Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay. Was Whitney looking for you to do the thing that you had done several times in your career before, which was just get the business to profitability? Or did they have a notion that you had an inkling that you could build a big, powerful brand here and actually build a tremendous growth business? By this time, I understood what they needed. I talked about a little bit of my book, I'd run three and I was a little bit smarter, fortunately. They had to liquify; there was no question about it. They were going to sell and the employees knew that I was just coming in there to sell this thing. They had a pool on how long I'd last, but I wrote on my board one of my favorite quotes from Benjamin Disraeli, “The secret to success is constancy of purpose. ” I wanted to create value. I want to build a brand. I decided when I walked in, I was going to play through Whitney. I was going to get them a good outcome, but I was going to stay and play through it. I thought we'd get another private equity player, we didn't. The Whitney partners, Peter Castleman and Paul Vigano, I'll never forget the meetings. They said this thing is kind of a mess. We didn't know what we bought. You have to pick a path and go. It might take you five years, but you got to do it. In Brooks' darkest hour, they wrote a check and recapitalized it. [...] cram down, but they wrote a check and that's when I came in. They were fantastic partners for Brooks, and we got them liquid. The pitch I made to our team (and it's what I believed) is that companies with issues get sold, companies with opportunity attract investors. I said, we're going to have to park cars in the parking lot. We're going to attract somebody. That's the mindset we had. We were going to sell the future, not just sell the current. If I'm remembering right, Whitney put in $7 million.…

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