Use case · Search funds, acquirers & business brokers
Off-market deal flow: local businesses with the owner’s name, from their own websites
Search funders, holdco builders, roll-ups, Main Street business brokers and M&A advisors doing direct owner outreach.
The job
Build a list of businesses in a target vertical and region, find who owns each one, and start a direct conversation with the owner.
How it is usually done today
- Scraping Google Maps, then researching every owner by hand.
- Paying outsourced list-building services by the month.
- Using company databases that cover mid-market firms well but small owner-operators poorly.
Why that hurts
- Finding the owner’s name is the bottleneck for off-market outreach.
- Generic info@ addresses rarely reach the owner.
- Lists go stale quickly, so one-off purchases age badly.
How LeadMerlin does it
- 1
Search the vertical across cities
Up to 5 cities per search, for example HVAC or fire protection across a metro.
- 2
Keep owner-identified businesses
Tick "Owner found" in the dashboard. The owner field comes from the business’s own About, Team or Contact pages.
- 3
Read the story
year_established and crawled page text surface "family-owned since 1987" or "second generation", useful for succession-minded outreach.
- 4
Write to the owner
A personal note to the owner’s verified email, or a letter to the listing address.
Multi-city search for an acquisition thesis
curl -X POST "https://api.leadmerlin.com/api/v2/searches" \
-H "x-api-key: $LEADMERLIN_API_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"keyword":"hvac contractor","location_codes":[1026201,1026748],"strictness":"strict","max_leads":500}'Location codes in these examples are placeholders — always look yours up with GET /v2/locations first.
What comes back
Most useful for this job:
- owner: the owner or founder named on the company website, or null.
- intel.year_established and web.pages[].text for founding year and family-business wording.
- Address, review count (a rough size signal) and verified emails.
Every field on an enriched lead
- Google Business Profile basics: name, category, address, rating, review count, claimed status, GBP URL, CID
- Owner name and a short business summary, extracted from the website by an LLM when the site states them
- Every email found, labelled verified / catch-all / invalid / unverified, with role-based and free-provider flags
- Phones from the listing and website; the main number (Google listing first) gets line type (mobile, landline, VoIP, toll-free) and carrier, up to your plan's monthly line-type allowance
- Tech stack: CMS, CDN, server, chat widget, online booking tool, online ordering / POS storefront, review widgets, analytics, frameworks, ad pixels
- Social profiles, services, service areas, year established when stated
- Raw text, title and meta description of up to 5 crawled pages per site
Limits and honest caveats
- Owner names appear only when the website states them; fill rate varies by niche, and owner-run trades that sign their sites do best.
- We do not have revenue, employee counts from registries, ownership tenure or likelihood-to-sell scores.
- An owner named on a website is a stated fact from that page, not a verified ownership record.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Leads |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 leads to start |
| Starter | $39/mo ($29/mo yearly) | 10,000 leads/mo |
| Pro | $49/mo ($39/mo yearly) | 20,000 leads/mo |
| Agency | $97/mo ($79/mo yearly) | 50,000 leads/mo |
- 1 lead credit per business that has a website to enrich.
- Listings without a website are never charged (counted as skipped, not returned in results).
- Off-niche listings removed by the niche filter are never charged.
- Failed enrichments are refunded automatically.
- A search charges only what your balance covers: with 40 credits left, it enriches the 40 top-ranked matches. Set max_leads to cap any search.
- Locations, niche suggestions, polling and demo endpoints are free.
- Phone line-type lookups have a monthly allowance: 100 on the free start, 1,000 Starter, 2,000 Pro, 4,000 Agency. Numbers looked up before are free. Past the allowance, phones still come back without a line type.
FAQ
How often is the owner found?
It depends heavily on the niche. Run a free search in your target vertical to see the real rate before committing.
Can I exclude chains and franchises?
Not automatically yet. Strict niche filtering and reviewing names in the export is the current approach.
Can brokers use it for seller prospecting?
Yes. The same workflow gives owner name, email and the listing address for mailers.
Related
Setup guides
Comparisons
Other use cases
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