Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

The map of your market, as promised. Prepared for Michelle Carr, H2 · September 2026
Here is the map. One thing up front, because it decides how you read every number on this page. Your market, in your words, is UK construction businesses of roughly £5m to £25m turnover, run by the MD or owner, with nobody in the commercial director's seat. The public record cannot count that directly. Most companies in that band file small-company accounts, and small-company accounts show no turnover at all. So we counted three ways and show all three: what the register says, what LinkedIn can actually reach, and what one evening's named pull produced. Where the record cannot answer, the page says so rather than guessing. There is nothing to buy at the end of this page.
504,084
Active UK companies whose main registered activity is construction. That is the number a data seller would quote you, and it is almost entirely noise: 182,000 file micro-entity accounts, 149,000 file small-company exempt accounts, 105,000 have never filed, and 35,000 are dormant. Strip the register down to companies whose filings show real scale and it is 10,476. Take out the property developers and it is 6,013 contractors. That last number is the one to remember.
Building contractors
Main contractors and general builders whose registered activity is the construction of commercial or domestic buildings. This is the heart of the "are we okay, can we improve" market: a healthy order book, a founder who still prices the work, and nobody whose only job is to check that the margin on the estimate is the margin that lands. The commercial review was built for exactly this firm.
Who to reach: the Managing Director or owner, very often the founder. How they behave: they are proud of the work, they trust the accountant for the numbers, and they read a cash flow problem as weather rather than as a symptom.
1,848
contractors filing above the small-company mass; 95,453 on the register in total
Specialist trade contractors
Mechanical and electrical installers, roofing and scaffolding, finishing trades, demolition and groundworks. The getting-paid lens lives here. These firms sit one rung down the supply chain, on the main contractor's terms, with retentions held and pay-when-paid pressure that the register will never show. The largest single group in your market, and the one most likely to say "we have a cash flow problem" when the real problem is upstream.
Who to reach: the Managing Director or owner. How they behave: they talk about the client who has not paid, not about the contract that let the client not pay.
3,099
M&E 1,114 · roofing, scaffold and other specialised 1,394 · finishing 451 · demolition and site prep 140
Civil engineering contractors
Roads, rail, utilities, water and groundworks at scale. Engineer-led firms that are excellent at the work and run on NEC and framework contracts that reward the party that manages the paperwork. Smaller as a group, higher in average contract value, and the firms where an extension of time or a loss and expense claim left unmade is the whole year's margin.
Who to reach: the Managing Director, often an engineer by training. How they behave: they respect a chartered professional and dislike being sold to. Peer-to-peer or nothing.
1,066
filing above the small-company mass; 25,628 on the register in total
Property developers, on the page as scale and not as a first target
The register classes development of building projects as construction, so a bought list would put these in front of you first. They are a different animal: project companies, often one entity per scheme, a funder in the background and, above a certain size, a finance director already in place. They buy a project reality snapshot when a scheme wobbles, not a commercial review of the business. Your call whether they belong in the outreach at all.
Why they are counted anyway: because any list you are ever offered will be forty percent developers, and it is better to know that than to discover it.
Context, not a target
4,463 filing above the small-company mass; 107,617 on the register
Firms with a commercial director already in the seat
Your rule from the call, applied. Of the clean companies in the named pull, roughly three in ten have someone titled Commercial Director on LinkedIn today. They are held back rather than deleted, because your own words were that a firm with the wrong commercial director needs you more than most. They become a later wave with a different opening line, not a first-wave target.
What it means for the seven in ten: the seat is empty, the MD is wearing the hat, and the conversation opens on that fact.
116 of 401
clean companies in the named pull with a Commercial Director in post; held for a later wave
The £5m to £15m firms that file small-company accounts, and why we will not put a register number on them
This is the deliberate gap. A £6m roofing contractor and a £600k one file the same small-company accounts and look identical on the register. Any figure we gave you for "£5m to £15m" from Companies House would be a guess dressed as a count. The honest proxy is headcount on the company's own LinkedIn page, which is where the reachable numbers below come from.
What we can say: the 6,013 contractors above cover the top of your band cleanly. The bottom half of the band is reached through the headcount lens, not the filings lens.
Deliberately uncounted
the register cannot separate them, and we would rather show none than show a number you would have to defend

Where the 6,013 contractors sit

1,359
London
949
South East
721
North West
506
Yorkshire and the Humber
452
Scotland
447
West Midlands
427
South West
327
East Midlands
235
East of England
227
Northern Ireland
196
North East
141
Wales

London and the South East together hold 2,308 of them, 38 percent of the contractors that matter. By registered office postcode, so a firm registered at its accountant's address is counted where the accountant is.

The two pinch points, in the public record

57%
of the 6,013 carry an outstanding registered charge: secured borrowing, asset finance or an invoice finance facility
52%
have been trading for twenty years or more, the succession and exit lane
2 in 3
of the 606 medium-sized contractors carry a charge, and 2 in 3 are past twenty years
1 in 4
large companies reporting on construction contracts pay more than a quarter of invoices later than agreed

The last figure is the top of your clients' supply chains. 1,433 large companies filed a payment practices report covering construction contracts; the median one pays 14 percent of invoices later than the agreed terms, and one in five averages more than 45 days to pay. A subcontractor's cash flow strain is very often somebody else's payment policy. A registered charge, for the avoidance of doubt, is normal in this industry and says nothing bad about a firm on its own. It says the conversation about cash is timely.

What one evening's named pull produced

~5,000
UK construction firms with a LinkedIn company page and 11 to 200 staff: about 850 at 51 to 200, about 4,400 at 11 to 50
565
companies pulled by title: Managing Director, Owner or Founder, UK, construction
285
ready: construction or civil engineering, 15 to 250 staff, no commercial director visible
311
named MDs and owners with a live profile at those 285 firms; 117 of them in London and the South East

A first pull, not the universe, and it took one evening. The reachable universe refills it every week. The named layer, company by company with the person to speak to and the signals the register shows against each one, is in the workbook Dan walks through on Friday.

Where the openings are

1
The register overstates your market eighty-four times over. Half a million construction companies, six thousand contractors that could ever buy a commercial review. Any list bought as "UK construction companies" is 99 percent firms that will never be your client, and the outreach then feels like the market not responding when what happened is the wrong 99 percent were contacted. The work is in the filter, not the volume. Whoever runs this for you, that is the number to hold them to.
2
Your positioning is already in the numbers. Two in three medium-sized contractors carry a lender on the register and two in three have been trading twenty years. That is the "are we okay" firm exactly: twenty years built, borrowing secured against it, and nobody whose only job is the margin. It gives the first message a non-crisis opener, which is what you asked for. Respect for what they have built, then one straight question.
3
Your buyers are on LinkedIn. They are just not talking there. Roughly five thousand firms in the band have a company page, and one evening found 311 MDs and owners with live profiles and no commercial director beside them. Present, quiet, reachable one at a time. A profile is not the same as activity, so the system reads whether a person is actually live on the platform before it writes to them, and the quiet ones are reached differently. Your instinct that they do not engage with posts is right. It does not follow that they do not read a message written to them by name.
4
London and the South East are 38 percent of the market, and they are yours. 2,308 contractors within reach of a face-to-face follow-up, which is where your business has always closed. The first wave runs there. The rest of the country is the second wave, not a different plan.
5
Getting paid is a market condition, not a client's failing, and that is the opener for the trades. One in four large companies reporting on construction contracts pays more than a quarter of its invoices late. The specialist subcontractor with a cash flow problem is usually carrying somebody else's payment terms. Said plainly, in the first line, that is a message a roofing contractor's MD reads twice.
Built from three public sources and one commercial index, no guessing. Company counts: the Companies House free company data snapshot dated 1 September 2026, active companies only, banded by primary registered activity and by the category of accounts each company files; "above the small-company mass" means medium, full, group or audited small accounts, and "contractors" excludes companies whose registered activity is development of building projects. Payment figures: the UK payment practices reporting export, pulled 3 September 2026, latest report per company, companies reporting qualifying construction contracts. Reachable counts: a commercial index of LinkedIn company pages and profiles, filtered to UK head office and construction activity codes, pulled 3 September 2026; that index carries some noise, which is why those figures are banded and the named pull was screened by hand. Registered charges and trading age are facts on the register and are used here as context, never as a claim about any company. Nothing on this page is a forecast.
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