Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Oliver Jones · H&Z · The United States layer · August 2026
H&Z names automotive, aerospace and defense, industrial goods, rail, financial services and private equity as its sectors. This map counts the United States layer of those six, counted where the buying sits rather than where the offices are, and it is the layer least likely to be mapped already. Who signs inside each segment, and roughly how many workplaces sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Automotive manufacturing
The deepest supplier tier in the country and the one under the most sustained cost pressure. In this market, sourcing and operations usually sit close enough together that the same office buys both, which shortens the route in but widens the number of people who have to agree.
Who signs: chief procurement officer, VP of purchasing, VP of operations, plant director. At tier two and tier three suppliers, the owner or the general manager.
9,500 to 10,500
US private workplaces across vehicle, body and parts manufacturing, employing roughly 1.0 million people
Aerospace and defense manufacturing
Long program cycles, regulated supply chains and slow supplier switching. At most firms in this category the work has to survive a program review before it starts, so the buying group is wider than one function and the first conversation is rarely the deciding one.
Who signs: VP of supply chain, director of procurement, program director, chief operating officer.
5,800 to 6,300
US private workplaces in aerospace products, parts and other transportation equipment, employing roughly 600,000 people
Machinery and electrical equipment
The broadest of your named manufacturing sectors by site count and the most fragmented. Ownership runs from family firms to sponsor-backed platforms, which means the same operating problem gets bought in two completely different ways: one as a founder decision, the other against a value creation plan someone else wrote.
Who signs: managing director or CEO at owner-run firms, chief operating officer, head of procurement, operations director.
34,000 to 35,000
US private workplaces across industrial, agricultural, construction, metalworking and electrical equipment manufacturing, employing roughly 1.1 million people
Rail
Small by count and unusually concentrated. The equipment layer is countable. The operator layer is not visible in this data at all, because US railroad employment reports through a separate federal system, so operators have to be identified by name rather than pulled from a list. That is one reason rail so often gets worked through the equipment side.
Who signs: head of procurement, operations director, engineering director, and on the operator side the chief mechanical officer.
Roughly 380 manufacturing sites
railroad rolling stock manufacturing only; US rail operators are not enumerated in this register
Banking, insurance and capital markets
The sector where a site count misleads. Branch and agency networks push the workplace figure far past the number of companies, so reach here is a naming problem rather than a counting one. The useful unit is the institution and the function inside it, not the address.
Who signs: chief operating officer, head of transformation, chief procurement officer, head of operations, and in carriers the chief underwriting or claims officer.
Roughly 6.2 million people employed
across US banking, securities, insurance carrier and agency workplaces; the company layer behind those sites is far smaller and is not separately published
Investment managers and sponsors
A different buying rhythm from everything above. Work arrives on deal timing rather than on a budget cycle, and one firm can commission the same diagnostic three times in a year across three portfolio companies. The relationship is with the fund, the work is at the asset.
Who signs: operating partner, head of portfolio operations, value creation lead, deal partner.
105,000 to 112,000
US private workplaces in investment management and related financial activities; buyout and growth sponsors are a subset this data does not separate out

Where the openings are

1
The four manufacturing segments alone come to roughly 49,700 to 52,200 US workplaces, and the three with published employment carry about 2.7 million people. That is the countable part of your named sectors in one country. Coverage that grows out of existing offices and referrals reaches the slice of it that already overlaps a network. The rest is not a worse market, it is an unaware one.
2
The buyer here is a role, not a company. Chief procurement officer, VP of supply chain, head of transformation. Those seats turn over, and a new one almost always reopens the panel of firms it will use. A channel built on named roles catches that moment. A referral-led channel usually hears about it after the shortlist is set.
3
Two of your six sectors cannot be bought as a list. Rail operators and financial institutions both fail a straight registry pull, for opposite reasons: one is missing from the data, the other is drowned in branch addresses. Anyone buying an off-the-shelf list in those two reaches the wrong rows. Working them takes identification rather than purchase, which is exactly why they stay open.
4
Your five service lines do not share one buyer. Sourcing work sits with procurement, performance work with operations, restructuring with the CFO or the sponsor, digital with the CIO, and customer work with the commercial side. One relationship tends to keep returning to the same door inside an account. Five named audiences is a different reach problem, and a solvable one.
Built from public federal employment data covering private US workplaces, 2024 annual averages. Counts are banded deliberately. The unit is the workplace site rather than the company, so a multi-site group appears more than once and the company layer is always smaller than the figure shown. Sector codes are assigned to a site by its main activity. Railroad operating employment reports through a separate federal system and is excluded throughout.
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