Meet the Broker: Harold Pratt
Today we meet Harold Pratt, president of Pratt Direct Marketing, Rosemont, IL, a company he has run since 1998.
He primarily brokers lists pertaining to senior leads for insurance companies, subprime credit, Catholic fundraising and business-to-business publishing.
Before setting off on his own, Pratt had worked as a sales manager for R.L. Polk, which specialized in motor vehicle data. (Equifax bought the firm in 2000).
“Basically I’ve been trading on the relationships I had made at Polk and other places along the way,” he says. “Almost all my relationships today are from that experience.”
A player in the industry since 1973, Pratt has seen massive changes, particularly in technology.
“As far as lists go, there are far more options and there’s more and more interest in alternative channels to the mail and the phone, of course,” he says, noting that when he began information was still stored on keypunch cards.
How has this changed the landscape?
“I would say you can do a lot more,” he says. “You can handle a lot more business with one or two people than you could back then and list searching is a lot easier today, using tools like NextMark and MIN than in the olden days of having to leaf through an SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Systems) directory.”
“You can do a lot more with less now and the analytics are much more accurate and powerful today. In the past, you had to wait weeks to have programmers handle things like segmentation for you on mainframe systems.”
What about the economy?
“My sense is that [the recession] has bottomed out, though I haven’t seen a huge increase in my business,” he says, noting that while inquiries and count requests are up, the size of orders is still down. “And I guess until I see an increase I’m not gonna say the economy has rebounded.”
Off the job, Pratt enjoys playing tennis.
