The Michigan business registry

Brad asked for "the SOS business database for Michigan." Three findings, one of them a correction worth keeping.

Finding one: in Michigan it is not the SOS

Unusually, Michigan's Secretary of State does elections and vehicles; business entities live under LARA (Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Corporations, Securities & Commercial Licensing Bureau). The old COFS system (2017) was retired; since June 23, 2025 the registry is the MiBusiness Registry Portal:

https://mibusinessregistry.lara.state.mi.us/search/business

(The old cofs.lara host now fails TLS entirely; update any bookmarks.)

Finding two: the fleet's "sos" corpus is a different animal

cbintel carries an sos resource (1,958 documents, 8 states, ~925 for Michigan), but it is Secretary-of-State ELECTIONS material: candidates, filing deadlines, regulations, rules. Campaign Brain's home turf, not a business-entity registry. Useful someday for the RFP lane's civic calendar; not for looking up a manufacturer.

Finding three: what the registry yields, and why the hunt cares

A free entity lookup returns what no scraper database can be trusted for, straight from the state record:

• exact legal entity name and ID, formation date, status
• the resident agent's NAME and registered office address
• annual-report filings, which list officers and directors
• assumed names (DBAs), mergers, dissolutions

For the hunt this is the missing G3 tool: JR Automation, Behler-Young, and Feyen Zylstra all sit one named contact away from qualified, and the registry names real officers with real addresses, as public record filed by the companies themselves. It also verifies legal names before a letter goes out (Roskam Baking Company vs Roskam Foods, for example).

The access stance, per doctrine

The portal sits behind a Cloudflare Turnstile human check, and the answer to a bot wall is the same as to any other no: we do not go around it. Lookups are a human-in-a-browser errand, two minutes each, and the five-prospect list below fits in one coffee. For legitimate volume some day, LARA sells bulk data extracts through its official program; that is the door, not scraping.

The errand list (Brad, one coffee)

Search each, note resident agent + any officers from the latest annual report, into the prospect row:

1. JR Automation Technologies LLC (need: a named engineering/IT contact path)
2. Behler-Young Company (verify the two-CEO roster oddity)
3. Feyen Zylstra LLC (named officer to pair with the modernization form)
4. Metal Flow Corporation (verify legal name before the letter)
5. Roskam Baking Company / Roskam Foods (which entity is current)