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Her positive attitude will be a major asset to Clare Hart as she works to bring a raft of subsidiaries onto the same page in her parent company’s book.

Clare Hart says her positive attitude will give her the
right mindset as she works to bring Infogroup’s
subsidiaries onto the same page.

As CEO of Infogroup, a global data modeling, marketing and services company with an executive office in Princeton, the former Dow Jones & Co. executive had to take the 30-plus companies — and their associated fiefdoms, which Infogroup had acquired over a period of years — and integrate them into a unified firm with common goals.

That presents a thorny challenge for Hart, 50, but her can-do attitude — forged during her teenage years in a Morristown bakery — helped propel her first to the president’s office at Dow Enterprise Media Group and then, in mid-2010, to Infogroup, a $500 million, 3,200-employee company that had just been taken private by a group of investors that included Rich Zannino, her former boss at Dow Jones. The firm has about 200 New Jersey employees.

“Infogroup had a history of making a lot of acquisitions, and a silo mentality had developed between them,” Hart said. “The challenge was to get the companies, which had been organized into about 15 business units, to function as one firm.”
As Infogroup’s point person, Hart led the effort to get everyone to work toward a common set of goals.

“Part of it involved promoting transparency and communications,” she said. “For example, we have company-wide town hall meetings every quarter, where everyone’s encouraged to air their thoughts. We also restructured compensation packages to incentivize people to share information across the firm, and to shift their focus from internal concerns to the overriding external goal of helping our customers to succeed.”

At its core, Infogroup is an information services company, tapping into databases and creating models and extracting information that helps clients refine their marketing programs. A company relocating to a new office, for example, will show up on Infogroup’s radar; it then alerts office-supply clients that they’ve got a likely prospect. Similarly, a home sale may trigger a notification to an insurance client that can pitch life insurance or other products to the buyer.

Infogroup is in a crowded field that’s getting more competitive as the Internet makes it easier for information to be distributed quickly and inexpensively, but that doesn’t worry Hart.
“We differentiate ourselves in a few ways,” she said. “For one thing, we’re targeted. We don’t blanket our clients with mass lists. Instead, we use sophisticated data modeling to generate predictive analytics that not only tell them how potential customers have behaved in the past, but what they’re likely to do in the future, too.”

The company also offers a suite of integrated services, including mobile and text message marketing, e-mail and social marketing, and Web development that can meet a variety of client needs.

During the next two years or so, Infogroup will be rolling out new applications, including what Hart called custom integration programs that will mate Infogroup databases with client and third-party databases, to deliver deeper and more targeted information.
“We’ll also be putting more of our interactive tools on the Web, and will simplify the self-service model,” she said. “That way clients will be able to manage it themselves in an even faster, more efficient manner,” freeing them from having to interface with an Infogroup specialist over the phone or electronically.

Hart believes a company has to be open to change to succeed, and said she’s always been open to challenges.
“When I was in high school working at the Swiss Chalet Bakery, in Morristown, owner Charlie Wurster encouraged me to take on responsibility,” she said. “At 16, I was already responsible for employee work schedules and other activities.”
Coming of age in the fast-moving 1980s also shaped her outlook.

“After graduating from Drexel, I worked as a computer programmer and then went for my MBA while I worked full time,” she said. “In the technology and finance fields, in particular, you’re usually judged by your accomplishments, instead of your gender or other characteristics. So as I see it, life is a meritocracy, and companies are also judged by what they can do.”

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