Meet the Broker: Jennifer Rickard

Today we meet Jennifer Rickard, COO of Rickard List Marketing, a Melville, NY company she has run along with her brother Mark for the past 21 years.

The company specializes in consumer publishing, financial and insurance lists and, in the last three years or so, “we’ve really branched out into the education marketplace,” she says.

The biggest change she’s seen in the last few years has been technological advances.

“We used to give clients information and everything was paper—mailing and overnighting things out,” she says.

Now that everything is done electronically, “people make decisions much later than they used to because they were waiting for information to come in. Everything’s just much quicker than it used to be,” she notes.

For example, it used to take two or three weeks to turn around a mailing campaign. Now it’s more like a day. This, she notes, creates a whole new scenario.

“The traditional role of the broker and manager is changing and evolving into something that it wasn’t before. We have to make ourselves more relevant to our clients,” she says. “I’m still doing the same job but I’m just more efficient at it.”

Concurrent with this rise in automation is industry consolidation, which she says may be affecting the level of personal service a list company can offer clients.

“There used to be a middleman and I think the middleman has been absorbed by these big companies. So you can either go to a giant company or you can go to more of boutique company which is what ours is like,” she says, noting her business would like to stay independent.

Economic conditions were primary motivators behind the company’s June 2008 decision to sell off its fundraising arm to Specialists Marketing Services. The smaller nonprofits the company worked with had required too much administrative work that detracted from the Rickard’s larger commercial clients.

“In good times you have the capacity to absorb it but in lean times you want to cut off anything that’s labor-intensive,” she notes. “Honestly I think we’re gonna have another lean year,” she says. “I don’t see it getting worse in the next year but I don’t see it getting better. I think we’re gonna be status quo for another year and then I’m hoping that the year after we’ll start to see an increase in business.”

In her spare time, Rickard enjoys cooking and cooking gardening in her home in Centerport, NY, as well as raising her 16-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter.