parent, the group CEO or founder, and the board sponsor sitting over the entry.
No clean register
reached through signals and named accounts rather than counted; the difficulty of finding them is the reason the segment stays open
Venture-backed companies between rounds
Where product-market fit and commercialization work is bought with money that has just landed and a board that wants a plan for it. Timing is the whole game: the window opens on the announcement and closes once the team is hired, which is usually a matter of weeks.
Who signs: founder and CEO, chief operating officer, VP of marketing, and the lead investor's platform or portfolio partner, who often makes the introduction.
Announced, not registered
funding becomes public on the day it happens, so this segment is worked as a stream of dated events rather than as a static list
Agencies, holding company units and consultancies
A channel rather than an end customer. They own the client relationship and buy specialist strategy in when a pitch or an unfamiliar category demands it, so one relationship here can produce repeat work across several brands without a new sale each time.
Who signs: chief strategy officer, head of planning, new business lead, and the managing director of the practice.
Coded by sector, not by practice
the public register counts advertising and consulting firms by sector code, which mixes one-person shops in with real practices, so the countable layer badly overstates the reachable one

Where the openings are

1
Reputation only reaches the people who already know you. Every engagement that arrives through a career network comes from the part of the market that overlaps that career. The 20,000 largest US employers do not know the name yet, and neither do most of the 60,000 in the band below them. That is a distribution gap, not a credibility one, and the two are fixed by completely different work.
2
This work is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A funding round, a new country manager, a category entry, a CMO hire. Those moments are visible from the outside to anyone watching the whole market on a schedule, and invisible to anyone waiting to be remembered. Watching several thousand companies for a trigger is mechanical work, and it is precisely what a referral channel cannot do.
3
The buyer is a seat, not a company. Chief strategy officer, VP of marketing, head of insights. Those seats turn over often, and a new one reliably reopens the roster of outside advisors within the first two quarters. A channel built on named roles catches that window. A channel built on relationships hears about it once the decision has already been made.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. Firm counts come from the federal business register, which covers US employer firms and excludes businesses with no payroll. Size bands are measured across the whole firm rather than a single location, so a company can sit in a larger band than its local headcount suggests. Published estimates for the mid-size bands vary, which is why the range above is deliberately wide. Cross-border arrivals, funding events and agency practices are not separately enumerated in any public register and are described here rather than counted.
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