You pulled 200 plumbers from Google Maps. You have names, addresses, phones, maybe a rating — and not a single person’s name. “Dear Business Owner” does not get replies. Here is every way to find the name, from manual methods to automation.
9 manual methods
- Google it — business name plus “owner”, “founded by”, or “CEO”. Local news and award pages surface names.
- Their website — About, Team, footer copyright line (”© 2024 Jerry Reid”), and blog author bylines.
- Google Business Profile — owners often sign review responses: “Thanks! – Jerry, Owner.”
- BBB — the Business Management section lists the principal, usually from official records. Highly reliable when present.
- LinkedIn — search the business name + city, filter to People, look for Owner / Founder / President.
- Secretary of State — LLC/corp filings list members or officers (sole props and anonymized states are gaps).
- Facebook page — Page transparency and posts from personal accounts.
- Yelp — “Meet the Business Owner” section and signed review responses.
- Just call and ask — “Who should I address this to?” works better than “Who’s the owner?”
Why manual research doesn’t scale
Each lookup takes 5–10 minutes. 50 leads is half a day; 500 is over a week of nothing but names — and you still end up with gaps.
How to automate it
Two approaches, best combined:
- BBB cross-referencing — fast and accurate when a profile exists, but many small local businesses have none.
- AI extraction from the website — for the rest, an LLM reads About, Team, footer, and contact pages and pulls the owner’s name, title, and sometimes founding year. Small business sites almost always name the owner somewhere, even buried in a paragraph: “Jerry and his wife started Pristine Plumbing in their garage in 2003.”
LeadMerlin automates the website side of this: it crawls the homepage plus up to four key subpages and uses AI to extract the owner or founder when the site names one. Expect fill rates to vary a lot by niche. In our early production data, roughly a quarter of enriched leads came back with an owner name; owner-run trades that sign their websites do much better than chains and franchises. For the rest, the manual methods above (BBB, state filings, LinkedIn) are still your best fallback.
The name alone is the start. To actually reach Jerry you also need an email that has passed an MX and mailbox check, and a phone with line type. LeadMerlin returns all of it in one structured record. Start with 100 free leads, no card required.