Offerings Read Free Page A

this cash to get the chips that’ll enable you to get your games on Wal-Mart’s shelves before Thanksgiving. Without that, you’re dead. You’re trying to focus on the equity markets, but the harsh reality is that in this lending environment, once you miss your sales targets your banks will abandon you.”
    There were a few more slides on her deck, but Kate had scored all the points she needed.
    Chris’s cell phone vibrated on the table where he’d set it. He apologized and said he hoped the interruption would be brief. Beth took the spot at the table where Chris had been sitting. She asked if she could email Kate’s slides to herself.
    Kate took a small sip of water, fished her BlackBerry out of her bag, and moved to the other side of the room. She inched toward a painting behind Chris’s desk.
    The painting was an oil on canvas of an Alpine scene sitting in a frame that had obviously been hand-carved. The corners and the middle of each side had a shell imprint surrounded by vines and flowers. She reached toward the lower right corner and touched the words Gustave Courbet. Her eyes followed a series of tiny brushstrokes across the middle of the picture.
    “Kate,” Chris said after she had been standing near the painting for a couple of minutes. “Please clarify this for me.” She went to the side of his chair and began explaining how she’d crunched the numbers. Beth walked to the credenza, filled her coffee cup, turned directly toward Kate, and spoke before Chris had a chance to do so.
    “If we have so little margin for error, I’m surprised you even bothered making the trip out here. You must see some potential or you wouldn’t have wasted your time. So tell me, what probability of success do you ascribe to the offering?”
    Kate wasn’t surprised the women in the room seemed to be the only ones on their toes. Beth probably spent as much time keeping her kids’ heads on straight as she did for the men in this room. “Sixty-forty. Seventy-thirty if we’re lucky. The market’s got a long way to go, but it’s inching back. Families who’ve pinched pennies for the past couple of Christmases want to get their kids something new and different this year. There’s a lot of pent-up demand out there right now. The answer to your question depends in part on how much you believe in what you’ve got in the pipeline.”
    “How big a raise can we pull off?” Beth asked, moving to Kate’s side as she spoke.
    “Assuming the bleeding stops by Memorial Day, three-fifty, minimum. Closer to four if your Christmas orders beat my projections by more than five percent.”
    Chris spoke up. “How much of our stock can the insiders sell?” At bottom, that was what all these presentations were about.
    Kate pushed back. “I haven’t fully worked through the numbers.”
    Chris reached into the pocket of his shirt. He retrieved his phone and touched the screen to bring up a spreadsheet. “How much? Ballpark.”
    Bankers use various metaphors to describe the point in the meeting when the principals ask how much they can put into their pockets. Her mentor at Greene, an M&A guru named Andrew Butler, called it the sexual side of capitalism. He said the image that always came to him at that instant was of Richard Burton dangling diamonds off his fingers before he placed them around Elizabeth Taylor’s neck. And now it was Kate Brewster’s turn to begin the seduction.
    “Thirty million, easy.”

FOUR
    Kate went straight from the meeting to the Denver airport for the redeye back to New York. Peter and Mack were in the kitchen when she walked in a little after eight. They were debating whether Mack should tuck in the shirt of his uniform before leaving for his Little League game.
    Kate knelt down and put her arms around Mack. “Everything okay with you, big guy?”
    The buttons on his uniform were all out of whack. He’d put the wrong button into the top hole and now he had more holes left to fill than buttons to fill