Entering a new geography or adjacent segment on a banker's list is entering blind. We map every operating company in the target market — starting from the entire active web — before you commit capital.
A banker's book shows the companies that hired a banker. A database export shows the companies a data vendor already found. Neither shows the market.
The teams we meet typically enter a new region holding a banker book, a trade-show attendee list, and an export from a profile database. Each is a sample with a bias.
Banker books are companies in a process. Databases index what their crawlers or analysts already profiled. The overlap between those samples and the actual operating market is unknown — and unknowable from inside them.
We start from the opposite end: 100M+ classified domains covering 99.99%+ of active internet usage. Every company in the target category and geography is read against your written entry thesis.
The result is a terrain map, not a sample — every operator enumerated, every inclusion and exclusion carrying a quoted snippet and source URL you can audit before capital moves.
The mechanics are deliberately boring: a wide first pass, then a deep second pass, with evidence discipline at every step. No black box.
You describe the market you intend to enter the way you would to a colleague: segment, geography, service model, customer types, disqualifiers. That text — not a keyword list — becomes the screening instrument.
From 100M+ classified domains we isolate the relevant categories and geography. In one industrial category this cut alone surfaced every candidate worldwide — before any judgement was applied.
367,478 domains in a single industrial categoryA fast first read separates live operating companies from directories, dead sites, distributors and noise. In a US-focused run, 25,000 domains triaged down to roughly 17,300 genuine operating businesses.
25,000 → ~17,300 live operating companiesEvery survivor is read in full against your thesis: fifteen signals per company, from footprint and service model to certifications and channel position. Each extracted claim is captured as verbatim site text.
Companies arrive scored — Mandate Fit 70%, Outreach Suitability 20%, Transition Context 10% — with group-owned businesses zeroed out. Roughly one in ten keyword-perfect candidates is excluded as already consolidated.
Market entry decisions turn on where companies actually operate. Websites blur this constantly: a "nationwide service" banner over a single depot, partner logos presented as locations, a coverage map drawn in marketing software.
We separate owned locations from partner mentions, and stated service areas from evidenced ones. The footprint signal records what the site demonstrates — named branches, addresses, dated project references — not what the header claims.
"The set of locations a company demonstrably operates from, evidenced by named branches, street addresses, or dated project references on its own site — with partner logos, distributor mentions and undated coverage claims recorded separately and never counted as presence."
"Industrial services" is not a market you can enter. Compressed air service in the Southeast is. Before committing, you need eligible independent counts at that resolution — because integration plans, pricing and competition all live there.
In one US industrial run we resolved a single category into ten subverticals, each with its own count of eligible independent companies. The spread — 702 at the top, 93 at the bottom — changed which entries were viable at all.
The exclusions matter as much as the inclusions: a tenth of keyword-perfect candidates were already consolidated — companies an entering buyer would have wasted outreach on.
The uncomfortable arithmetic: if a tenth of the obvious candidates are already owned and a fifth of the real fits never use the obvious keywords, a keyword-built entry list is wrong at both ends — padded with dead names and missing live ones.
Each has a legitimate use. The question is which one you want underneath an entry decision.
| Decision factor | Commissioned market study | Profile-database export | Full-web entry map |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting universe | Analyst sample plus interviews | Companies the vendor found | 100M+ classified domains |
| Named companies | Aggregates and quadrants | Yes, within coverage | Every operator in category |
| Evidence per inclusion | Methodology appendix | Firmographic fields | Verbatim quote + source URL |
| Exclusions documented | Not enumerated | Silent gaps | Every exclusion with reason |
| Re-run on a revised thesis | New engagement | New filter, same universe | Custom ICP re-runs included |
| Typical entry cost | Six figures | Annual licence | From €4,900 (proof project) |
A study tells you whether to enter. A database gives you somewhere to start. The entry map tells you exactly who is there — see the method for how the two passes work.
Four anonymized entries from real screening runs. Client deliverables carry the company names and source URLs; the public site does not. The quotes are verbatim site text, because that is the standard we hold every inclusion to.
"the founder established the company in 1981" · "Our salespeople are engineers"
Indiana, five locations, UL508 compliance, recurring offerings. Scored 92.7 — with all twelve evidence snippets verified against site text.
"a fourth-generation, family-owned CNC company"
Defense, aerospace and medical work with AS9100D and ITAR registrations — the kind of regulated-market position an entering platform pays attention to.
"family-built, American-owned since 1965"
A stamping and assembly operation whose homepage never uses the category's obvious keywords. Profile databases file it elsewhere; a full read of the site does not.
"co-owned by two fourth-generation families" · "launched their joint venture in 1996"
Robotic palletizing in Washington state. Family-associated, recurring service revenue — and an ownership structure worth knowing before the first call, not after.
An entry map is a working file, not a slide deck. Everything arrives in formats your team already uses.
A tool you trust for entry decisions should be explicit about its edges. These are ours — stated here rather than discovered by you three months into the program.
The file is built to disappear into your existing process, not to sit beside it. Four moves cover most entry programs.
The full file imports into your CRM or deal tracker as-is — one row per company, signals as columns, evidence linked. No re-keying, no PDF archaeology.
Top fits are ranked by the 70/20/10 scores, so outreach order is an argument you can defend in a partner meeting rather than a gut call.
IC memos and entry papers cite the verbatim snippets directly. When a committee member asks "why this company," the answer is a quote and a URL.
First conversations reshape the thesis. Send us the revised language; the universe re-screens against it, and the map updates without a new engagement.
All fifteen signals ship with every company. These four do the heaviest lifting when the question is "should we enter, and through whom."
Entry economics are regional. The signal distinguishes owned locations from partner mentions, and stated coverage from evidenced coverage — so your density maps reflect operating reality, not marketing copy, before the LOI.
The principal score, weighted at 70%. Your entry thesis is matched against what each site actually says it does — recovering fits without obvious keywords and removing keyword-perfect mismatches with a documented reason attached.
In an unfamiliar market, the channel map is the market. Named OEM authorizations, distributorships, rental fleets and chemical programs show who is embedded with which manufacturers — and which locked-in relationships survive an ownership change.
Certifications are entry barriers you can read: UL 508A panels, ISO/IEC 17025 labs, ASME stamps, NADCAP approvals. We capture the exact claim text — the certified tier is usually the tier worth entering through, and the one keyword screens undercount.
An entry through acquisition is an entry through people. This signal counts who is named on the site — principals, second-line managers, functional leads — and anchors our succession framing: founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned, with website-visible facts only.
Entering on project revenue and entering on contract revenue are different bets. Service agreements, maintenance programs, calibration cycles and consumables are legible on sites — and roughly half of confirmed industrial fits carry founder evidence alongside recurring-offering language.
A proof project on one subvertical typically lands within a few weeks; a full universe with deep shortlist follows the two-pass cadence — triage first, deep extraction on survivors.
Timing scales with category size: a 367,478-domain category takes longer than a 25,000-domain national cut. We quote a delivery date at scoping, and hold it.
Yes, and it should be. Entry theses sharpen on contact with the terrain — a geography widens, a service line gets excluded, a customer type becomes the focus.
Custom ICP re-runs on any subset are included in every engagement. The universe is already built; re-screening it against revised language is the cheap part.
Yes. The underlying universe is global — the 367,478-domain industrial category above is a worldwide count, and 300+ organisations run on our data across Europe and North America.
Entry maps are typically scoped to your target geography from the start, so you pay for the market you are entering, not the planet.
A study answers "is this market attractive" with aggregates, quadrants and interview synthesis. It rarely names more than a dozen companies, and its samples are the analyst's.
An entry map answers "who exactly is there" — every operator, scored and evidenced. Many clients use both; only one of them produces a target list.
A proof project starts from €4,900 — one subvertical or region, full evidence discipline, so you can judge the output before scaling it.
A full universe with deep shortlist starts from €9,900. Annual monitoring, with monthly deltas per thesis, from €18,000. Public pricing, no discovery-call theatre.
They are reported as insufficient-evidence entries rather than silently dropped — the specimen format reserves a class for exactly this (8 top fits, 5 keyword-missed, 5 documented exclusions, 2 insufficient-evidence).
In practice they are a small minority of operating companies, and knowing they exist is itself entry intelligence.
Entry work rarely stands alone — it usually feeds a corporate development program or an existing platform's expansion plan.
Send us the entry thesis as you would say it out loud. We will scope the universe, quote a fixed price, and show a specimen report first — the same evidence discipline, on a market you already know, so you can check our work.