Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Dr. Lauran Star · August 2026
Here is the map, as promised. Your work has two different buyers who almost never talk to each other: the person who books a speaker for an event, and the person who brings in senior help when the organization is not working. This covers where the second kind sits, who signs, and roughly how many there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Mid-market employers, 250 to 999 people
The clearest fit for senior people work bought by the engagement rather than by the hire. Too large to run without a real people function, too small to carry a full executive team around it, so the gap is usually filled by one overloaded HR leader reporting to a CEO who knows something is wrong but not what. The largest group on this page.
Who signs: the CEO or founder, the single senior HR leader, and where one exists, the board chair.
27,000 to 28,000
US employers in this workforce band
Large employers, 1,000 people and up
Where culture and transformation work is a funded program with a name and a sponsor rather than a favor. Longer to sell into and more competitive, but the engagements are larger and they are the organizations most likely to buy the advisory work and the keynote from the same person.
Who signs: chief people officer, chief transformation officer, head of organizational development, and the CEO on the larger pieces.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers at 1,000 people or more
Corporate parents and holding companies
Small by count and unusually valuable, because the decision sits with people who own several operating businesses at once. One relationship here can reach a portfolio rather than a single company. Worth being straight about a limit: ownership structure is not recorded in any public employer register, so backed and sponsor-owned companies cannot be filtered out of the wider market from public data. They are identified one at a time.
Who signs: the group CEO, the operating partner, the group people director, the chief of staff.
Roughly 490 at 250 people or more
out of about 2,800 US management and holding entities in total; deliberately a narrow, high-value list
Manufacturers and industrial operators
The segment where culture problems present as safety, turnover and output numbers rather than as culture problems, which is why they get diagnosed late and funded quickly once they are. Frequently owner-led or sponsor-owned, and rarely competed for by advisors who arrive through conference stages.
Who signs: the CEO or president, VP of operations, HR director, and the board on turnaround work.
Roughly 6,100
manufacturing employers at 250 people or more
Health systems and care organizations
The largest single concentration of workforce problems in the country, and the sector where retention, culture and clinical outcomes are openly treated as the same conversation. Long buying cycles, but the work is recurring once it lands.
Who signs: CHRO, chief nursing officer, chief medical officer, VP of clinical operations.
Roughly 6,200
health care and social assistance employers at 250 people or more
The speaking and conference buyer
Your other market, and a separate one. Association conferences, industry summits, executive offsites and internal leadership events each have someone who owns the program and the date, and that person is almost never the one who buys advisory work. Stated plainly: this group is not enumerated in any public register, which is exactly why it stays underworked by everyone.
Who signs: conference program chair, association education director, internal events or learning lead, chief of staff.
No public register
reached by name and by event, one at a time; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
A stage reaches the people who came to the event. It is a strong channel for the speaking side and a weak one for the advisory side, because the organizations most likely to need senior help are the least likely to have sent anyone to a conference that year. The two buyers need two channels, and only one of them currently exists.
2
This work is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A departure, a merger, a failed senior hire, a survey that came back badly. Those moments are visible from outside if someone is watching the whole market, and invisible if you are waiting for the right person to remember your name. Watching several thousand companies for a trigger is a mechanical job, and it is the one that a referral channel cannot do.
3
The mid-market is the underworked band, and it is the largest. Roughly 27,000 employers between 250 and 999 people. They are big enough to have real organizational problems and small enough that one conversation with a CEO settles it. They also rarely appear on speaker circuits, which is precisely why they stay unreached.
4
This is a distribution gap, not a credibility one. Diagnosing organizations is your discipline and you do not need help with it. What is missing is the machinery that puts you in front of several thousand named CEOs and people leaders who have never heard of you, on a schedule, and tracks what comes back. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from public federal registry data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Counts are banded deliberately. Workforce bands use plan participants as a headcount proxy, so they indicate scale rather than an exact staff count. Owner-only and very small employers are not published in this data. Sector codes are self-reported. Ownership structure and the events market are not covered by any public register and are described rather than counted.
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