Up From Ground Zero
| FEATURES | Michael Learmonth |
© Copyright 2002 MBAJungle.com All Rights Reserved.
Rebuilding After 9/11: Up from Ground Zero
Last fall’s attack on the World Trade Center nearly destroyed Euro Brokers. Sixty-one employees in the midsize brokerage died. Its headquarters was gone. What remained were a stalwart CEO and a tight team of gutsy employees who fought through their anguish and fear and refused to be beaten. The story of an amazing comeback.
September 11 was Ed Keslo’s second day on the job. At age 35, the affable New Yorker had worked on trading desks for 13 years. He’d just left a position at a competing brokerage to rejoin his old friends Ed Mardovich, James Formisano, and Peter Ortale brokering bonds at Euro Brokers, an outfit on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. The firm was in the midst of one of its best and busiest years. That morning, Keslo could barely keep up with all the flashing phone lines, jumping bond prices, and speedy conversations with colleagues. Revenue for the first nine months of 2001 was up 14 percent from the previous year, and stock in Maxcor Financial Group, Euro Brokers’ parent company, had hit a 52-week high on August 21.
Just before 9 A.M., Keslo saw debris from the attack on the north tower fly past his window. He turned and looked across the trading floor toward colleagues who had a better view of the building. “From their faces you knew it was something serious,” Keslo says. He and his pal Formisano grabbed each other and, along with a third broker, started walking toward the elevator. “I knew I wanted to get out of there,” he says. The three didn’t stop walking until they reached Keslo’s childhood home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, about a mile away. Keslo’s two other friends at the firm, Mardovich and Ortale, were among 61 employees killed in the attack. Eleven of the 21 people who worked with Keslo on the repurchase-agreement desk, affectionately known as the repo desk, didn’t make it.
Euro Brokers also lost its headquarters, of course, the vital center of its network of seven offices across the globe. Despite the incomprehensible horror of the moment, a practical business question soon emerged for the remaining employees: Could the firm survive? It was impossible to know for sure, but it was clear that recovery would have to happen quickly, within a few months, perhaps, if it was to happen at all. Every day the company’s brokers weren’t working the phones meant a dwindling of the firm’s hard-earned market share. Sure, insurance would probably cover Euro Brokers’ rebuilding costs, but that hardly guaranteed the firm would live on. Survival would require, more than anything else, the grit of 248 deeply traumatized employees, many of whom, including Keslo, were vowing never to work in Manhattan again.Euro Brokers CEO Gilbert Scharf watched the disaster unfold on TV in the company’s London office. “My first thought and concern was for our people, period,” recalls Scharf, 53, a circumspect man with a 20 percent stake in the company. “I said, ‘Do we have a New York employee list with phone numbers?’ We did, thank God.”
Scharf’s concern for his employees was particularly keen. Euro Brokers’ employees had been more than just co-workers; they were part of a tight-knit family. Many had worked side by side on trading desks for at least a decade. “We spend an inordinate amount of time together,” says COO Keith Reihl. “The nature of the business is such that we’re here from 7:30 A.M. until 5 P.M., and then we entertain three nights a week. We get very close. You go to people’s christenings and weddings.”
Scharf didn’t sleep for 36 hours after the attack. The burden he felt so acutely boiled down to this: The 248 surviving New York employees, the Maxcor shareholders, Euro Brokers’ clients, and the families of the victims were going to need the kind of support that only a profitable company can provide. “The thought of closing down never crossed my mind,” says the CEO, who knew there were at least a few things he could count on to help the company rebuild.
Following the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which closed down both towers for more than a month, Euro Brokers had learned important lessons. It started making daily backups of its electronic records to an off-site location in New Jersey-a move that would pay enormous dividends after September 11-and began upgrading its old computer technology with generic equipment that could be more easily replaced. And in a decision that would later prove crucial to the rebuilding effort, Euro Brokers took out additional business-interruption insurance. No one, of course, had foreseen an interruption like this.
The flow of electronic data is the lifeblood of a brokerage, so the rebuilding had to start with senior VP of technology Walter Danielsson and his staff, most of whom, fortunately, survived. On September 12, Danielsson picked up the firm’s backup tapes in New Jersey and ordered 150 computers. “The first thing you have to do is set priorities, otherwise it’s an overwhelming task,” he says. “You pick the most horrible areas and deal with them first.” Working from home and from a small Euro Brokers office in Parsippany, New Jersey, his team needed only four days to get new hardware up and running. But with lower Manhattan’s communications infrastructure mangled, it would take months to restore the direct lines into banks and clearinghouses-all necessary steps for Euro Brokers to resume business full bore.
The search for office space also began almost immediately. Scharf received an outpouring of offers from other brokerages and friendly clients who could accommodate a dozen employees here, a dozen there-Bloomberg, for example, could provide space for 50. As tempting and gracious as the offers were, Scharf turned them all down. Euro Brokers didn’t have a lot of time to find a new home, but Scharf felt it was essential that the company find a single space big enough to accommodate everyone. “When families grieve, they get together, and that’s how they gain strength,” he says. “So we needed to keep the family in one location to give us the strength to rebuild.”
On September 13, Scharf got his wish. One of Euro Brokers’ clearing banks, Prudential Securities, called to offer a large trading area on the 16th floor of One New York Plaza, a skyscraper on the southern tip of Manhattan. Prudential had downsized, and the space was vacant. It seemed perfect. Everything was falling into place, or so Scharf thought.
On the Sunday morning after the attack, Euro Brokers’ desk managers slogged through the gray ash on the streets and braved the thick, smoky air to have a look at their new building. From the 16th floor they had spectacular views of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island. But these vistas were no longer selling points to the survivors of September 11. “The reaction was, ‘My guys won’t come,’ ” Scharf says. “The desk managers said, ‘I got guys who don’t want to come to the city.’ ‘My guys aren’t coming downtown.’ ‘My guys won’t go above the second floor.’ I said, ‘Look, I understand all of those reactions.’ We had a discussion, a good give-and-take.” But Scharf had already made up his mind. In a decision that foreshadowed the gut-it-out attitude almost everyone at Euro Brokers would soon adopt, the CEO decided that this was going to be the new office. Besides, employees couldn’t see the World Trade Center site from there.
Scharf had called for a companywide meeting to be held the following day at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue, five miles north of Ground Zero. Formisano picked Keslo up at his home in Brooklyn so they could drive together to the meeting. They had plenty to talk about. “A lot of people called me before the meeting and said, ‘You’ve got to pick up the ball now and lead the repo desk. It’s your ball,’ ” recalls Keslo, who’s known as Kez at the office. The repo desk, one of Euro Brokers’ most successful, was pivotal to the company’s survival. It needed a strong leader, and among the survivors Keslo was most qualified to take charge. But he didn’t want the job. “I told my wife that the way I felt, I didn’t even want to return to work at all. I just didn’t have it in me.”
Many employees arrived at the meeting with a spouse in tow. There were hugs and tears and meetings with grief counselors, but there was also business to take care of. Scharf told his staff that the office would open the following day, one week after the disaster, but that no one had to show up who wasn’t ready. “Having lost so many of their best friends, we weren’t certain if people would have the ability to reactivate, to get back into business,” says Reihl. No one had been further from ready than Keslo. But seeing his colleagues and their families at the meeting changed him. Scharf was right-bringing everyone together could be a source of strength. Keslo’s colleagues were counting on him to step up, and knowing that bolstered his spirit. “There were a lot of emotions running high. Everybody broke down and sort of looked to me,” he says. “They said, ‘Listen, it’s got to be you. You’re the only one who can do it.’ Even though I had no desire to do it, I had no choice.”
Keslo was among about 120 employees who put on a brave face and arrived for work the next day. But everyone was on edge emotionally, ready to snap or collapse over the smallest misunderstandings. Scharf, for instance, wasn’t even sure if Keslo was going to come back again. When the CEO questioned him about it, Keslo misread it as a challenge to his abilities and lost his temper. “I just went at him,” he says.
A top priority for brokers was convincing clients that Euro Brokers was going to stay in business and continue to take good care of them. The last thing the company needed was for clients to flee to another brokerage. There were only 40 phone lines split between 25 trading desks-enough to begin making contact with clients, but far short of the 1,200 lines Euro Brokers had relied upon in the World Trade Center.
Keslo started by dividing accounts among the surviving brokers. Each reassuring call to a client could be a little trauma in itself. Like the one to Fleet Bank, which had been covered by Denis McHugh, a hard-working broker who had not survived. “I know Denis used to cover you,” Keslo recalls saying to a Fleet Bank rep. “I’ve asked another broker, Kerry, to cover you because he’s experienced in the industry. He’ll be able to give you good coverage. My name is Ed. If you have any problems, please feel free to call me. We’re trying to rebuild this thing, and we’re going to need your help in every way.” The clients understood. Euro Brokers didn’t lose a single one.
After reestablishing contact with clients, Keslo had to face another daunting task-hiring people to replace those who had died. Luckily, downsizing in the financial services industry meant that there was no shortage of applicants. But how would new employees adjust to working at a firm that had gone through such devastation? How would the survivors feel about the folks who were replacing their lost friends? “You had a lot of fragile people here,” Keslo explains. “Some people whom I might have been able to hire I didn’t pursue, because their personalities wouldn’t have fit in with the people I had.”
A month and a half after his return, Keslo had hired three new brokers, giving the repo desk a big boost. Formisano says that Keslo’s charm had something to do with it. “A lot of people are here because Eddie Kez was involved,” he says. “On this desk, there has to be a big wheel that all the little wheels revolve around.”
By early October, all but a few of the surviving employees were back at work. Many had declared they would never return, but for a variety of reasons-the desire to see the firm survive chief among them-they had a change of heart. On October 22, with a diminished but dedicated staff, Euro Brokers issued a press release announcing that it had reestablished all of its key New York operations. The mood inside the office was upbeat. The release acknowledged to Wall Street that the attack “severely impacted New York revenues for September,” but much of the immediate damage to the company was borne by Euro Brokers’ property and business-interruption insurance, which covered the loss of equipment and income. The company had already received $5 million from Kemper Insurance Companies.
In the six months prior to the attacks, Euro Brokers had averaged $8 million per month in revenues. One month later, despite its temporary office space, a jury-rigged infrastructure, and a chronic shortage of phone lines and employees, Euro Brokers was experiencing an unlikely commercial rebirth. The company had managed to recover 81 percent of its average revenue before September 11. November revenue came in at 87 percent of normal. Maxcor stock hit another 52-week high at $6.51 a share on February 13. Says General Counsel Roger Schwed, “We are surviving, and currently, we are doing remarkably well.”
Euro Brokers’ recovery has also been fueled by adrenaline. The staff rallied, putting in the long hours necessary to piece things back together. Employees regained their footing quickly-so quickly that early on, the company cut back on grief counseling. Initially, counselors had been on duty in the office every day. Soon they were reduced to twice a week, and in November, the firm moved them out of the office altogether. “You have to assist your employees in coping with their problems, but the workplace is not the best place for it,” Schwed says.
This doesn’t mean the trauma is over for the staff. Far from it. While some employees dealt with the horror immediately, others filed it away to be uncovered at some future time. Nearly everyone felt some degree of survivor’s guilt. In group sessions, employees expressed regret that they hadn’t done more to help others escape. Some lamented being late to work that day or not coming in at all. Joseph Flounders, a money markets broker, had originally planned to attend a golf tournament but came in anyway to do some work. He didn’t survive. Three months later his grief-stricken wife took her own life. “The firm can’t afford to take its eye off the psychic-recovery ball,” says Schwed.
Nothing will ever be the same for Euro Brokers, but each passing day brings an incremental improvement. “Normal? I can’t hope for that,” Keslo said one January morning on the repo desk. “I can only hope that things are going to be okay.” The return of locker-room banter on the floor, never a bastion of clean language, is as good a sign as any that things are already okay, in no small part thanks to Keslo. The arrival of the new year was a turning point. “For the first time we started joking about people,” Keslo says. “You know, laughing and telling stories. And everyone got involved.”
There are plenty of other signs of recovery. The company has started a relief fund to provide financial assistance to the families of employees and rescue workers killed in the attack. The firm also expects to sign a lease on a permanent space. Forty more employees have been hired, the stock price remains strong, and Keslo is thinking about expanding into other products. “The repo desk is only going to grow,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong; we have our moments. We have a lot of emotional baggage we share among ourselves. There are a lot of sleepless nights. But we’re there for each other, and that’s the way it’s going to be as long as I’m here.” And, as far as anyone can tell, that will be for quite some time.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2002 issue of MBA Jungle.
© Copyright 2002 MBAJungle.com All Rights Reserved.
Rebuilding After 9/11: Up from Ground Zero
Last fall’s attack on the World Trade Center nearly destroyed Euro Brokers. Sixty-one employees in the midsize brokerage died. Its headquarters was gone. What remained were a stalwart CEO and a tight team of gutsy employees who fought through their anguish and fear and refused to be beaten. The story of an amazing comeback.
September 11 was Ed Keslo’s second day on the job. At age 35, the affable New Yorker had worked on trading desks for 13 years. He’d just left a position at a competing brokerage to rejoin his old friends Ed Mardovich, James Formisano, and Peter Ortale brokering bonds at Euro Brokers, an outfit on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. The firm was in the midst of one of its best and busiest years. That morning, Keslo could barely keep up with all the flashing phone lines, jumping bond prices, and speedy conversations with colleagues. Revenue for the first nine months of 2001 was up 14 percent from the previous year, and stock in Maxcor Financial Group, Euro Brokers’ parent company, had hit a 52-week high on August 21.
Just before 9 A.M., Keslo saw debris from the attack on the north tower fly past his window. He turned and looked across the trading floor toward colleagues who had a better view of the building. “From their faces you knew it was something serious,” Keslo says. He and his pal Formisano grabbed each other and, along with a third broker, started walking toward the elevator. “I knew I wanted to get out of there,” he says. The three didn’t stop walking until they reached Keslo’s childhood home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, about a mile away. Keslo’s two other friends at the firm, Mardovich and Ortale, were among 61 employees killed in the attack. Eleven of the 21 people who worked with Keslo on the repurchase-agreement desk, affectionately known as the repo desk, didn’t make it.
Euro Brokers also lost its headquarters, of course, the vital center of its network of seven offices across the globe. Despite the incomprehensible horror of the moment, a practical business question soon emerged for the remaining employees: Could the firm survive? It was impossible to know for sure, but it was clear that recovery would have to happen quickly, within a few months, perhaps, if it was to happen at all. Every day the company’s brokers weren’t working the phones meant a dwindling of the firm’s hard-earned market share. Sure, insurance would probably cover Euro Brokers’ rebuilding costs, but that hardly guaranteed the firm would live on. Survival would require, more than anything else, the grit of 248 deeply traumatized employees, many of whom, including Keslo, were vowing never to work in Manhattan again.Euro Brokers CEO Gilbert Scharf watched the disaster unfold on TV in the company’s London office. “My first thought and concern was for our people, period,” recalls Scharf, 53, a circumspect man with a 20 percent stake in the company. “I said, ‘Do we have a New York employee list with phone numbers?’ We did, thank God.”
Scharf’s concern for his employees was particularly keen. Euro Brokers’ employees had been more than just co-workers; they were part of a tight-knit family. Many had worked side by side on trading desks for at least a decade. “We spend an inordinate amount of time together,” says COO Keith Reihl. “The nature of the business is such that we’re here from 7:30 A.M. until 5 P.M., and then we entertain three nights a week. We get very close. You go to people’s christenings and weddings.”
Scharf didn’t sleep for 36 hours after the attack. The burden he felt so acutely boiled down to this: The 248 surviving New York employees, the Maxcor shareholders, Euro Brokers’ clients, and the families of the victims were going to need the kind of support that only a profitable company can provide. “The thought of closing down never crossed my mind,” says the CEO, who knew there were at least a few things he could count on to help the company rebuild.
Following the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which closed down both towers for more than a month, Euro Brokers had learned important lessons. It started making daily backups of its electronic records to an off-site location in New Jersey-a move that would pay enormous dividends after September 11-and began upgrading its old computer technology with generic equipment that could be more easily replaced. And in a decision that would later prove crucial to the rebuilding effort, Euro Brokers took out additional business-interruption insurance. No one, of course, had foreseen an interruption like this.
The flow of electronic data is the lifeblood of a brokerage, so the rebuilding had to start with senior VP of technology Walter Danielsson and his staff, most of whom, fortunately, survived. On September 12, Danielsson picked up the firm’s backup tapes in New Jersey and ordered 150 computers. “The first thing you have to do is set priorities, otherwise it’s an overwhelming task,” he says. “You pick the most horrible areas and deal with them first.” Working from home and from a small Euro Brokers office in Parsippany, New Jersey, his team needed only four days to get new hardware up and running. But with lower Manhattan’s communications infrastructure mangled, it would take months to restore the direct lines into banks and clearinghouses-all necessary steps for Euro Brokers to resume business full bore.
The search for office space also began almost immediately. Scharf received an outpouring of offers from other brokerages and friendly clients who could accommodate a dozen employees here, a dozen there-Bloomberg, for example, could provide space for 50. As tempting and gracious as the offers were, Scharf turned them all down. Euro Brokers didn’t have a lot of time to find a new home, but Scharf felt it was essential that the company find a single space big enough to accommodate everyone. “When families grieve, they get together, and that’s how they gain strength,” he says. “So we needed to keep the family in one location to give us the strength to rebuild.”
On September 13, Scharf got his wish. One of Euro Brokers’ clearing banks, Prudential Securities, called to offer a large trading area on the 16th floor of One New York Plaza, a skyscraper on the southern tip of Manhattan. Prudential had downsized, and the space was vacant. It seemed perfect. Everything was falling into place, or so Scharf thought.
On the Sunday morning after the attack, Euro Brokers’ desk managers slogged through the gray ash on the streets and braved the thick, smoky air to have a look at their new building. From the 16th floor they had spectacular views of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island. But these vistas were no longer selling points to the survivors of September 11. “The reaction was, ‘My guys won’t come,’ ” Scharf says. “The desk managers said, ‘I got guys who don’t want to come to the city.’ ‘My guys aren’t coming downtown.’ ‘My guys won’t go above the second floor.’ I said, ‘Look, I understand all of those reactions.’ We had a discussion, a good give-and-take.” But Scharf had already made up his mind. In a decision that foreshadowed the gut-it-out attitude almost everyone at Euro Brokers would soon adopt, the CEO decided that this was going to be the new office. Besides, employees couldn’t see the World Trade Center site from there.
Scharf had called for a companywide meeting to be held the following day at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue, five miles north of Ground Zero. Formisano picked Keslo up at his home in Brooklyn so they could drive together to the meeting. They had plenty to talk about. “A lot of people called me before the meeting and said, ‘You’ve got to pick up the ball now and lead the repo desk. It’s your ball,’ ” recalls Keslo, who’s known as Kez at the office. The repo desk, one of Euro Brokers’ most successful, was pivotal to the company’s survival. It needed a strong leader, and among the survivors Keslo was most qualified to take charge. But he didn’t want the job. “I told my wife that the way I felt, I didn’t even want to return to work at all. I just didn’t have it in me.”
Many employees arrived at the meeting with a spouse in tow. There were hugs and tears and meetings with grief counselors, but there was also business to take care of. Scharf told his staff that the office would open the following day, one week after the disaster, but that no one had to show up who wasn’t ready. “Having lost so many of their best friends, we weren’t certain if people would have the ability to reactivate, to get back into business,” says Reihl. No one had been further from ready than Keslo. But seeing his colleagues and their families at the meeting changed him. Scharf was right-bringing everyone together could be a source of strength. Keslo’s colleagues were counting on him to step up, and knowing that bolstered his spirit. “There were a lot of emotions running high. Everybody broke down and sort of looked to me,” he says. “They said, ‘Listen, it’s got to be you. You’re the only one who can do it.’ Even though I had no desire to do it, I had no choice.”
Keslo was among about 120 employees who put on a brave face and arrived for work the next day. But everyone was on edge emotionally, ready to snap or collapse over the smallest misunderstandings. Scharf, for instance, wasn’t even sure if Keslo was going to come back again. When the CEO questioned him about it, Keslo misread it as a challenge to his abilities and lost his temper. “I just went at him,” he says.
A top priority for brokers was convincing clients that Euro Brokers was going to stay in business and continue to take good care of them. The last thing the company needed was for clients to flee to another brokerage. There were only 40 phone lines split between 25 trading desks-enough to begin making contact with clients, but far short of the 1,200 lines Euro Brokers had relied upon in the World Trade Center.
Keslo started by dividing accounts among the surviving brokers. Each reassuring call to a client could be a little trauma in itself. Like the one to Fleet Bank, which had been covered by Denis McHugh, a hard-working broker who had not survived. “I know Denis used to cover you,” Keslo recalls saying to a Fleet Bank rep. “I’ve asked another broker, Kerry, to cover you because he’s experienced in the industry. He’ll be able to give you good coverage. My name is Ed. If you have any problems, please feel free to call me. We’re trying to rebuild this thing, and we’re going to need your help in every way.” The clients understood. Euro Brokers didn’t lose a single one.
After reestablishing contact with clients, Keslo had to face another daunting task-hiring people to replace those who had died. Luckily, downsizing in the financial services industry meant that there was no shortage of applicants. But how would new employees adjust to working at a firm that had gone through such devastation? How would the survivors feel about the folks who were replacing their lost friends? “You had a lot of fragile people here,” Keslo explains. “Some people whom I might have been able to hire I didn’t pursue, because their personalities wouldn’t have fit in with the people I had.”
A month and a half after his return, Keslo had hired three new brokers, giving the repo desk a big boost. Formisano says that Keslo’s charm had something to do with it. “A lot of people are here because Eddie Kez was involved,” he says. “On this desk, there has to be a big wheel that all the little wheels revolve around.”
By early October, all but a few of the surviving employees were back at work. Many had declared they would never return, but for a variety of reasons-the desire to see the firm survive chief among them-they had a change of heart. On October 22, with a diminished but dedicated staff, Euro Brokers issued a press release announcing that it had reestablished all of its key New York operations. The mood inside the office was upbeat. The release acknowledged to Wall Street that the attack “severely impacted New York revenues for September,” but much of the immediate damage to the company was borne by Euro Brokers’ property and business-interruption insurance, which covered the loss of equipment and income. The company had already received $5 million from Kemper Insurance Companies.
In the six months prior to the attacks, Euro Brokers had averaged $8 million per month in revenues. One month later, despite its temporary office space, a jury-rigged infrastructure, and a chronic shortage of phone lines and employees, Euro Brokers was experiencing an unlikely commercial rebirth. The company had managed to recover 81 percent of its average revenue before September 11. November revenue came in at 87 percent of normal. Maxcor stock hit another 52-week high at $6.51 a share on February 13. Says General Counsel Roger Schwed, “We are surviving, and currently, we are doing remarkably well.”
Euro Brokers’ recovery has also been fueled by adrenaline. The staff rallied, putting in the long hours necessary to piece things back together. Employees regained their footing quickly-so quickly that early on, the company cut back on grief counseling. Initially, counselors had been on duty in the office every day. Soon they were reduced to twice a week, and in November, the firm moved them out of the office altogether. “You have to assist your employees in coping with their problems, but the workplace is not the best place for it,” Schwed says.
This doesn’t mean the trauma is over for the staff. Far from it. While some employees dealt with the horror immediately, others filed it away to be uncovered at some future time. Nearly everyone felt some degree of survivor’s guilt. In group sessions, employees expressed regret that they hadn’t done more to help others escape. Some lamented being late to work that day or not coming in at all. Joseph Flounders, a money markets broker, had originally planned to attend a golf tournament but came in anyway to do some work. He didn’t survive. Three months later his grief-stricken wife took her own life. “The firm can’t afford to take its eye off the psychic-recovery ball,” says Schwed.
Nothing will ever be the same for Euro Brokers, but each passing day brings an incremental improvement. “Normal? I can’t hope for that,” Keslo said one January morning on the repo desk. “I can only hope that things are going to be okay.” The return of locker-room banter on the floor, never a bastion of clean language, is as good a sign as any that things are already okay, in no small part thanks to Keslo. The arrival of the new year was a turning point. “For the first time we started joking about people,” Keslo says. “You know, laughing and telling stories. And everyone got involved.”
There are plenty of other signs of recovery. The company has started a relief fund to provide financial assistance to the families of employees and rescue workers killed in the attack. The firm also expects to sign a lease on a permanent space. Forty more employees have been hired, the stock price remains strong, and Keslo is thinking about expanding into other products. “The repo desk is only going to grow,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong; we have our moments. We have a lot of emotional baggage we share among ourselves. There are a lot of sleepless nights. But we’re there for each other, and that’s the way it’s going to be as long as I’m here.” And, as far as anyone can tell, that will be for quite some time.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2002 issue of MBA Jungle.