Kevin Tawil

And in the preceding three or four years, our focus was so much on just holding on, scaling, managing this business that not a lot of time and attention had been put on optimizing the balance sheet.

Because along the way, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have been doing some shareholder purchases.

That would have gotten people liquidity, and those transactions are highly accretive to remaining shareholders.

I think two reasons.

One, we're really focused on the core business, and it was growing really fast.

But two...

And nobody wanted to sell.

It's not like there was a desire of shareholders in this time frame to sell because everybody saw what was going on.

So they were excited to be part of it.

And then even more so when we closed the lock line transaction earlier that year in 2006.

And then so we fast forward, we get through that.

Still, nobody wants to sell shares, but they recognize that we've got plenty of capacity on the balance sheet here to lever up.

get some returns back to shareholders.

And that's when we did a pretty big dividend.

I think it was a little over a third of our enterprise value at the time and basically ended up dividend 750 million out to our shareholders.

There were two things happening.

There were two reasons we ended up doing the transaction.

The market was incredibly frothy.

I mean, this is leading up to the financial crisis.

Our timing couldn't have been better, honestly.