Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Michelle Ashby · Agency Management Institute · August 2026
Independently owned agencies are an easy market to name and a hard one to list. The same twenty-person shop files itself as an advertising agency, a marketing consultancy, a design studio or a digital services firm depending on how the founder filled in a form years ago. This is a read of where those owners actually sit in the public data, who signs, and roughly how many of them there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Advertising agencies
The band that self-identifies as an agency, which is the smallest of the four and the only one most list builders ever pull. Establishment counts run higher than firm counts because a multi-office agency is counted once per location, so the two numbers you will see quoted for this segment are both correct and describe different things.
Who signs: the owner or founder, the president, the managing partner, and on succession work the second-generation leader who is about to become one.
12,000 to 16,000
US advertising agency firms carrying payroll; location-level counts run materially higher
Marketing consulting and strategy firms
The largest and the least reliable band on this page. Published counts differ by roughly a factor of two depending on whether the source counts verified active locations or the full register, and a good share of the register is one person with a laptop. It is also where a lot of full-service shops quietly file themselves, which is why ignoring the band loses real companies.
Who signs: the founder, the managing principal, the practice lead at the larger end.
20,000 to 40,000
US marketing consulting establishments; the spread is honest, published sources disagree by about two to one
Graphic design and brand studios
A well-measured band, unusually so. Around sixteen thousand locations at the last full count and a firm count within a few hundred of that, which tells you most of these companies operate from one address. Creative-led ownership, thinner on business management than the advertising band, and therefore the group with the most obvious gap between craft and running a company.
Who signs: the owner or creative principal, the studio director, the co-founder who handles the commercial side.
14,000 to 16,000
US graphic design establishments, with the firm count close behind it
Public relations and communications firms
Grouped with advertising in the published data rather than broken out cleanly at this level of detail, so this is stated as a share of the wider group instead of a count of its own. The boundary is genuinely blurred: a firm doing substantial creative work alongside media relations tends to file as an agency, which pushes companies between the two bands and inflates one at the expense of the other.
Who signs: the owner or managing director, the president, the partner group at firms with more than one principal.
Inside a group of roughly 60,000 to 65,000
the published advertising, public relations and related services group; the communications layer is not split out usefully at this level
The size band that actually fits
The filter that matters more than any of the four above. Most firms in every band on this page are owner-only or under five people, and an owner-only shop cannot free a week a quarter for anything. The band that carries ten or more people on payroll is the real serviceable market, it is a fraction of the totals shown, and no public source publishes it at this level of industry detail. It is built rather than bought.
Who signs: the same seat in every case. The owner.
A fraction of the totals above
size bands exist in the public data at coarser industry levels only; the ten-and-up agency band has to be assembled
The second seat inside the agency
Your other buyer, and a separate reach problem. The rising leader, the account director, the operations lead being groomed to run the place. They are not on any register, because registers name companies and owners and stop there. They are identified agency by agency, usually from the agency's own site, which is slow, mechanical and completely doable at scale.
Who signs: the owner, still. Who uses it: the account director, the director of operations, the integrator, the incoming partner.
No public register
identified company by company; the difficulty is exactly why this seat stays underworked

Where the openings are

1
Four codes, one market. An independent shop lands in whichever band the founder picked at registration, and that decision has nothing to do with what the agency does today. Anyone who pulls a single list reaches roughly a third of their own addressable market and never finds out the rest exists. The brand studios and the marketing consultancies are the part that goes missing, and they are the part with the widest gap between craft and company management.
2
The published universe is dominated by firms too small to be a fit. Tens of thousands of establishments, most of them one or two people. The band that can fund a seat and protect a week a quarter for it is a fraction of that, and it does not exist as a downloadable list at this level of detail. Which means the qualification work is the moat: whoever assembles that band properly owns a market nobody else can buy.
3
Two people, one signature. The owner buys, the rising leader is the one whose year it changes. Public data names the owner and stops. Reaching the second seat means reading the agency's own site, one company at a time, and that is mechanical work rather than clever work, which is why it almost never gets done.
4
Reputation selects for overlap, not for need. A peer-group and education business grows through owners who already know the name, or know somebody who does. The owners most likely to need a room full of peers are precisely the ones who have never been in one and have no idea the room exists. That is not a positioning problem and it is not a credibility problem. It is a reach problem, it is mechanical, and it is the part we build and hand over.
Built from public registries covering US employer establishments and firms, with bands drawn deliberately wide where published sources disagree. Establishment counts and firm counts measure different things, and industry codes are self-reported by the companies themselves, so these figures describe scale rather than an exact number of agencies. Owner-only businesses are under-represented in employer data. Size bands and the second seat inside an agency are not published at this level of detail and are described rather than counted.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
enquirerconsulting.com