How Much Is a Company’s Phone Book Worth? At the Very Least, $30

NEW YORK — The chairman and chief executive of F. W. Woolworth Co., Harold Sells, lives in Murray Hill, N.J. Seven miles away, in Florham Park, Woolworth’s president and chief operating officer, Frederick Hennig, resides.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. partner Lloyd Blankfein has two homes, one in Manhattan and the other in East Hampton, N.Y. Another Goldman partner, Fischer Black, has homes in Chappaqua, N.Y., and Pittsfield, Mass. And David Beemer, managing director of Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc., has a penthouse in Guttenberg, N.J.

Those are but a few of America’s least approachable corporate executives whose home addresses and, in many cases, home telephone numbers, are for sale by Steve Olsen.

Operating out of his cluttered two-room suite in Hotel Rutledge, a small Manhattan residential hotel, Olsen, 25, is one of a small group of entrepreneurs who buy, sell and swap corporate telephone directories.

He specializes in Fortune 500 companies and financial institutions. An associate, Stanley Grubman, in Silver Spring, Md., also sells directories of Fortune 500 companies, plus many Washington Beltway high-technology firms.

Runs a Regular Ad

Olsen regularly runs a two-line ad in New York Press, a weekly, that says: “We pay cash for internal phone directories of large companies.” He pays $30 to $50 a book and sells photocopies for $50 to $100, he said. Those answering his ad, he said, come from every level--from the mail room to the executive suite.

Not all in-house directories include home numbers--those that do command higher prices--and a sampling indicates that most of the home numbers in company directories also are listed in local telephone books.

But the company directory still is valuable, because without it, someone tracking an elusive executive would need to know which phone book to go to: Greenwich, Conn., for example, for the home listing of Hugh Garnett, partner at the accounting firm of Deloite, Haskins & Sells; or Randolph, N.J., for a listing for George Miles Jr., the executive vice president and chief operations officer of WNET, Channel 13.

Variety of Companies

Olsen estimates that his more than 300 directories contain 4 million to 5 million names. Among the companies on his seven-page, single-spaced list of phone lists are:

American Broadcasting, CBS, NBC, Aetna, Continental Insurance, Metropolitan Life, New York Life, Prudential-Bache, Travelers Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer Fund, Paine Webber, Smith Barney, Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, Citicorp, Dillon Read, First Boston, Morgan Guaranty, Morgan Stanley, Allied Corp, American Cyanamid, American Home Products, Bristol Myers, Pfizer, Schering-Plough, Sterling Drug, Warner-Lambert, General Foods, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, AT&T;, IT&T;, NYNEX and Sprint.

He also acquired one particularly hot property: the spring 1989 directory of Time Inc. He sold it shortly before Time’s takeover woes began but insists that the buyer had nothing to do with that.

Among Olsen’s most productive resources are the “alumni directories” kept by many companies, especially management consulting and accounting firms, which keep track of where their valued former managers have gone. Those books are especially rich in home and summer-home telephone numbers, he said.

Most of Olsen’s customers are executive recruiters stalking management and technical personnel for finders’ fees of up to a year’s salary. “They want to be able to talk to their candidate directly, either at home or on his direct office line, without explaining to a secretary who they are and what they want,” Olsen said. He added that he often will offer to sell directories to buyers at a lower price if they have some new directory to offer him in exchange.

Grubman said 90% of his clientele are stockbrokers seeking new sales prospects. “If someone is listed as management in a company phone book, they can probably afford to buy stock,” he said.

David Lord, managing editor of Executive Recruiter News, confirmed that corporate recruiters are avid collectors of in-house phone books. It is general practice, Lord said, for a headhunter, having lured an executive away from XYZ Inc. for a better berth at ABC Co., to ask the recruit, as a favor, to drop off a copy of his old XYZ phone book.

“We take a rather dim view of the practice,” Lord said. “It is a violation of the confidence of the firm. . . . Also, in a good executive search, original research is the preferred method. And you do that by sourcing. You develop names based on personal recommendations.”

Expressing Displeasure

Spokesmen for Woolworth’s, IBM and General Motors also are annoyed at the practice. Joseph Carroll, Woolworth’s vice president for public affairs, expressed displeasure that his company book was for sale. He said any employee caught selling a company directory to someone like Olsen would be reprimanded.

A GM spokesman said his company’s phone book bears a warning that outsiders are not to see it, and the book is to be destroyed when a new one is issued.

Even a copyright, Olsen said, wouldn’t protect the companies unless they sold the books themselves. Only then, he said, could they claim that his photocopies deprived them of profits.

“In the meantime,” Olsen said, “I’ve got a pretty good thing going here. Some day I’ll get the money to have all of this cross-indexed and computerized: Can you imagine what a data base I’ll have? Direct lines to millions of the most powerful people in the world.”