Frank Martell has helped oversee one of Orange County’s biggest turnaround stories over the past 2 ½ years.
Martell, chief financial officer of Irvine-based CoreLogic Inc., joined the property information, analytics and services specialist in 2011 amid an unclear period, with rumors swirling of a potential sale for the nascent public company and hard questions being raised from a large shareholder.
Since then, the company—which was spun off from Santa Ana-based First American Financial Corp. in 2010—has refocused its priorities, shed noncore businesses, reorganized operations, and grown its more profitable data and analytics line of business.
Shareholders have taken to the reinvention at CoreLogic, which provides a variety of consumer, financial and property data to lenders, corporations and government agencies.
Its shares, which traded at roughly $8 when Martell joined the company at the end of August 2011, now are worth more than $30, for a market value of about $3 billion; that’s good for the No. 7 spot among the largest publicly traded companies based in OC.
Adding to the impressive gains: The stock surge has come amid a still-rocky residential real estate market that’s taken away a fair amount of refinance-related business for CoreLogic.
“We’ve had a great run,” said Martell, who won an award in the public-company category Jan. 28 at the Business Journal’s CFO of the Year Awards at the Hotel Irvine Jamboree Center (see related stories, pages 1, 4, 6 and 7).
Challenging Situations
Stepping into a challenging situation at CoreLogic wasn’t out of character for Martell, who has 25 years of experience as a CFO, chief executive, chief operating officer and other general management positions in the marketing and business information industries. About half of his career has been spent overseas.
He ran the Asia-Pacific region for New York-based ACNielsen Corp. in the late 1990s when he had to deal with the Asian financial crisis, which effectively cut his division’s revenues in half. In 2002, the SARS illness outbreak rocked overseas business again.
Martell knew that he and CoreLogic “had a lot to do” when he was brought aboard in 2011. Around that time, CoreLogic formed a committee to explore strategic options and was being faulted for its performance by one of the company’s largest institutional investors at the time, Boston-based Highfields Capital Management LP.
CoreLogic—which completed its split from First American in June 2010—was still going through growing pains as a public company at the time, according to Martell.
“They didn’t have the public-company infrastructure—it usually takes 12 to 18 months,” said Martell, whose experience also includes working through the 1996 spin off of ACNielsen from Dun & Bradstreet Corp.
The first order of business: addition by subtraction.
After deciding that an outright sale or merger of the company wasn’t in shareholders’ best interests, CoreLogic divested itself of several noncore and lower-margin businesses, shrinking the company’s revenue base by nearly a third, from nearly $2 billion to about $1.3 billion.
“You have to be focused,” Martell said. “At the end of 2011, we set out on a long-range plan. What we’ve done is to be very careful (about following that plan)—that’s helped generate good credibility with investors.”
The plan, called Project 30, provides a roadmap for a companywide productivity improvement program, and is intended to significantly reduce costs at its numerous operating units. It has resulted in more than $100 million in cost savings to date.
Martell credits CoreLogic Chief Executive Anand Nallathambi for driving CoreLogic’s restructuring.
“He was the mastermind behind the strategy and is someone who has led by example in challenging times,” Martell said.
“I have a great relationship with Anand,” Martell said. “It helps that I’ve been able to bring some operational background” as a chief executive.
Organic growth and select acquisitions—including deals to boost the company’s insurance-related business—have helped push the company’s revenue base upward since the divestitures. CoreLogic expects its 2013 revenues to be between $1.58 billion and $1.6 billion, and is wrapping up a $661 million buy of three data and analytics businesses.
