Even When You Have the Good Leads
This Is Not a Sales Story
This is a Missing Persons case. As I have blogged before. I do a lot of missing person work. I do not serve papers. I have never reunited an adoptee with their birth mother. I rarely track down anyone who does not want to be found. Still, what I do more often than anything, is find people. That is I have to find that the person you need researched is the person written about, noted, exposed and otherwise made public in the public records found for his or her name. It makes a huge difference in what you know or do not know as we will get to in a moment.
You have a company. To know about the company, you need to know about the people who run it; for most smaller companies, the most you can learn about the company is to learn about the people who run the company. You find people associated with a company in several places. Then?
When I started formulating this post in my head, I was thinking about data and the good data, the data on “people” information online. In essence, there are three levels of people information in the public record (as well as additional levels of information in non-public records). Three ways to go then:
Free People Searches
Paid People Searches
Subscription People Searches
Google a name. That is, open Google.com on your browser, just put the name, first and last, into the search box, hit enter. Depending on how common the name, within a few pages, you will get results from Whitepages, Spokeo, usphonebook.com, etc. Whatever black magic it takes to goose Google, these sites do it. Click and you will get something, perhaps an address, phone numbers, email addresses, maybe more. But for more more, often the more you want, you are prompted to put up. Some fee from a few dollars on up, to unlock more background.
So, you can subscribe. These sites, Beenverified, Truthfinder, Pipl, etc., will take your credit card number, charge you once a month and then give you free reign to peruse all the people they have records. For this fee, give or take about $20, there’s a fair amount of “people” information. More than just googling the name. Is it the good leads, I mean good data?
The good leads, the leads locked up only for the good salesmen, get distributed to those with access subscription services like Lexis, Accurint, Tracers, TLO, or best, can mainline the actual credit bureaus, Experien, TransUnion, Equifax. The good data is supposed to be the most current, the most accurate, the most complete. It is.
You get what you pay for. What comes up on Google. What comes up when you pay the extra. What comes up with a monthly Whitepagebeenverifiedspokeao subscription is mostly right. There is a lot of good, very information when you cannot get the good data. Except there is data that is horribly off. Not the least because the Google-y sites allow often for “opt-out”, or as us old timers could relate, having a unlisted telephone number. For a variety of reasons, these sites often “miss” addresses, places, etc. Worse, the data often is horribly, what I would call “muddy”, that is they frequently mix up things. People with the same name will have their records combined; relatives will show up that are not really relatives. A lot of what you will see needs to be checked and rechecked and cross-referenced to make sure you do not have “noise”, information that seems like it matters but does not.
Having the good leads should ensure you at least get the steak knives. I have the good leads, and I still almost blew one recently. I had a company. I found a website. I noted who I believed to be, the top three executives. I started my research. There was a LinkedIn profile. There was now enough information, spelling of name, places worked, to put into the good database. And there was a record. The record included a bankruptcy, a key bit of finding to know about someone who was CEO and had already raised $3.5 million from private equity. I moved along to PACER to get more details from the bankruptcy. It was not there.
I had two tabs going on Chrome. On the left, it said bankruptcy, case number included, on the right, the box, no results found. A little copy and paste later, I found the bankruptcy, but I also found that the person’s first name was not spell the same, explaining why I originally did not find the record. I had this people report, and it was telling me, this person’s name has been reported spelled multiple ways. And it happens. Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, these languages are not perfectly transliterated into Roman letters, and the same person’s name may be spelled in multiple ways—when did Usama bin Laden become Osama bin Laden? Still, I was not willing to believe my good leads. I needed more to “prove” the person with one name was the same as the person with the other name.
I thought they were. From that LinkedIn search, I had generated some related companies. From my other search, I had found an additional business affiliation. Looking up records on these companies, they all came back to the same address. Bam. I figured the name may be different but you would always use the same address. I wrote up my memo on the company and I cited the bankruptcy. Except, the answer did not quite feel right.
The more I did research on my guy, the more I learned about the person with the alternative spelling. It was not matching what I had gleaned from that initial LinkedIn. Did this person make a big career left turn at some point? Long story short, I did more searching, figured out social security numbers and dates of birth and who was who, and also that the people with the very close but different names were likely father and son, and that accounted for the address matches. When the memo went out, there was mention of the bankruptcy ONLY to say it was not our guy, and I only said that because I had already heads-up’d that there was a bankruptcy.
Most people may are not hiding but they may be hard to find. No matter how good your data, it can take some doing to know you have located them..