Finding the Phone Number and Location of the Company Headquarters
There are a million and one reasons why you would need to find the contact information for a company’s headquarters during the course of an investigation. Next to the Internet, the telephone is probably the second best tool available to an investigator. Getting a hold of the right person in a company can be a crucial start to an investigation. The problem is, in general, large corporations do not want you contacting their headquarters.
So where do you start?
A good place to start for any investigation involving a company is the company website. Fifty percent of the time, the information you are looking for can be found there. But as mentioned before, larger companies have numerous channels that they want you to go through first before contacting their headquarters. And even if you find the information on the website, how do you confirm that this is the actual address and phone number to the headquarters? The next step would be to perform a search at a website that provides information on businesses, my favorite for finding this type of information is www.Hoovers.com (in fact, all of the contact information in the below post can be found in Hoovers). But other sites, such as Dun and Bradstreet, can be used as well (see my post in the “Investigative Sources” section on company information). Generally, you need not go any further and Hoovers or D&B provided the information you were searching for. But if you are still not satisfied, you can always search for the company’s annual report (www.annualreports.com), and the information you are looking for should surely be there.
Hopefully, this information will help to get your investigation on the right track, but if not, don’t despair. In future posts, I plan on discussing some more techniques on finding even the trickiest of contact information.