00:00 – Matt McCoy:
You’ve spent much of your career stepping into companies that need transformation. What’s the first thing you look for when deciding whether a business can actually be turned around?

00:09 – Conrad F. Mir:
Toxic financing on their books. It’s clearly a noose, and people try to justify the fact that, “If I just got past this and I just have this little monies,” that never works. You can get around it, but it always has some trailer.

So I was part of this company once—great technology, dealing with head and neck cancer, and amazing thought processes and the technology, and everybody had alphabet soup after their names.

00:37 – Conrad F. Mir:
And they were really, really interesting people. Now all of a sudden, they were just caught, and they needed not a lot of money. They only needed $80,000 to put things together. And they got into this toxic financing.

00:51 – Conrad F. Mir:
And they asked for more, of course, which you’re going to ask—always ask for more.

00:55 – Conrad F. Mir:
And they asked for $200,000 and change. That $200,000 and change with the toxic financing actually cost them $500,000 and change.

01:02 – Conrad F. Mir:
And consequently, they had to sell themselves in the open market.

01:07 – Conrad F. Mir:
And they just killed the technology. They took it for parts, but that’s effectively the issue. Stay away from toxic financiers.

01:16 – Conrad F. Mir:
Try to find things that you can move forward in, you can pay, and do what you say and say what you’ll do.