Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Laura LaBine · ProVisors · August 2026
The route in that you publish runs through a local group: a recommendation, a meeting as a guest, then a formal invitation from that group. That is a real channel, and it has a shape: dense where the network already is, quiet everywhere else. This map is the everywhere else, across the United States. The professional segments a region recruits from, who inside each one is the candidate, and roughly how many firms sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Law firms
The anchor discipline in almost every region and the deepest bench by count. Transactional, trust and estate, employment and litigation partners each carry a different referral pattern, so a single firm can hold several candidates who would never compete with each other.
Who joins: managing partner, practice group leader, the partner who owns business development, and at larger firms the client development director who decides where the firm sends people.
11,000 to 13,000
US legal services employers with payroll that file a benefit plan; the partner seats inside them are a multiple of that
Accounting, tax and audit firms
The discipline most likely to be in the room before anyone else, which makes it the highest value seat to fill and, in networks like this one, the hardest to keep balanced across regions. Consolidation has moved many of these partners onto larger platforms in recent years, which changes who the candidate actually is.
Who joins: managing partner, tax partner, audit partner, and the practice development lead at the multi office firms.
9,000 to 11,000
US accounting, tax preparation and payroll services employers that file a benefit plan
Wealth management and investment advice
The segment with the clearest commercial reason to join, because one referred relationship can carry the year. It is also the segment where the register understates the market: many advisors operate as registered individuals or small teams under a larger platform, so they never appear as employers at all.
Who joins: founding or managing principal, senior advisor with a book, and the head of growth at the larger independent firms.
8,000 to 9,500
US investment advice and portfolio management employers that file a benefit plan; advisors operating under a platform are not separately counted
Insurance brokerage and benefits consulting
Large by count and easy to under represent, because the discipline splits into property and casualty, employee benefits and specialty lines that rarely refer to one another. Filling one of those seats does not fill the others.
Who joins: agency principal, benefits practice leader, producer with a mid market book, and the regional manager inside the consolidators.
11,000 to 13,000
US insurance agency, brokerage and related activity employers that file a benefit plan
Management consulting and advisory
The widest and least defined segment on this page, covering strategy, operations, human capital, transaction advisory and the fractional executive market that has grown fastest of all. Wide is not a problem here, because the qualifier is the seat rather than the sector.
Who joins: principal or founding partner, transaction advisory lead, fractional CFO or COO, executive coach with a corporate book.
10,000 to 12,000
US management, scientific and technical consulting employers that file a benefit plan
Commercial banking and lending
Small by count and disproportionately useful, because a commercial banker usually sees a company change shape before its attorney or its accountant does. The count below is institutions. The reachable seats are the market presidents and relationship managers inside them, which is a far larger number.
Who joins: market president, commercial relationship manager, head of business banking, treasury management lead.
3,000 to 3,500
US commercial banking and credit institution employers that file a benefit plan

Where the openings are

1
The reachable unit is a person, not a firm. The segments above band out at roughly 52,000 to 62,000 registered US employers, and the larger ones hold several partners who would qualify on their own. An invitation route reaches the ones already standing next to a current member. The rest are not unqualified. They have never been asked, and they are addressable by name and by discipline.
2
Balance is a targeting problem before it is a recruiting one. A referral network is only as strong as its thinnest discipline, and the thin one tends to be the trust and estate attorney, the commercial banker or the benefits consultant. Those are named roles, inside named firms, in a named metro. A channel built on roles can go and get that exact seat. A channel built on referral can only wait for it to walk in.
3
Geography makes this a repeatable build rather than one campaign. Because the map is per metro, the same six segments and the same roles rebuild cleanly for every region, in whatever order the regions need. A newer market and a mature one want different mixes of the segments above, and both come out of the same list build.
4
The story is the easy part. Distribution is the gap. Advisors who join tend to arrive through someone who told them what it returned, and that story does not need improving. What a referral shaped channel rarely carries is the machinery that puts it in front of several thousand named partners who have never heard it, on a schedule, and tracks what comes back. That is the part we build, and we hand it over once it works.
Built from public registries covering US employers with payroll that file a benefit plan, current to the most recent published filing year. Counts are banded deliberately. Sole practitioners, owner only firms and advisors operating under a larger platform are not published in this data, so these figures describe established firms rather than the whole professional population. Sector codes are self reported by the firms themselves.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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