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How to Find the Owner of a Business

Published on October 11, 2023by Botster

Contents

If you’ve ever wondered how to find out who owns a business, you’re not alone. The funny thing is that you don’t need to be a detective or spend endless hours scouring the internet to unearth this information. You only need the right tools and know where to look.

That’s why in this article, I’ll introduce you to several easy-to-use automation tools that will empower you to unveil the ownership details of any business you encounter swiftly — no more mystery; just straightforward methods that work to make such a bulk list:

From this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn:

How to find the owner of a company;
Several easy-to-use automation tools that will help you to quickly find owners of companies in bulk;
Tips and tricks to make the best use of the information you extract using the automation tools.

Now, you might be wondering why you should listen to me when you can just look for a website where you can copy the names and contact details of business owners at your leisure.

For one, I don’t think such a website exists. And even if it does, the information you’ll find there will most likely not be up-to-date since it will need to be manually updated.

The methods I’ll show you in this guide won’t let you just find a business owner's name, but they also ensure that you get the latest info out there. Not outdated ones.

Who may need to find business owners’ names in bulk?

Now, who are the people who may need to find who owns a business in bulk? In other words, who are the people likely to benefit the most from this detailed guide?

Entrepreneurs and Startups: if you're an entrepreneur looking to partner with other businesses or a startup seeking potential investors or collaborators, you may find it necessary to identify business owners first.
Real Estate Professionals: real estate agents and investors also usually need to identify property owners for potential real estate transactions or investment opportunities. So if you work in real estate, you don't want to miss this guide.
Marketing and Sales Professionals: since the professionals involved in marketing and sales are usually at the forefront of outreach, they often need to know how to find out the owner of a business to target potential clients, create mailing lists, or establish business partnerships.

Before we proceed, let me quickly tell you about my friend, Andrew, and how we generated over a thousand leads for his marketing agency even before he launched.

So a few months ago, I was in my front yard taking in fresh air when my phone rang suddenly. I picked up the phone, and the next 7 minutes or so was Andrew telling me about his plans to start a marketing agency and how he needed my help, being an experienced business owner.

When he was done talking, I told him: you need to learn how to find who owns a business.

Why? He asked, confused.

"Well," I said, "because finding a business owner means you've found a decision-maker in the company, meaning you've increased your chances of landing that company as a client."

The very next day, we researched and generated over 1,000 leads for Andrew in less than one hour. And guess what, I'm going to be sharing with you the exact same steps we took and the tools we used without holding anything back.

The best part of this strategy is that it doesn't matter whether you're a marketer or not, you can use it if you need to find out who owns a company, irrespective of your industry or market.

Are you ready for the next big shift in your business? Then come with me and learn how to find out who owns a company!

How to find business owner information on Google

Step 1: Before searching for a business owner, find relevant companies by keyword

If you're like my friend Andrew who is starting right from scratch, then the first thing you must do is find a list of companies in your target market. After which you'll find the business owner.

If you already have a list of target companies, you can skip this step and move right on to the next. Otherwise, keep reading.

To find companies, you’ll need the Google Maps Scraper. Using the keyword you provide, this bot will fetch businesses, their addresses, websites, contact details, and other data about them, all within a minute.

To access this bot (and the ones I’ll mention later on), you must first create a free account on Botster:

Registration is quick and easy, and your payment details are not required. Once your account is set up and you’ve verified your email address, you’re ready to put the Google Maps Scraper to work.

To get started finding owners of companies:

Open the Google Maps Scraper’s start page by clicking on “Start Bot”:

Name your job (e.g. “Stock Broker Companies New York”) and enter a folder name if you wish:

Enter your keywords, including your target location.

Each keyword must be on a new line:

Select how many companies you’d like to extract:

Select ‘your’ location on the map.

Your location affects the results of your search. Best if it’s the same as your target location:

Let the location remain in the text box when you’re done typing. You can do this by not clicking the city on the suggested list. Instead, type the full name and click outside the text box to get this:

Select how you’d like to receive your results.

And…. start the bot!

Voila! That’s it for the first step in how to find an owner of a business!

The “My Jobs” page will automatically open, and you will see the bot running. Once it shows “completed”, you can click on “View data” to see the results or you can click on any of the 3 logos I boxed to download the file in CSV, Excel, or JSON:

You’ll also receive your result in your email address.

Video guide

Here’s a video tutorial I made earlier, in case you want to watch me go through these steps:

Results

This is what the result of our query looks like:

Now, we have a list of companies, and we can start to find the business owner!

Tips on how to use your extracted data

Sort the list of companies in descending order by “Rating” to find companies with good reputations. Whether you wish to work with them or sign them up as a client, it’s best to work with reliable people.
Sort the companies in ascending order by “Rating” to find companies with bad reputations and try contacting their owners to offer business advice for improving their business.
Keep reading to see how to use the exported company names for further extraction as described below.

With that out of the way, let's move to how to find the name of a business owner.

Step 2: To find out who owns a business, scan the code of the company’s website

For the next step in this guide, we'll be scanning the websites of the companies we extracted just now. This is crucial to the process of how to find ownership of a company because most company websites will have their owner's name listed on one of their pages.

To do that, we need the HTML Code Scanner, another automation software that can scan the HTML code for keywords you provide. It can scan a single or multiple web pages on a single or several websites.

Launch the HTML Code Scanner’s start page and name your job.
Next, click and drag the ball to select how many pages this tool should scan:

Next, input keywords that are often associated with company owners such as CEO, Director, President, owner, owns, founder, co-founder, founded:

Next, we need to input the website URLs we got from the last tool, so just copy the websites and paste them here:

You have the option to schedule this project for a future date, but we’re interested in getting the results now, so let it start immediately:

Without delay, launch the bot into action!

Video tutorial

Watch a quick video guide on how to launch the HTML Code Scanner into action:

Results

Let’s take a look at the results extracted for mytraderfield.com. The HTML Code Scanner has found the desired keywords on two site pages. Click on the extracted links, and you’ll see CEO’s and director’s names:

Tips

First, sort the results from Z to A by column “Found?”. Once you’ve done that, remove the cells containing “false” since they won’t be needed.
Next, check the links in the “URL detected on” column to get better informed about company owners. You may find something that will help personalize your email to them.
You can also use this bot for anonymous LinkedIn searches. I described how to do this in my guide on how to look for candidates on LinkedIn.

How to find small business owners on LinkedIn

This step-by-step guide will be incomplete if we don't cover LinkedIn. LinkedIn is perhaps the best website to find business owners because it's a networking platform where you can also reach out to them right away.

You may be wondering why we’re only looking for small businesses on Linkedin. That’s because small business owners often just post their email on LinkedIn instead of creating a separate company page, which is the case for larger companies.

Now, I’ll show you how to find owners of a business on LinkedIn and how to extract their email addresses to an Excel file in BULK, within a minute. For that, we'll need the LinkedIn Email Miner. The best part of using this tool is that you can just look for EVERY founder in the location you specify.

Using the LinkedIn Email Miner is quite easy. Follow the steps below:

On the LinkedIn Email Miner’s start page.
Enter keywords that are often associated with company owners such as CEO, Director, President, owner, owns, founder, co-founder.

Note that each query must be on a new line, not separated by a comma:

Enter your preferred location:

Enter preferred email masks:

And that’s it! You’re done already!