Open Google and type this: "trucking company" "Greenville, SC" -jobs. You get a list of local trucking companies, most of them independent, with a few job boards you can skip. That one line is a lead search. The rest of this page is how to make it sharper, with eight patterns you can adapt, and what to copy into a sheet from each result.
A lead from Google is two things: a business that fits, and a person at it you can write to. Search finds the business easily. The person takes a second step, which is reading the company's own site. This guide covers both, by hand. It does not use scrapers, because Google's terms prohibit automated queries and because a list you read yourself is a better one.
What you are looking for: a business and a person
Our example seller is Fernhill Fleet Wash, a mobile truck-washing service in Greenville, South Carolina. Its buyers are local trucking and delivery companies with 5 to 50 trucks. The owner, Dale, wants 60 names this week: company, website, the owner or fleet manager by name, a phone number, and an email if one is posted. He gives himself 10 minutes per search pattern.
Four operators that narrow a list
You need only four. Quotation marks force an exact phrase, so "family owned" returns pages with those words together. A minus sign removes noise: -jobs, -indeed, -facebook. The site: operator limits results to a domain or type, such as site:.org. And intitle: requires a word in the page title, which finds About pages and team pages. You can combine them in one search. Google changes how it reads operators from time to time, so if a search returns very little, loosen it by dropping one condition.
Eight searches for one niche
Each is written for Dale's niche. Swap in your trade and your city.
1. A first list of businesses.
"trucking company" "Greenville, SC" -jobs -indeed -ziprecruiter
2. About pages that name an owner.
intitle:"about us" "family owned" trucking "Greenville"
3. Team pages. These list dispatchers, fleet managers and owners by name.
intitle:"our team" OR intitle:"meet the team" dispatch trucking "Greenville, SC"
4. Hiring signals. A company hiring drivers is growing its fleet, and the page often names a recruiter or owner.
"now hiring" CDL "Greenville, SC" -indeed -ziprecruiter -glassdoor
5. Trade association member lists.
site:.org "member directory" trucking "South Carolina"
6. New businesses. The after: operator limits results by date.
"grand opening" OR "now open" trucking OR logistics "Greenville" after:2026-01-01
7. Carrier packets. Some companies post onboarding PDFs with a business contact on them. Use only the business contact details, nothing else on the document.
filetype:pdf "carrier packet" "Greenville, SC"
8. Addresses posted on a company's own site. Once you have a company, find its public emails with this, replacing the domain.
site:greenvilletrucking.example "@greenvilletrucking.example"
Run the first search for 10 minutes, copy the useful results, then do the others. Searches 2, 3 and 5 give the most named people. Searches 4 and 6 give timing: a reason to write now.
When a search goes wrong
The usual failure is a page of directory results: Yelp, Yellow Pages, Mapquest, Facebook. Add them to the minus list, one at a time, as in -site:yelp.com -site:facebook.com, until the results are company sites. The second failure is the wrong city, because Google leans on where you are. Put the city in quotes and add the state, and if you are in another town, look at the page addresses before you trust a result. The third is too few results, which usually means too many quoted phrases. Drop one. And if everything you find is a national company, your niche word is too broad: change "trucking" to "flatbed" or "produce hauling" and the local firms come up.
Keep a short list of search strings that worked in the sheet's second tab. When you come back in a month for fresh names, you can rerun them in minutes, and the results will include whatever is new.
Reading a company website for the owner's name
Spend two minutes on each site, in this order. The About page, which often tells the founder's story. The Team or Contact page. The footer, where "© 2026 Smith Hauling LLC" gives the legal name to search in the state registry. A signed blog post or news item. The Privacy or Terms page, which often names the legal entity and a contact. If you find no person, write the role instead ("fleet manager") and look for the name later. For the next step, how to find who owns a business takes a legal name to a person, and finding a business owner's email address picks up from there.
Maps and directories alongside
Search finds companies that have a good website. Google Maps finds companies that have a street address and reviews, including many that don't have a site worth reading. Use both on the same niche: Maps for volume, search for names. Our guide to getting leads from Google Maps covers the Maps half, and directories such as the member lists from search 5 fill the gaps between them.
Getting the list into a sheet
Keep eight columns: company, website, person, role, phone, email (only if posted), where you found it (the search number), and the date. The column for the search number tells you which pattern earns its time. After 60 rows, count how many have a named person and how many have an email. That ratio is your real yield. Dale's first hour turned up 38 companies, 21 with a named owner or manager, and 9 with a posted email. Yours will differ, but the shape is common: many companies, fewer names, fewest emails.
Check the list before you send
Remove duplicates and national chains. Make sure each site is live and the company is still operating: look at the latest news post and the most recent review. Verify every email before you write; our piece on verifying email addresses before sending covers the tools, and finding emails from a website covers where addresses hide. For a longer walk through list-building, see how to build a lead list.
Doing this by hand is the right way to learn a niche, and a slow way to run one every month. Rocketship finds the buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. See what the AI workers do.