Mr. Katz: The company was founded in 1995. It was a joint venture between two famous insurance entrepreneurs and Morgan Stanley Capital Partners, which has since been spun off into a separate company, Metalmark Capital. Jim Stone, founder of Plymouth Rock, and Peter Wood, who built Direct Line in the UK raised $315 million from Morgan Stanley. The mission was to build the next large national direct to the consumer automobile insurance company, in effect at that time the next GEICO, and that is what we have been doing ever since. Automobile insurance is cyclical, not quite as cyclical as commercial insurance, but nonetheless we found ourselves starting the company at the wrong side of the cycle and also we chose to enter the business in the state of New York, which right now is a wonderful state to do business in but at that time had a fraud problem that was caused by certain regulations that have since been repaired. As a result, we chose to take a different course. Along that time other companies such as Nationwide, Ohio Casualty, Farmers, Reliance, and many others had also decided to start a direct company to try to imitate GEICO's success, and we call that the Class of 1995. Many of them had tried to grow too fast in that environment and were looking to sell these subsidiaries that they felt had not lived up to their expectations. We proceeded beginning around late 1999, 2000 with a strategy where we bought up these companies, and we repaired them and fixed their loss ratio and added them to our operation, integrated them, and created scale. We bought a program from Lancer Insurance called Teachers' Insurance Plan. It was only in Long Island, and we have expanded it to sixteen states right now. We bought Connecticut Life & Casualty, and then we moved our headquarters here, which gave us some cost savings. We bought Great American's direct operation, called Worldwide, which doubled our size. We turned profitable when we closed that acquisition in April 2003. We have been profitable ever since. Then in 2004 we bought Unigard's subsidiary National Merit. So we started our strategy to be a big direct marketer right away. We ran into some headwinds. We changed to a roll-up strategy, and in 2004 we changed back to what we were born to do, which is go direct. In the meantime, we built a wonderful company with policyholders in almost every state. We have a national IT platform that can rate, quote, and bind on the telephone and over the Internet. We have a terrific management team, about $133 million of premium, and a good-sized investment portfolio. So the company has about $150 million in total revenues. We still need scale, so we are continuing to look for acquisitions. However, the big focus for us right now is organic growth. We are growing our teacher's program and we are working with Internet portals in companies such InsWeb, InsureMe, and Netquote, where we are having very good success, as well as our own sites response.com and teachers.com.
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