Management Shake-Up at Local Insight Media

Local Insight Media President and CEO Scott Pomeroy has resigned, effective Friday. Pomeroy was replaced as interim CEO by Scott Brubaker, a director at the turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal, and since October 2010, LIM’s chief restructuring officer. This move comes just a few months after LIM filed for Chapter 11 in an effort to restructure its debt to ensure its long-term viability.

BIA/Kelsey has also learned that Executive Vice President Kathy Geiger-Schwab has also resigned. Executive Chairman Marilyn Neal has stepped in as acting chief operating officer, and Linda Martin has returned to LIM to serve as “interim senior sales advisor.” Richard Jenkins, also a director with Alvarez & Marsal, has been named acting CFO.

All this suggests a feeling among LIM’s investors that a new team was needed to right the ship so that it can operate effectively once it emerges from bankruptcy. Or, in another possible scenario, the company has inserted a new team to prepare the company for sale. LIM is essentially a collection of acquisitions that have been pieced together, and doing so always presents a serious operational challenge. LIM had benefited from a deliberate avoidance of exposure to major metro markets, and from picking isolated market, which are less vulnerable to competition.

The company’s main obstacle, however, is its debt, which stood at about $580 million before the bankruptcy filing. LIM had 2009 revenues of $578 million.

Pomeroy had only recently accepted a position on the board of Yellow Pages Group New Zealand, a firm going through its own debt-related struggles.

Alvarez & Marsal is familiar with the Yellow Pages industry. The firm was brought in by investors in European Directories, and one of its directors, Peter Briggs, was put in place last year as EDSA’s CEO, replacing Cornel Riklin, who had been running EDSA since 2006.