Daniel R. Butler, former president and CEO of Corporation Service Company® (CSC), was inducted into the Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame Thursday night.
Established in 1990 by Junior Achievement of Delaware, the Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame recognizes business leaders.
Butler led CSC from 1975 to 1998. CSC acquired six companies during Butler’s tenure, including Prentice Hall Legal & Financial Services, which alone tripled the company’s size. Butler also helped drive CSC to pioneer the adoption of the Internet as a business and legal services platform through its www.incspot.com (now www.cscglobal.com) web portal.
CSC was founded in 1899 by two Delaware attorneys, but as recently as the 1970s remained a small concern focused on Delaware corporate formations and statutory representation. When Butler was hired in 1975, he quickly set in motion the company’s transformation into an industry leader for a much wider variety of services.
When Butler came on as CEO, CSC had roughly a dozen employees; today it has more than 1,800 employees at offices and operations centers throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe, as well as in South Africa and Australia.
CSC now has a range of global capabilities, from due diligence services for some of the nation’s largest lenders to subsidiary management services for global companies and domain name management and Internet monitoring for many of the world’s most valuable brands.
The Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame honors both contemporary business leaders and historic business leaders whose contributions impacted the state and the region in a positive way. It commands the main entrance at Junior Achievement of Delaware’s modern facilities at 522 South Walnut Street in Wilmington. Past laureates include 19th century textile industrialist Joseph Bancroft, W.L. Gore and Associates founders Wilbert and Genevieve Gore, MBNA’s Charles Cawley, and more than 50 others. Former ING Direct executives Arkadi Kuhlmann and Jim Kelly were inducted in 2012.
“In the course of my daily work, I am privileged to associate with many of the area’s most thoughtful business leaders,” said Junior Achievement of Delaware President Rob Eppes, “and Dan Butler stands out as the kind of personable executive that any of us would want to work with or aspire to emulate.”
Butler’s induction to the Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame, said CSC CEO Rod Ward, “serves as a worthy capstone to a remarkable career.”
Also honored as the historical inductee was Peter Minuit, who led a commercial expedition to the site of present-day Wilmington.
