0816_TOEFL-Test-and-Score-Manual-1997

Great Ideas and Insights from VIPs ● 277
GREAT
Lynn Tilton—Be a Modern Industrialist
Lynn Tilton describes herself as a modern industrialist.
IDEA
She’s dedicated to reviving American manufacturing
companies that have fallen on hard times. She also claims to be a mystic
who believes she has been called on to change the world.
“When I started this business, I wanted to prove making money and
making the world a better place were not mutually exclusive,” said Tilton,
a striking woman with platinum blonde hair and a penchant for wearing
short skirts and stiletto heels.
In the past five years, Tilton’s Manhattan-based Patriarch Partners
has acquired about 75 companies, including Stila Cosmetics, an Arizona
helicopter company, Rand McNally, Snelling Staffing, and Natura Water.
Tilton told me she believes “joblessness is a plague” upon America.
“My mandate is to make the companies I buy competitive again,” she
said. “I believe with every cell of my being that we must be an industrial
economy. We have to look in the mirror and realize that outsourcing all
our manufacturing will leave us permanently unemployed.”
A graduate of Yale and Columbia, she started her career in high-stakes
banking, developing proprietary methods to package and resell jumbo
loans. “At one point, I ended up with $2.5 billion worth of loans made to
small, distressed companies,” she explained. Instead of repackaging and
reselling the loans, she decided to “raise private equity to buy out the other
investors.”
Tilton is outspoken and passionate about reviving “beaten-down
American brands.” One of her biggest success stories involves the revival
of Old Town Fuel and Fiber in Old Town, Maine. The company makes jet
fuel from wood and now employs 250.
Unlike many investors, Tilton prefers to be hands-on. She said she
evaluates the management team as soon as she closes the deal. It takes her
about 90 days to determine who will stay and who will go. In most cases
the CEO is let go. “The current management tends to hold on too tight to
what was done in the past,” she said.
So that means she replaces the CEOs and assigns someone on her
team to supervise daily operations during the turnaround. The secret of