Okay I have a question, what methods have your runners used to found out who their end employer was? I'm trying to come up with ways and maybe it's just my paranoid thinking but if I was Mr. Johnson I would have so many cutout's and false leads as possible, especially since it's supposed to be deniable.

Honestly my group doesnt tend to unless something goes wrong. Most of the time our Johnsons come to the meet with a completely clean one-shot Commlink, so we cannot find out electronically. Our Johnsons tend to be very cautious about us following them in anyway (We learnt our lesson after being targetted by a Johnson because he had been comprimised.) and they tend to have the backup required to get away nice and safe.

However that doesn't mean that we dont throw out tendrils. I try and get a fix on some Matrix information so that my Sprites can use it to track the guy down. I try and get a hack down on the car the Johnson uses so I can follow it using GridGuide. We ask our Contacts about who might be hiring us and why. But we dont really push it, as I said, unless the Johnson decided he needs us removed.

Run image recognition on a picture that the group will have of the Johnson after the meet. There is a good chance Mr J has an online profile of some sort on some website out there. Usually thats the most significant step you can take.

You can't be too crazy about the players not learning about the Johnson.

In a rational, highly realistic world the Johnson would NEVER meet most runners. The runners would only meet the fixer at most and probably not even that until they had proved themselves. However the Johnson meet is a staple of shadowrun.

In general most people don't really want the thugs they are hiring to know anything about them, but until you get to the big leagues you are not usually dealing with people who have the skills and resources to stop a typical group of starting runners from finding out a whole lot about them.

[Organized crime is an exception, as they hire little fish to do stuff, but typical clients are not experienced in this area. And most characters in SR (if not the players) will understand that getting caught prying into the Yak's/Mafia/etc business is unhealthy.]

There is also a tradition in the written SR stuff about the backstabing Johnson that makes players feel that they want to know who the Johnson is.

However the disadvantage of knowing too much about your client is that the people that you just injured with your run probably also want to know who he is and are willing to put a lot more effort into finding that out than they are into punishing the streetscum who did crap to them. If they know that finding you tells them who he is then they can and often will put a lot of effort into finding you and making you tell them who hired you. And it's likely to be the last thing you ever say to anyone.

Sometimes Mr. Johnsons can just screw-up when trying to cover his identity. Such as: forgetting to turn off his main com-link he left in the rental; carrying some minor company property (company doc-wagon bracelet); meeting at the resturant near his workplace (buisness lunch); any of several easy to forget little things.
Surprisingly some Mr. Johnsons are new to this type of thing, and haven't fully read the Hireing Runners for Dummies".
Or so we thought. He had just enough evidence to implicate a rival company.

I'm not su much worried as the players wanting to find out. I just want to be prepared for what they might try and have relevent info they can gather.

The ID bracelet is a good one, things that are always there tend to be forgotten, at least until you get to the ultra-scary paranoid area's

Mr. Johnson's little black book is a useful source for ideas. But the key trick is to be sure you and your players are playing the same game.

I figure there will be three basic types of Johnson's.

Professional Johnson's: People who handle shadow assetts for their company as a matter of course, these guys will never appear on a company directory anywhere they are professional and they take great pains to let no one know who they serve unless they want it to be known. The flip side to that coin however is because of their long associations with the shadows poking around amongst the fixer and runner community can likely identify who they are. For very high risk runs they may work entirely through fixers or set up elaborate cover identities. A good example of this sort of J can be found in the story stuff in the back of Runners companion which is a great story albeit entirely too technomancergasmic at the end.

Sometimes Johnson's: these folks occasionally interact witht he shadows but not with any regularity. They can range from members of an organization that either does not have professional J's or for some reaosn they do not want to use their "in company" J to handle the hiring. They can also be members of the shadow community who need to hire other talent such as fixers or other runners. They know enough about the game to protect themselves and they don't have nearly as big a footprint as a full time Johnson, on the other hand they don't have the same resources to obscure their identity as a professional Johnson. In some ways these are the J's you need to be most weary of, sometimes their running a game on you, sometimes it's just their runs are really really complicated. Internal sabotage and the like.

One timers: These are people that have little to no contact with the shadow community and have taken it into their head to hire a team of professional criminals to do something for them. THe upside to these guys is their ability to hide their identity and screw over their teams is usually pretty limited. Unfortunately their sometimes inexperienced enough to still try the latter.

As for my preparation I usually plan for my team to try and do cursory investigations into who their working for, I also have my J's try and give the runners as much info as their comfortable with to keep them from digging further. A J might tell the runners that he represents a smuggling concern or corp and explaining in broad details the purpose that the run serves. I also prepare a legwork table similar to what you might see in printed runs or SR Missions on the J and targets ahead of time. I also usually figure the J will carry two comlinks, one disposable and broadcasting perhaps with a databomb or honeypot, one hidden and with good firewall and other ratings that is his actual comlink. Most company men can't afford to not bring their links to potentially hour long meets so they have to have them. On the other hand their going to be scary security by comlink standards.

Couldn't Johnsons wear a Nanopaste disguise, or have the Bland quality? Bland should mean that running Image Recognition on you nets a number of false positives in the triple digits.

There's also the possibility that a professional Johnson has used Biosculpting regularly. He may not keep the same face for more than 30 days. Johnson may also just be a cloned wimp rigged as a biodrone with a scratch-built appearance and an agent to keep it going if the WiFi gives out...