Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Carolyn Barnes · August 2026
Here it is, as promised. This is scoped to the corporate side of your work, the organizations that buy stress, burnout and resilience programs for their people. It covers who actually owns that budget, which groups they sit in, and roughly how many of them there are. It describes the market, not your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Employers of 100 to 249 people
The largest group on this page and the one most people skip. At this size there is no wellbeing function, no committee and no panel of approved suppliers. One person carries HR alongside other work, and a half day workshop is exactly the size of intervention they can actually say yes to. It is also the band least likely to ever appear at a conference, so it is almost entirely unworked.
Who signs: the HR manager or people lead, often the only one. Frequently the founder or the COO.
Roughly 47,000
US employers in this workforce band
Employers of 250 to 999 people
Here a benefits function exists and wellbeing is a named line rather than an afterthought, but it is still owned by one person rather than a department. Big enough to have a budget and a stress problem they can measure, small enough that the decision does not need three meetings.
Who signs: HR director, head of people, benefits or total rewards manager.
27,000 to 28,000
US employers in this workforce band; a further 11,000 or so sit above 1,000 people
Health systems and care organizations
The sector where burnout stopped being a wellbeing topic and became a staffing and retention line. That matters commercially, because it moves the budget out of a small perks pot and into a much larger problem with an operational owner attached to it.
Who signs: CHRO, chief nursing officer, director of employee wellbeing, VP of clinical operations.
Roughly 6,200
health care and social assistance employers at 250 people or more
Finance, insurance and professional services
The longest hours and the most openly acknowledged pressure cultures, which makes this the group most comfortable buying something explicitly about overthinking and stress rather than dressing it up as productivity. They also run the most internal events, so one relationship often produces several bookings.
Who signs: chief people officer, head of talent, learning and development lead, and at firms, the managing partner.
Roughly 7,100
finance, insurance, professional, scientific and technical employers at 250 or more
Shift-based and frontline employers
Retail, hospitality, transport and warehousing. Rarely approached by wellbeing providers, because the assumption is that there is no budget. There often is, it just sits under turnover and absence rather than under wellbeing, and it is spoken about in the language of cost per replacement rather than wellness.
Who signs: VP of HR or operations, head of field or store operations, director of employee relations.
Roughly 5,500
retail, accommodation, food service, transport and warehousing employers at 250 or more
The events and conference buyer
A separate market that sits alongside all of the above rather than inside it. Association conferences, industry summits, internal leadership offsites and all hands events all book speakers on stress and resilience, and the person who books them is almost never the person who buys a workshop program. Worth stating plainly: this group is not enumerated in any public register, which is exactly why it stays underworked.
Who signs: conference program chair, association education director, internal events 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
The 100 to 249 band is the real opportunity, and referral cannot reach it. Roughly 47,000 employers, more than the 250 plus and 1,000 plus bands combined. They do not run conferences, do not sit on panels and do not appear on speaker circuits, so almost nothing about the usual channel puts you in front of them. They also decide in one conversation, because the person with the problem and the person with the budget are the same person.
2
Two buyers, one channel. The person who books a keynote owns an event and a date. The person who buys a workshop program owns headcount, absence and retention. They rarely talk to each other, and a channel built on being seen tends to keep producing the first kind of buyer. Reaching the second kind is a different and more mechanical problem.
3
The budget is usually not in the wellbeing line. In health care it sits with retention. In shift based employers it sits with turnover and absence cost. Framing the same work in the language the budget holder already uses is often the whole difference between a polite no and a purchase order, and it is a sorting problem before it is a persuasion problem.
4
This is a reach problem, not a credibility one. The work and the proof already exist. What is missing is a way to put them in front of several thousand named people who own this budget, on a schedule, without it consuming your week. That is the only part we would 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, which is why the page starts at the point a program budget realistically exists. Sector codes are self-reported. The events market is not covered by any public register and is described rather than counted.
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