COMPANY & ORGANISATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Every company leaves a paper trail. The trick is knowing where to look — and remembering the trail is a *register*, not a confession booth you enter in disguise. This is competitive intelligence and due diligence, not corporate espionage, and not pretexting a receptionist for the org chart.

Why this matters

Legal identity is the difference between a brand name and an entity you can actually describe. Students who start on LinkedIn meet a marketing story. Students who start on the register meet directors, addresses, and status. If you cannot name the company number, you do not yet have a company. You have a logo.

What you'll be able to do

You will find a local business's registration number, registered address, key public officers, and a bounded size signal — from filings and news — and cite each item. Keep trading names and shelf-company tells in the notes instead of blending them into one vibes-based "firm."

Every company leaves a paper trail. The trick is knowing where to look.

Company research is a common OSINT task — competitive intelligence, due diligence, investigations, or sales prospecting. Legitimate when sources are public. Not legitimate when you invent a buyer persona or dumpster-dive. Stay on registers, filings, and what the company already published. Pick a local business that actually filed something.

Start with the legal entity

• **Company registers**: ASIC (Australia), Companies House (UK), SEC (US), OpenCorporates (global).
• **Business registration numbers**: ABN, ACN, EIN, VAT — search these for associated entities.
• **Trading names**: A company may operate under multiple trading names. Search all of them.

OpenCorporates is a map, not gospel; click through to the official register. Numbers are pivot keys. A brand with no number may be a sole trader, a foreign entity, or vapour — write which. A registered address is often an accountant's office, not the shop. Record both if public. Do not treat it as a surveillance target.

Leadership and people

• **LinkedIn**: Search for current and former employees. Look for job titles that reveal structure.
• **Crunchbase**: Funding, founding dates, investor information.
• **Zoominfo / Apollo**: Contact data (often a paid tier, but free tiers provide limited useful data).
• **Board members**: Search for directors on company registry sites.

Directors on the register beat "thought leadership" posts. Former employees are useful for historical structure and terrible as a pretexting channel — do not message them pretending to be a journalist. Public titles, public bios, public filings. You do not need a paid mobile number for this lesson. Disambiguate common director names with company number plus a second public source.

Financial health signals

• **Annual reports**: Public companies file these. Look for revenue trends, risk factors, and subsidiary mentions.
• **News mentions**: Search for recent funding rounds, layoffs, acquisitions.
• **Job postings**: Rapid hiring suggests growth; hiring freezes suggest trouble.
• **Glassdoor / Indeed**: Employee reviews — biased but useful for culture and leadership signals.

Private companies often will not hand you revenue. Then the range comes from tenders, news, headcount bands, or "unknown — no filing." Unknown is valid. Inventing turnover because the shop looks busy is not analysis. A 10-K risk factor is structured. A Glassdoor rant is a mood.

A company that has been registered for 10 years with no website, no LinkedIn, and no reviews may be a shelf company. That is itself a finding.

Numbered workflow

1. Write the objective: legal identity, officers, address, size signal.
2. Search the official register (and OpenCorporates as an index). Capture number and status.
3. List trading names and related numbers.
4. Record directors/officers from the register; corroborate titles on public professional pages.
5. Pull one financial or size signal from a filing, tender, or reputable news item — or write "not public."
6. Cite every claim. Stop when the exercise fields are filled or explicitly blank.

Legal and ethical boundaries

Company registers, public filings, and traces firms chose to publish. Competitive intelligence, not espionage. No pretexting, impersonation, or paying insiders. If a fact is not in a public record or public page, it is out of scope.

Common mistakes

Researching the brand and missing the entity. Treating a registered office as the factory. Using LinkedIn headcount as audited revenue. Stopping at Crunchbase. Calling a quiet company "shell" without checking whether it is simply small and dull.

**Rule of thumb:** The register is boring on purpose. Boring is where the directors live. Charm is where the marketing team lives. Start with boring.

Close with the exercise: research a local business online. Find its registration number, registered address, key personnel (CEO, directors), and approximate revenue range. Document all sources. If revenue is not public, say so and show the sources you used to learn that.