CM: When it comes to SBI, the one question that comes to mind is this: How did you get investors to put capital into a space when no one else could or would?

Stringham: There's no question that there were people retreating aggressively from the e-services space. … Anybody that really had a core business, a historical business that was not in the e-services space, had to exit purely from the pressure of the public markets. Their multiples would get killed if they didn't exit. That really left very few strategic buyers to purchase these assets.

The other potential source of buyers was financial buyers. And all of the financial buyers, a lot of private-equity firms, were interested, and we'd see

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them in many of these deals. However, their challenge was that they didn't have a platform. They didn't have a business that they could attach these acquisitions to. So it's that story of catching the falling knife. Are you getting something at the bottom or are you not? And we generally found that all those players, while they might have been in the mix at some moment and the sellers were obviously trying to present them as good alternatives, none of them materialized.

CM: Which was good news for SBI …

Stringham: Well, what that all meant, for our investors, was that we were buying these assets at incredibly low values, values that were, you know, a few dollars above liquidation value. So we'd look at the AR and we kind of understood what the liquidation values were, and we were buying assets at that level. So for an investor who had a platform who could see those kinds of values, I think it was easy for them to make the decision to do it. I mean, they had some level of confidence in the experience we'd had with them prior to the collapse. And so that certainly was a factor on their investment. (Read More)

Body Doubles: A Career for Givers as Well as Takers
By Shawna Rice

Roger Muller of Booz Allen & Mariya Redden (one of the first Stay-Focused participants) in the Grand Caymans

Winston Churchill once said, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” Here are six people who make a life by tapping the knowledge and resources within consulting's ever-widening reach.

When a client engagement required Oliver Bron of Bain & Company to spend an extended period of time in London, the naturally curious consultant found himself spending personal time somewhere other than in the English city's famous museums. During evenings and weekends, Bron went about learning all he could about London's missing-child hotline, and the practices and services behind the city's approach to finding missing children.
(Read More)

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