Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Neil Morris · Redaptive · August 2026
Here is the map, as promised. Funded energy work has a buyer problem rather than a demand problem: the person who owns the building, the person who owns the capital and the person who owns the reporting commitment sit in three different seats, and in most large companies they meet rarely. This is the United States market, segment by segment, with who signs in each and roughly how many companies sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Manufacturers and industrial operators
The heaviest energy load per building in the country, and the segment where a funded upgrade is easiest to defend internally because the saving lands in a line the plant already reports on. It is also the segment where the case is usually made in operations rather than through a sustainability function.
Who signs: VP of operations, plant or facilities director, corporate energy manager, and the CFO on the capital question.
6,000 to 6,500
US manufacturing employers at 250 people or more; roughly 1,800 of them carry 1,000 or more
Health systems and hospital groups
Buildings that never turn off, capital committees that meet on a fixed schedule, and an energy bill that competes directly with clinical spending. Slow to sell into, and the work tends to repeat across a system once one site has proved it.
Who signs: VP of facilities, director of plant operations, chief financial officer, and the sustainability lead where the system has one.
5,900 to 6,100
US health care employers at 250 people or more, of which roughly 1,100 are hospitals and health systems
Multi-site retail, grocery and food service
Hundreds of near-identical sites, which is what makes one proven retrofit repeatable across a whole estate. In this category the energy decision usually sits with construction and facilities rather than with whoever pays the utility invoice.
Who signs: VP of construction and facilities, director of energy, head of ESG or sustainability, and the CFO on portfolio-wide commitments.
3,600 to 3,800
US retail, grocery and food service employers at 250 people or more
Transport, distribution and warehousing
Large roofs, high bay lighting, refrigeration load and a charging problem that arrives whether anyone planned for it or not. Worth being straight about the count: only about 160 US employers file under a warehousing code at this size, because most warehouse square footage sits on the books of retail, wholesale and manufacturing parents. The real footprint is far larger than the code shows.
Who signs: VP of supply chain or network operations, facilities director, head of engineering.
1,400 to 1,500
US transport, distribution and warehousing employers at 250 people or more
Commercial real estate owners and managers
The landlord side of the same buildings, where the split incentive between owner and occupier is the entire conversation. Small by employer count and very large by square footage, which is exactly why it belongs on this page.
Who signs: asset manager, head of engineering, director of ESG, portfolio or fund manager.
Roughly 800
US real estate employers at 250 people or more, counted by their own payroll, which says nothing about the size of the portfolios they hold
Colleges, universities and school systems
Campus estates carrying deferred maintenance backlogs against constrained capital, which is the condition a funded model was built for. Public boards, long approval paths, and a standing preference for anything that does not require new borrowing.
Who signs: VP of facilities or campus operations, energy manager, chief business officer or CFO, and the board on larger commitments.
1,250 to 1,350
US education employers at 250 people or more

Where the openings are

1
Three seats, one decision. Facilities owns the building, finance owns the capital, sustainability owns the commitment. In most large companies those three meet rarely, so a channel that reaches only one of them stalls at the second meeting. Reaching all three inside the same account on purpose is a targeting problem, and a solvable one.
2
This is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A refit, a lease event, a reporting deadline, a new CFO, a plant expansion, a site added or closed. Those moments are visible from outside if someone is watching a defined list of several thousand companies, and invisible if you are waiting for the right person to think of you.
3
Warehousing is the segment lists get wrong. Only about 160 US employers at 250 people or more file under a warehousing code, so anyone buying an off-the-shelf warehousing list reaches a small and largely irrelevant set and misses the retail, wholesale and manufacturing parents who actually own the roofs. Working that footprint takes identification rather than purchase, which is why it stays open.
4
This is a distribution gap, not a credibility one. The six segments above come to roughly 19,500 US employers at 250 people or more, and about 5,800 of them carry 1,000 or more people. Underwriting and delivering the work 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 facilities, finance and sustainability leaders 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, which is why the warehousing count sits well below the real warehouse footprint. Real estate owners are counted by their own payroll rather than by the portfolios they hold.
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