How do you find other businesses owned by the same person?

Search a record that indexes people, not companies. City licence registers sometimes publish the owners of each licensed business, and a few state registries accept an officer name. Take the person's name from one record, search it, then corroborate each hit with a second shared name or address before calling it the same person.

Why the usual advice does not work here

Every guide to business ownership starts from a company name. You have a person.

That is the whole problem. A reader who has just identified the operator of one location wants the operator's other locations, and the advice they find is a list of fifty Secretary of State search links. Most of those pages accept a company name or a file number and nothing else. Typing a person into them returns nothing, which reads like the person has no other businesses rather than like the search box cannot answer the question.

Some state registries do index people. Alabama runs a separate Business Entity Search By Agent | Officer | Incorporator. Louisiana's commercial search offers "Officer Name or Agent Name" as a search type next to entity name and charter number. Rhode Island's corporate search has "Search by an individual name (Officer, Director, etc.)" with separate first, middle and last fields. Those three were read off the live search pages on 19 September 2026. Plenty of other state portals sit behind a bot shield or render their form in JavaScript, so treat any published fifty-state table of this as unverified until you load the page yourself.

How often is one person behind more than one local business?

Often enough that it is worth checking every time, and Chicago is where you can measure it.

The city publishes two datasets that join on an account number: business licences, which carry the legal name, the trade name and the street address, and business owners, which carry a person's first and last name and a title for each licence account. The second one is the unusual part. A named person per licence is not something most cities put in an open dataset.

As of 19 September 2026 the city held 52,131 current active licences across 36,171 accounts, and 36,123 of those accounts, 99.9%, name at least one person. Between them they carry 46,281 distinct owner names. Of those, 4,852, or 10.5%, appear on more than one account, and between them they touch 9,574 accounts, 26.5% of every currently licensed business in the city.

Methodology: rows in the Chicago business-licence dataset with license_status of AAI and a license_start_date on or before 19 September 2026 and an expiration_date after it, joined to the business-owner dataset on account_number. A person is counted where both a first and a last name are present, matched on uppercased first and last name with punctuation removed. The middle initial is excluded because it is inconsistently filled. Owner rows naming a company rather than a person are outside the count.

The 26.5% is a claim about names, not about people, and the difference matters. Kevin Brown appears on 30 accounts. Some of those are one Kevin Brown and some are others, and the register gives you nothing to tell them apart. A stricter test helps: take every pair of accounts linked by a shared name and keep only the pairs that also share a second named person. That survives on 2,077 accounts, 5.7% of the city's licensed businesses. Treat 5.7% as the floor and 26.5% as the ceiling.

A worked example: 35 licences, 35 different companies

Richard Melman, who founded the Chicago restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You, is named on 35 accounts holding a current Chicago licence. Those 35 accounts carry 35 different legal names:

curl -s --get "https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/ezma-pppn.json" \
  --data-urlencode "\$where=upper(owner_first_name)='RICHARD' AND upper(owner_last_name)='MELMAN'" \
  --data-urlencode "\$select=account_number,doing_business_as_name,owner_title"

[
  {"account_number":"366625","doing_business_as_name":"RIVER NORTH ITALIAN LLC","owner_title":"MANAGING MEMBER"},
  {"account_number":"373590","doing_business_as_name":"CLARK HUBBARD LLC","owner_title":"MEMBER"},
  {"account_number":"3222","doing_business_as_name":"GABE'S PLACE, INC.","owner_title":"PRESIDENT"}
]

That query returns 54 rows across 53 accounts, not 35, because the owner file covers every account the city has ever licensed. Intersecting it with the current-licence set above is what leaves the 35. The doing_business_as_name in the owner file is the account's legal name, not the name on the sign. Join the account numbers back to the licence file for that, and these three come out as RPM Italian, Bub City and Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. The pattern holds across all 35. Each restaurant is its own company, usually named after the street it sits on, and exactly one of the 35 legal names contains the words Lettuce Entertain You: the parent company's own licence account.

So none of the obvious routes work. The sign says RPM Italian. The legal name says River North Italian LLC. No two of the 35 accounts share a street address, so grouping by building finds nothing either. The only field that connects this restaurant to the other 34 is the person.

Six title values appear across the 36 owner rows on those 35 accounts. Eleven say managing member, six say member and one says shareholder, which are ownership roles. Eight say manager and four say president, which are not. The remaining six say other, a free-text catch-all the city offers on the form that tells you nothing at all. Chicago records the title the applicant gave and publishes every kind in the same column, so read the column rather than counting rows.

Corroboration comes free here. Jay Stieber's name appears on 32 accounts, and 29 of those are accounts that also name Melman. Two independent names overlapping on 29 accounts is not a coincidence in the way one shared surname would be.

Where the state registry takes over, and where it points somewhere else

The city file stops at the city line and at the licences the city issues. The state registry holds the entities themselves, including the ones that never needed a Chicago licence and the ones that closed years ago.

Illinois publishes managers for LLCs and officers for corporations, so the same name can be run against the state record. A search of Illinois officer, manager and member names for the string "Richard Melman" returns 121 entity records: 89 LLCs and 32 corporations. Sixty are active, 52 are dissolved, and the remaining nine are merged, withdrawn or suspended. That set passes its own name test: 112 of the 121 give the officer's address as 5419 North Sheridan Road or 20 Locust Road, so these are overwhelmingly one Richard Melman rather than several. That is a deeper set than the city file, because a dissolved 1980s corporation still sits in the registry long after its licence lapsed.

It is also a different set, and the reason is the useful part. Six of the 35 Chicago accounts belong to companies whose Illinois filing names no person in a management role. The manager is another company, and the only individual on the filing is the registered agent:

{
  "officer": {
    "type": "company",
    "name": "LETTUCE ENTERTAIN YOU ENTERPRISES, INC.",
    "roles": [{ "kind": "manager", "title": "Manager" }]
  },
  "company": {
    "jurisdiction_code": "us_il",
    "entity_number": "LLC06358152",
    "legal_name": "RAMEN FULTON MARKET LLC",
    "status": "active",
    "formed_on": "2017-07-24",
    "parties": [
      { "type": "person", "name": "LAWRENCE B SWIBEL",
        "roles": [{ "kind": "registered_agent", "title": "Registered Agent" }] },
      { "type": "company", "name": "LETTUCE ENTERTAIN YOU ENTERPRISES, INC.",
        "roles": [{ "kind": "manager", "title": "Manager" }] }
    ]
  }
}

Nineteen Illinois companies name Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc. as their manager. All nineteen carry exactly two parties, that manager and Lawrence B. Swibel as registered agent, and taking the agent for an owner is the mistake this whole article exists to prevent. A person search for Melman never reaches these nineteen, and an entity search from the parent never reaches the ones filed under an individual. The group is only visible if you run both.

This is why the parent company itself is a poor starting point too. Its own Illinois record, entity number CORP63829501, lists Robert J. Melman as president and Jay L. Stieber as secretary. Richard Melman is not on it.

What a shared name proves, and what it does not

A name in a filing is a role, not a stake. Members and managing members hold an interest in an LLC by definition; managers, presidents and secretaries may hold none. A registered agent is a party designated to receive legal mail and is frequently a commercial service acting for thousands of unrelated companies, so an agent-name search returns that service's client list rather than one person's portfolio. No US state filing publishes an ownership percentage.

Neither registry carries a unique identifier for a person. Matching is on a name string, which means the answer to "is this the same person" is evidence, not a fact. Three things move a match from possible to solid:

• A second person named on both records, as with Melman and Stieber.
• A shared address on the filings, as distinct from a shared registered-agent address, which thousands of unrelated companies also share.
• A shared parent company or manager entity, which is a filed relationship rather than an inference.

A zero-result search is also ambiguous. Delaware's section 18-201 asks a new LLC for its name and for its registered office and agent, requires nothing else, and leaves anything further to whatever the members choose to include. Wyoming's section 17-29-201 asks for that same short list. In states like those, an empty result means the ownership was never filed, not that the person has no company there. For more on what public filings do and do not reveal, see how to find out who owns a business; for starting from a storefront rather than a person, see finding the legal entity behind a local business.

Running the same search across states

The manual version works inside one city and one state. It breaks the moment the person's companies cross a state line, because each registry is scoped to its own jurisdiction and most of them will not take a person's name at all.

GovFiles normalizes the business-entity records of all 50 states and the District of Columbia into one schema, and its officer search runs a name across every registry that publishes officers, members, managers, agents or shareholders, returning the matched party alongside the full company record:

curl -s -X POST 'https://api.govfiles.dev/v2/officers/search' \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"q":"\"richard melman\"","jurisdictions":"us_il","role":"manager","limit":100}'

Set jurisdictions to all to search every registry at once, or to a comma-separated list such as us_il,us_wi,us_fl. The role filter takes the normalized role kind, so member returns only the filings where the person is recorded as a member and registered_agent returns only agent appointments. Each result carries the registry's verbatim title next to the normalized kind, which is what lets you keep the distinction between an owner and an officer that the rest of this article depends on.

Officer data exists only where the registry publishes it, and a company that files no officers never appears in an officer search.

Frequently asked

How do you find other businesses owned by the same person? Search a record that indexes people rather than companies. Some city licence registers publish the owners of each licensed business, and some state registries let you search by officer name. Chicago's business-owner register is one: of the 46,281 distinct owner names on accounts holding a current Chicago business licence, 4,852, or 10.5%, appear on more than one account. Corroborate any match with a second shared name or address before treating it as the same person.

Can you search a state business registry by a person's name? In some states, yes, but most registry search pages only accept a company name or a file number. Alabama offers a "Business Entity Search By Agent | Officer | Incorporator". Louisiana's commercial search has an "Officer Name or Agent Name" search type. Rhode Island offers "Search by an individual name (Officer, Director, etc.)". Where no officer search exists, the state's own website cannot answer the question at all, no matter how many times a guide tells you to search the Secretary of State.

Does a shared name prove two businesses have the same owner? No. State and city registers have no unique key for a person, so two records with the same name may be two different people. Look for corroboration: a second person named on both records, a shared address, or a shared registered agent. In Chicago's register, 1,891 of the 4,852 multi-account owner names have at least one pair of accounts that also share a second named person, which is much harder to produce by coincidence than a single name collision.

Why do the city licence and the state filing name different people? They record different things. A city licence names the people responsible for the licensed business. A state entity filing names whoever the company filed as its manager, officer or agent, and for a restaurant group that is often the parent company rather than an individual. In Illinois, 19 companies name Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc. itself as manager. Searching only for a person would miss every one of them.

Does being named as an owner or manager mean the person owns the business? Not necessarily. These are filing roles, not equity. A manager can be a salaried employee, a president can hold no shares, and a registered agent is a party designated to receive legal mail who usually has no stake at all. Chicago's register does publish ownership-flavored titles such as sole proprietor, member and shareholder alongside officer titles, which is more than most state filings give you, but no public filing states a percentage.