There is a peculiarity about the UK that no other country quite replicates. Every company registered in England, Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland must file its directors, registered address, incorporation date, SIC industry codes, and financial accounts with Companies House. That information is publicly available, searchable, and free to access via an open API that the government publishes specifically to encourage its use.
The database contains over five million active companies. It names their directors. It shows when they were appointed. It records the businesses' industry classifications. It tells you whether a company is active, dormant, or in the process of being wound down.
It is, by any reasonable measure, the most comprehensive free business intelligence database in the UK. And almost nobody in the local marketing and outreach space was using it properly.
I noticed this gap while working on a campaign for a web design client in Hertfordshire. He wanted to find local businesses without websites — the kind of businesses that are theoretically his ideal customer but that you cannot find through LinkedIn because they have no digital presence at all. We had tried Google Maps scraping, which gave us business names and addresses. But we had no way to find the actual decision-makers. The owner of a dental surgery on Google Maps is listed as "Riverside Dental" — not as "Dr. James Chen, director, incorporated 2019, 44 years old, also director of two other companies."
That second layer of information is the difference between a cold outreach to a business name and a warm outreach to a named individual with a specific professional context.
The solution was to combine two data sources that were designed to complement each other and had never been properly combined in an Apify actor.
The first source is Google Maps. When you search "plumber in Hertford" or "accountant in Bishop's Stortford", Google Maps returns a list of businesses with their name, address, phone number, website (if they have one), Google rating, review count, and geographic coordinates. This is the discovery layer — it tells you what businesses exist in a location by type.
The second source is the Companies House API. Given a company name and a postcode, the API can identify the registered company, confirm it is active, return its SIC codes (the government's classification of what industry it operates in), give you its incorporation date, and most valuably, list its current directors with their appointment dates and nationalities.
The UK Business Lead Generator connects these two sources in sequence. You tell it what type of business to find and where. It runs the Google Maps search, gets the list of businesses, then passes each result to the Companies House API for enrichment. The match rate is not perfect — some sole traders and partnerships are not Companies House-registered — but for limited companies, which make up the majority of businesses in most professional service sectors, the match rate runs at roughly 60–75%.
What you get back is qualitatively different from what any generic Google Maps scraper returns. Not "ABC Accountants, 23 High Street, Hertford, 01992 xxxxxx, 4.3 stars". Instead: "ABC Accountants Limited, 23 High Street, Hertford, director: Sarah Mitchell, appointed 2017, SIC 69201 (Accounting), incorporated 8 years ago, status: active." Sarah Mitchell is the person you want to talk to. And you now know her name.
For local marketing agencies, web designers, and professional service firms doing B2B outreach in the UK, this changes the quality of every conversation. You are not approaching a business — you are approaching a person with a specific professional history. The email or LinkedIn message that says "Hi Sarah, I work with accounting practices in Hertfordshire that are looking to modernise their client onboarding" lands differently than one addressed to "Dear Business Owner."
I also added a lead scoring layer. The actor scores each result on a composite of factors: no website (high opportunity), low Google rating (reputation management opportunity), few reviews (organic growth opportunity), recently incorporated (new business that needs infrastructure), director contact data available (actionable). A 100-point lead score gives you an at-a-glance prioritisation of which leads are warmest.
It costs £0.003 per business found and £0.007 per business enriched with Companies House director data. A search for 100 local businesses with full enrichment costs about £1.00.
There is no competing tool on the Apify Store that combines Google Maps discovery with Companies House enrichment. The data has always been there. Someone just had to connect the dots.
That someone turned out to be a consultant in Bishop's Stortford who needed a better way to find clients for his own clients.