Kevin Tawil

We were interviewing private equity firms.

So we would go out and see if we'd even let them into the process.

It was certainly a heady time.

We were walking into conference rooms and the first thing that some of these partners would say to us, just name your price.

I'll pay whatever.

And certainly that felt great, felt validated.

The process ended with us picking one party to negotiate with, one winner, if you will, highest price.

We wanted to negotiate some of the terms.

Then once we finished negotiating the terms with that private equity firm, we told them, look, you've got lead and we're going to give you this much allegation, but I'm going to take the same deal and give it to the other two finalists and give them the option to join the party.

And here's why.

We don't want one private equity firm controlling our direction.

It was important to us that we had a group of people around the table who were ultimately looking out for the best interest of the company long-term and not necessarily one particular fund.

So we ended up negotiating originally with Madison Dearborn, but we brought Welsh Carson and Providence Equity into the deal.

All the time, interestingly, Herb was in the background saying, this is a really frothy market.

I would encourage you to work as fast as you can.

Get through this process.

And his words couldn't have been more prescient because our debt deal that went along with the equity was the second to last deal in early July 2007 that closed.

And then I think one deal the next day closed, debt deal.

And then the window shut for...

quarters and quarters.