James Blair first entered a newsroom as an advertising manager for a small paper in Clinton, N.C., in the early 1970s, a time when computers were as fresh as his entrepreneurial spirit.
Nearly 30 years later, Blair has become a leader in the credit bureau industry and an innovator in the computerized tracking of credit histories, making certain that utility companies and other niche markets are safe from bad creditors.
“All the products that we have probably basically didnt exist five years ago,”Blair said.
A 1969 graduate of the West Virginia University P.I. Reed School of Journalism, Blair will come back to the school Oct. 22-24 to train nine people from area news media in the selling skills and entrepreneurial drive that helped him succeed. Blair calls the program”an intense boot camp,”where sales professionals will learn the basics and more advanced selling techniques. He spent this week in southern West Virginia teaching the program to Charleston Gazette employees.
Modest about his rise in the credit bureau industry, he says he never would have made it without a little luck and his ability to sell his products and to think outside the box.
“I think that I was just afforded a lot of opportunity,”he said.”Ive always been very entrepreneurial. When I look at something, I dont see it the same way as other people.”
In December 1970, Blair, who grew up near Lonaconing, Md., left the University. He entered the service and the military assigned him to the JFK Center for Military Assistance, a special operations division like those now working in Afghanistan.
Blair worked on campaigns to help beef up the American military image as the U.S. government removed troops from Vietnam. He left the military in April 1973 and went to his first newspaper job in North Carolina, working for the Sampson North Carolina Independent.
“That was a joyous time for me. Not only was I manager, I was the only advertising employee. I learned an awful lot about newspapers,”he said.
He returned to West Virginia two years later to work at the Republican Delta in Buckhannon. The WVU graduate worked his way from advertising manager to general manager.
He left West Virginia again in 1977 to work in West Lafayette, Ind., running the Perdue University Exponent, a student newspaper with a 44,000 daily circulation, 11 full-time employees and 350 student journalists.
In 1979 Blair became the publisher of the Daily Independent in Kannapolis, N.C., a paper owned by Roy Park of the Park Newspapers Co. As a member of the Kannapolis Chamber of Commerce, Blair was assigned to a group whose aim was to turn around an ailing credit bureau by computerizing it. Within a year the company went from being unable to meet its payroll to making $168,000. Blair was hooked.
In 1982, while he was still working for the newspaper, Blair and his wife, Marsha, purchased their first credit bureau from the Atlanta-based CBI , now Equifax, the largest credit reporting entity in the world.
By 1983 the couple had purchased a second credit bureau in Johnson City, Tenn., and in 1986 purchased one in Greenville, N.C. Blair quit the newspaper industry and went head-first and full-time into the industry.
He got into the credit bureau industry just as it was moving from manual to automated. He was at the forefront of taking it from cards in cabinets to computers. Credit bureaus keep track of monthly payments and whether customers keep up with those payments to help creditors estimate credit risk.
“This was in the early stages of creating databases on a national basis. You were able to put hundreds of thousands of records on the computer. Then CBI linked the files together so they had files on 300 million people, more adults than there are in the entire U.S.,”he said.
Three major national companies dominate the business, Equifax, Trans Union and Experian. In 1997, Blair sold his credit bureaus to Equifax and briefly retired.
As part of the sale, Blair carved out several niche markets that he thought the credit bureaus didnt do a good job of servicing. Those markets are served under the umbrella of Online Information Services, a multiple service company providing collection agency service, rental exchange, mortgage reporting and utility exchange service.
The company primarily serves companies in the southeastern United States. Online Information is based out of Greenville, N.C., and serves”niche markets that arent served by the big three credit bureaus,”Blair said.
“The reason we were able to do that was that our service is provided over the Internet, so any company with an Internet connection can use our service,”he said.