Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Mark Sadovnick · 5th Element Group · August 2026
Senior leadership work in this market gets paid for out of two different budgets. A senior search is bought by whoever owns an empty seat. An impact or partnership mandate is bought by whoever owns a reputation. Those two people rarely sit in the same meeting. This map covers where each of them sits across the US market, 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
Big enough to hire an executive through search, small enough that the chief executive is personally in the room for it. This is also the band where a culture problem is felt long before it is named, which is the moment discovery work is worth paying for.
Who signs: the chief executive or founder, the single senior people 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 a search is a funded requisition with a sponsor and a scorecard rather than a favor, and where the wellbeing and workplace side is a standing line rather than a one-time project. Slower to reach, more competitive, and materially larger once it lands.
Who signs: chief people officer, chief diversity or inclusion officer, head of talent acquisition, chief of staff, and the chief executive on the top seats.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers at 1,000 people or more
Companies reporting to the securities regulator
The only layer where an impact commitment is written down in public and carries a date on it. That makes the buying moment visible from the outside, which is unusual in this market and useful to anyone watching for it.
Who signs: chief sustainability officer, VP of corporate affairs or communications, head of environmental and social reporting, general counsel.
5,500 to 6,000
US companies filing regular public reports, used here as the countable proxy for a published impact agenda
Foundations, endowments and large non-profits
Mission is already the product here, so none of it has to be argued. The constraint is capital discipline and board approval, and the senior hire is very often the first spend committed after a strategy reset.
Who signs: the executive director or chief executive, the board chair, the grants or program director, and the search committee.
30,000 to 35,000
US foundations and filing charities operating at a scale that funds a professional executive team
Family offices and private capital
The strongest segment on this page by fit, and the hardest by reach. Single family offices do not register as family offices anywhere, do not publish, and do not appear on any list that can be bought. That is precisely why the segment stays open to whoever is willing to work it by hand.
Who signs: the principal, the chief investment officer, the family office executive director, and the outside advisor who makes the introduction.
No public register
reached by name and one at a time; the countable adjacent layer is roughly 15,000 to 17,000 registered investment advisory firms in the US, which is where the identification work starts

Where the openings are

1
Two buyers, two budgets, one firm. The seat owner and the reputation owner almost never share a meeting and never share a budget line. In this market a referral network reaches whichever of the two happens to think of you that quarter. Working two named audiences separately and on purpose is a different problem, and it is a solvable one.
2
Search is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A departure, a funded round, a merger, a new board mandate. Those events are visible from outside if somebody is watching several thousand named companies for them, and invisible to anyone waiting for the phone to ring. Watching at that scale is mechanical work, and it is the part a reputation cannot do for you.
3
The family office layer cannot be bought as a list, which is why it is still open. Everyone who buys data reaches the same registered firms. Identifying principals, their operating companies and the executive who screens for them takes patient, unglamorous identification one record at a time. That is exactly the kind of work that gets built once and then runs without you.
Built from public registries covering US employers, filing charities and foundations, registered advisory firms and companies reporting publicly to the securities regulator, and counts are banded deliberately. Workforce bands use filed plan participants as a headcount proxy, so they indicate scale rather than an exact staff count. Family offices are not enumerated in any public register and are described here rather than counted.
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