Kevin Tawil

I think that interestingly, you saw our leverage ratios decline.

from the initial transaction and up until the Merrimack transaction.

And we just didn't have a use for that.

So you think of what's the highest and best use of that, and you'll reinvest that in the operations to the extent that you really believe in the return on investment that you're going to get from that.

And we were.

We were investing as much as we could.

Number two would be acquisitions, and so there was nothing available to us.

And then number three would be returning capital to shareholders, ideally in a share or purchase secondarily in the form of a dividend.

And in those early years, we didn't really think about the latter too much.

Obviously, we did that small transaction, returning 10% of capital through a share or purchase.

But we would really come back to leverage mainly, at least in those first few years, at either an acquisition or in conjunction with an equity recap that happened to undertake.

And the first one from that was really 2001 when TA came onto the cap table.

We have seen Mercurial growth and we were excited by it, but at the same time, we took it all in stride.

Maybe we were a little overconfident because with the Merrimack transaction, things were a little more challenging.

We had now had two companies, Jim and I were stretched, the management team wasn't as strong as we would have liked it.

And so there was some element of, I think Jim and I just seeing the risk

here.

I was like, hold on, this is great.

But neither Jim or I had taken anything out at this point.

And we were both interested in some financial security.