Kevin Tawil

Do you want liquidity or not at this price?

Are you a buyer, are you a seller, are you a holder?

versus a dividend, which is you're force-feeding somebody money that they may or may not want.

Sure, intuitively, it's like, oh, yes, give me a dividend.

That sounds great.

But as the recipient of that, what do I do with that?

Can I redeploy that in the same place?

Do I want to redeploy that?

That was our first introduction to balance sheet management, if you will, from Irv.

It was a good lesson.

The importance and the impact, although I'm not sure we fully appreciated it at the time, of a share of purchase over at Eminent.

I think it was an important consideration and driver of returns, obviously.

And when we did the original road rescue deal, I'd say we used leveraged to the maximum extent possible.

So we went out and got a sufficient amount of as much senior debt as we could.

And in fact, the investor capital that we raised, we structured that partially as debt and partially as equity in order to drive the highest returns to shareholders.

You just look over the next couple of years as we came to the Merrimack deal, of course, using leverage, the lowest cost of capital out there.

We were going to use that at every turn, whether it's cash on the balance sheet or cash that we could generate from raising debt.

We always had that mindset from the start.

start of responsibly using the lowest cost of capital that's available to us.

And debt was at times it was more available than less, but we had that as part of our ethos.