"Clear Thinkers"

Shortly after we founded New World Merchant Partners, Andrew, Joe, and I had to devote a substantial amount of time discussing the types of transactions on which we wanted to focus. We are all very different.

· Andrew could sell snow to an eskimo and can tell you in short order whether a particular transaction is capable of completion;

· Joe wants to build businesses as a principal – a long-term, capital intensive process that builds substantial equity if it is successful and correct choices are made and extremely costly and time-consuming if it is not successful or if we choose incorrectly; and

· I am an executor – my expertise is to review companies, determine proper transaction structure and remedial steps, determine proper participants in the transaction, and take all steps necessary to bring the transaction to closure.

I felt that each of these activities needed to be meshed together to give us short-, medium-, and long-term projects which would maximize our own opportunities for success. As you can imagine, there were numerous disagreements, all very good natured, regarding focus, timing, risk, etc.

We all found that our ability to create order out of our collective chaos was maximized with what my friend and client Bill Brock has termed “Clear Thinkers”. A “Clear Thinker” is a vodka martini, shaken, no vermouth, with either a couple of olives or a twist. After a few “Clear Thinkers”, we found that we all shared a pretty consistent vision of our initial operations with relatively few details subject to further discussion. We also found that the Whiskey Blue Lounge at the W Hotel at 49^th and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan is a particularly good venue for clear thinking.

The martini has been described as “the King of Cocktails”. Bernard DeVoto remarked “[The martini] . . . is the supreme American gift to world culture”, and Nikita Kruschev called the martini “ . . . America’s lethal weapon”.

For New World Merchant Partners and its principals, Andrew Glashow, Joe Berkovitz, and me (Bob Brown), the martini gave us our chance to focus, cut through the clutter with “clear thinking”, and determine a common platform upon which we would build New World Merchant Partners.