Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Jennifer Kelley · Expansion Desk · August 2026
Remote assistant work is bought by an owner who has run out of hours, not by a procurement team. That makes this market unusually large and unusually hard to reach, because the buyer is one person inside a small company and there is no department to call. This map is where those owners sit across the US, 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.
Real estate brokerages and agent teams
The category most used to buying support by the hour and the fastest to say yes, because the cost of an unanswered lead is obvious the same week. Team leads inside a large office buy separately from the broker, so one office can hold several buyers.
Who signs: broker owner, team lead, operations manager.
110,000 to 125,000
US establishments registered as real estate agent and broker offices; most are small, and larger offices contain several independent buying teams
Medical, dental and outpatient practices
One of the two largest counts on the page and the most cautious buyer, because the first question is always about how records are handled. Once that is answered the work is sticky, since a practice that offloads scheduling and follow-up rarely takes it back.
Who signs: practice owner, practice manager, office administrator.
350,000 to 380,000
US physician, dental and outpatient practice establishments; the three to twenty-five person band is where remote support substitutes for a local hire
Insurance agencies and brokerages
Owner-run, renewal-driven and administratively heavy, which produces a predictable annual pinch point rather than a random one. Small enough to decide in a single call, large enough to keep someone busy year round.
Who signs: agency principal, operations manager, and the producer running their own book.
125,000 to 140,000
US establishments registered as insurance agencies and brokerages
Construction and specialty trade firms
Enormous by count and almost never targeted for this, because the marketing aimed at them is about tools rather than back office. The office side is usually one person doing scheduling, invoicing and permits, and the owner feels it immediately when that person leaves.
Who signs: owner, office manager, project coordinator.
450,000 to 500,000
US construction and specialty trade establishments; the office function is typically one or two people regardless of crew size
Accounting, bookkeeping and small legal practices
The segment with a calendar attached. Load is seasonal and predictable, which makes the buying trigger predictable too, and these buyers evaluate a remote hire more carefully because they already sell professional time themselves.
Who signs: managing partner, practice manager, office administrator.
115,000 to 135,000
US accounting, bookkeeping, tax preparation and small legal practice establishments
Marketing, creative and digital agencies
The buyer most likely to already understand the model and least likely to need convincing about remote work. They buy for margin rather than for rescue, which changes the conversation from hours saved to work they can now take on.
Who signs: founder, head of operations, account director.
38,000 to 45,000
US establishments in advertising, public relations, design and related services

Where the openings are

1
The market is enormous, and that is the problem. The segments above come to roughly 1.2 to 1.3 million registered US establishments. A channel that tries to reach all of them reaches nobody. The band that actually converts is defined by size and by moment, not by industry: three to twenty-five people, with an owner who is the bottleneck.
2
This is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. An assistant resigns, a season starts, a practice adds a provider, a listing surge lands. Some of those moments show up publicly in job postings and hiring activity, which means a share of this market can be reached in the exact week the problem is felt rather than months either side of it.
3
The categories do not share a first sentence. The broker wants leads answered. The practice manager wants to know who touches patient records. The trade owner wants invoices out on Friday. Same service, three different opening conversations, and a single message written for all of them lands for none of them.
4
Referral and marketplaces only reach people already searching. Someone comparing agencies has already decided the category is real. The much larger group has not framed the problem as a hiring decision at all, so they never search and never appear in a marketplace. They are only reachable by someone contacting them first, by name.
Built from public federal registry data covering registered US establishments, current to the most recent published year. Counts are banded deliberately. They describe establishments rather than companies, so a multi-site firm can appear more than once, and category codes are self-reported. Owner-only businesses without payroll are not published in this data, so the real number of small firms is larger than the bands above.
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