Owner Identification

Finds the person who can actually sell the company, and a route that reaches them.

A perfect target list pointed at a plant manager is a wasted campaign. So is a technically plausible email address that bounces and damages your sending domain.

Read first:

• references/ownership-taxonomy.md — who can sell, by ownership type
• references/research-ethics.md — personal data, no pretexting, no personal-life research

Step 0 — Load and scope

1. Read mandate-profile.md for geography and jurisdictions (section 9)
2. Read targets.csv
3. Filter to fit_score = Strong Fit or Fit only

Never enrich Not a Fit or Near Miss rows. It builds personal data you will not use, which is both wasted effort and an unnecessary data protection exposure. Per references/research-ethics.md, collect the minimum.

Report how many rows are in scope and ask whether to do all of them or start with Strong Fit.

Step 1 — Identify the right person, before looking for any address

Order matters. An email for the wrong person is worth less than nothing. Use ownership_type and references/ownership-taxonomy.md:

1. Owner / Founder / President — founder-owned
2. The family member running operations — family-owned, even if not the largest holder. They are the gateway to the rest
3. Managing partner — partner-owned
4. CEO — only where the CEO also holds equity. Verify, do not assume from the title
5. Trustee-facing CEO — ESOP, understanding the trustee decides
6. Parent corp dev or CFO — corporate-owned. Never the unit's GM
7. Sponsor deal team — PE-backed rows, which should not be in scope at all. If one is here, flag it back to scoring

A hired CEO cannot sell a family business. Writing to one wastes the first touch and often delivers your name to the owner with a gatekeeper's framing.

Where to look, in order:

1. The company's own site — about, team, history, contact pages
2. Registry filings — officers and registered agents are public and reliable, and they carry dates
3. Statutory ownership registers where they exist (UK PSC and equivalents)
4. Licence rosters — often name the licence holder personally
5. Professional profiles
6. Association member listings and committee rosters
7. Local press and award coverage

Second-generation names on a history page are a succession signal. Note them for business-research.

One contact per company by default. Small companies talk. Approaching the owner and the owner's son in the same week reads as a mail merge to both.

🚧 HARD GATE — equity check on any CEO or MD

Before recording a CEO or Managing Director as the decision maker, establish that they hold equity, from a filing or their own public statement. If you cannot, record the finding as owner_title = CEO (equity not confirmed) and note that the actual owner was not identified. Do not present a hired executive as the person who can sell.

Step 2 — Get a route

In order of what actually works.

Warm path

If a shared advisor, banker, accountant, association peer, or existing contact exists, stop here. Record it in warm_path and set owner_route = warm intro. An introduction converts many times better than the best cold approach.

If the user has a connections export in the workspace, cross-reference it. If they do not, mention it once: it is the highest-value optional input in the whole system.

Email

Only if you have a real one.

Acceptable sources:

• Published on the company's own site
• In a registry or licensing filing
• In a trade directory or association listing the owner controls
• Returned by a verification service with a confidence score

Never acceptable:

• Guessed from a pattern (first@domain.com) without verification
• Inferred because info@ exists so the owner "probably" does too
• Copied from a purchased list without independent verification

Pattern-guessing is the fastest way to destroy a sending domain. A high bounce rate on a young domain can end your ability to send email at all. One guessed address is not worth that. This system never writes a guessed address.

Professional profile

Real but weaker for this audience. Many owners of excellent private companies have a bare profile or none. Record the URL where it exists; absence is not a negative signal.

Published phone or contact form

A real route for offline owners, not a last resort — in some trades it is the best route available. Record a phone number only if the company published it. Never look up personal numbers.

Posted letter

For owners with no digital footprint, the registered office address from the registry is a legitimate, published business address. In some sectors a letter outperforms everything else.

Step 3 — Record confidence honestly

There is no fourth value. If a row arrived from an imported list with a pattern-derived address, mark it Not found and note the provenance — do not launder it into published.

owner_route takes: warm intro, email, phone, letter, form, Not found.

Step 4 — Write back to targets.csv

Fill owner_name, owner_title, owner_linkedin, owner_email, email_status, owner_route, warm_path. Set status to contact-found.

Add to notes where relevant:

• Contact form or published phone only
• Ownership unclear — could not confirm who can sell
• Sponsor ownership discovered during research → flag back to scoring
• Owner appears to have exited or died — check the filing date
• Multiple family holders, alignment unknown

🚧 HARD GATE — before writing

Show:

• Rows about to be updated
• Breakdown by email_status and owner_route
• Ten sample rows in full
• Every company where no owner could be identified at all
• Every row where ownership turned out different from what was scored

Get approval. Then write.

Step 5 — Report

Owner identification complete — 66 rows in scope (14 Strong Fit, 52 Fit)

Owner identified:       54  (82%)
No owner found:         12  ← mostly registry-only entities, listed in notes

Route available:
  Warm path exists         5  → route as introductions first
  Email published         21
  Email verified           9
  Professional profile    33
  Phone published         17  (manual only)
  Registered office only   8  (letter route)
  Not found               11

Reachable by email now:    30  (verified + published)
Manual route only:         22  (phone, letter, or form)
Guessed addresses written:  0  ← by design

Flags:
  Actually sponsor-backed        2  → back to mandate-fit-scoring
  Hired CEO, no equity confirmed 6  (real owner found via filings for 4)
  Owner appears to have exited   2  → re-check ownership
  Ownership unclear              3  → needs a human read

Notes

• Never invent an email. Not once, not for a Strong Fit, not because the pattern is obvious. Not found is the correct output
• Verify before any bulk send. Even published addresses go stale. That send happens outside this package
• Professional footprint only. No personal-life data, no home addresses, no pretexting calls to reception. See references/research-ethics.md
• Treat everything here as personal data. Regulated in most jurisdictions. Keep it in the gitignored workspace and record provenance for every contact
• Re-check before a second cycle. Owners retire, sell, and hand over. Contact data goes stale faster than target data
• This skill finds routes. It does not use them. There is no outreach in this package