Kevin Tawil

It's a long tenure for people across a breadth of roles.

This is where we benefited early on from having a tremendous board of advisors, directors who could help us think about these types of issues.

And while it is certainly important from a shareholder return perspective to shepherd equity very carefully,

Part of the ethos early on was you need to reward management team and have them aligned with the shareholder base.

And that meant distributing options as a key part of the management incentive plan.

And that was built in early on as part of our comp structure, certainly was for Jim and I. And in order to attract the very best people, like the Gerald Risks of the world, we

To pull him out of his current role at a much lower salary, we needed to use equity and the promise of that as a key factor in bringing him in and other important leaders of the organization.

It connected to being able to get great people, really.

Because when you're a small company, you're getting these really talented people to come work for a small company.

roadside assistance company in Houston, Texas, or a cell phone insurance company in Nashville, why would they do that?

Well, you've actually got a great story because you get to be part of this leadership team, as opposed to being a cog in a wheel in a large company.

You get to be part of a leadership team, you get to be in on the decision making, and we've got this great vision that we've laid out.

To the extent we work hard and reach those goals, you can not only be part of that, you're rewarded by it as well.

And we tried to push this as far down in the organization as we could.

And it had fits and starts over time, but we ended up pushing it all the way down to the manager level.

So those people who come in right after business school in particular get slugs of equity right away.

It was really a TA and Brett era thing.

We believed in it and certainly needed equity to hire the key senior managers.

But once Brett came on board around 2001, 2002 timeframe, I think we were much more rigorous in our thinking about how to drive that down further in the organization and get people involved.

at the VP, director, manager level, aligned toward these goals.