Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Evgeni Kouris, New Mittelstand · August 2026
Here is the map. It covers Germany, and it sorts the market by who pays rather than by who shows up. A network built on succession has two audiences that barely overlap: the people who come for the handover itself, and the firms that pay to sit next to them. In this market first contact with an owner almost always happens through an adviser who is already at the table, which is why the adviser layer is on this page as a buyer in its own right.
Family businesses due for handover
The reason the category exists. Owners at or near retirement with no family successor lined up, spread across every sector and almost every region. Large as a number and hard as a channel, because nothing in the public record marks which owner is ready this year rather than in five.
Who signs: the owner or managing partner, the second generation family member, and the long serving commercial director.
185,000 to 190,000
German businesses estimated to change hands in the current five year window
Mid sized companies, 50 to 249 people
The band where an external successor is a realistic answer rather than a theory. Big enough to fund a management team and service an acquisition, small enough that one buyer can take the whole thing. This is the group a search fund actually looks for, and the group most likely to have never heard the phrase.
Who signs: the owner or managing director, the finance director, and the works council chair on the announcement.
50,000 to 60,000
German companies in this employment band
Companies with 250 people and more
Fewer, slower and more valuable. Succession here is a board process with advisers appointed early, so the community itself is less relevant than the sponsor relationship. This is where a partner budget sits rather than a ticket.
Who signs: the chief executive, the chief financial officer, the head of corporate development, and the supervisory board chair.
14,000 to 16,000
German companies at 250 people or more
Tax advisers and auditors
The most reachable group on this page and the least worked. In this market the tax adviser is in the room years before any banker, sees the ownership question before anyone else, and is professionally exposed if the handover goes badly. Registered, listed and addressable, which the owners are not.
Who signs: the practice partner, the succession or corporate advisory lead, and the association education director on the training route.
95,000 to 105,000
registered tax advisers in Germany; practices are far fewer
Regional savings and cooperative banks
Small in count, deep in reach, and structurally motivated. Every one of them has a corporate client team that has been lending to the same owners for decades and carries the credit risk when a business fails to hand over. A partnership at this level reaches a portfolio of owners rather than one.
Who signs: the head of corporate clients, the succession advisory lead, the regional board member, and the head of communications on a joint event.
About 350 savings banks, plus roughly 670 cooperative banks
each with its own corporate client team and its own regional book
Search funds, their investors and the deal advisers
Your existing audience, listed here because it is also a paying segment. Searchers, the investors who back them, and the corporate finance boutiques and law firms that live off the same transactions. Being straight about it: none of this is enumerated in any public register, which is why it is currently reached by reputation and why that ceiling is real.
Who signs: the searcher, the fund partner, the corporate finance principal, and the law firm partner who owns the succession practice.
No public register
reached by name and by deal, one at a time

Where the openings are

1
Two audiences, one channel. A summit and a community reach the people who already know the category and came looking. The firms that pay for access to them are a different market with a different calendar, and in most networks that side grows only when somebody goes and gets it by name.
2
Succession is a moment, not a cycle. A birthday, a health event, an internal handover that failed, a bank asking about the next ten years. From the outside those moments are invisible in the company register. The advisers standing next to them are not invisible at all, and that asymmetry is the whole opening.
3
The largest reachable group on this page is not the owners. It is the adviser layer: roughly 95,000 to 105,000 registered tax advisers, plus about 350 savings banks and roughly 670 cooperative banks with corporate client teams. Each one sits between you and a book of owners you cannot list.
4
This is a distribution gap, not a credibility one. The community, the summit and the standing in the category are yours and you do not need help with them. What is missing is the machinery that puts you in front of several thousand named advisers, bankers and owners on a schedule, in German, and tracks what comes back. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from published German federal business statistics, public professional registers and the published national estimates of businesses due for succession, current to the most recent published year. Counts are banded deliberately. Registered individuals are not firms, and one firm can hold many, so the rows read as scale rather than as a target list and are not meant to be added together. Where no public register exists, the row says so rather than guessing. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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