Ed Mallin, who has been with information services firm Infogroup for 20 years, will leave the company in late November.
Mallin will be succeeded by Franklin Rios, the president of Infogroup’s Enterprise Solutions. Rios, who joined Infogroup in July, will take responsibility for the Infogroup Services unit Mallin currently heads. Rios came to Infogroup from Vertis Communications, where he led the interactive sales and marketing unit.
While Mallin does not have concrete plans for his post-Infogroup career, he told Direct Newsline that, given the changes the company has gone through of late, “I concluded that if I am going to make a change…this would be the time.”
Mallin’s resignation marks the latest in a period of transitions for the company. Founder and former CEO Vinod C. Gupta stepped down after a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. The company was taken private by private equity firm CCMP Capital in March, and Clare Hart joined it as its new CEO in July.
Was there discussion of Mallin staying on? “Clare [and the rest of the Infogroup management team] all wanted me to stay and be part of the future,” Mallin said. “But they were respectful enough to say ‘we will support you in whatever decision you make.’”
Looking back over the last 20 years, Mallin said his biggest point of pride was the way the company’s 30-plus acquisitions were integrated into Infogroup, as well as its predecessor incarnations InfoUSA and American Business Information.
“We brought lots of cultures together,” he said. “Maybe not as elegantly as I would like, but in the end we became a force in the industry.”
Mallin wouldn’t pin down a specific event as being his best day at the company, offering instead any time he won a large piece of business. “At heart I’m a sales and marketing guy,” he said. Similarly, he said his worst days were when the company lost business. “I was an athlete in college. I’ve always been a bad loser.”
This spirit carried over from his academic days, where his sports were basketball and tennis, to his both at Infogroup and Compilers Plus, the company he founded 27 years ago and which was acquired by Infogroup in 1990.
