Loretta Ivey had a rule about paper, and the rule was older than her firm. Paper, she told every analyst she ever trained, does not care who is embarrassed. It does not hurry, it does not flatter, and it does not forget what it was told to say. If you wanted to know what a company was, you did not listen to its chief executive at a podium. You read what its own officers had signed, in the order they had signed it, and you believed the arithmetic over the adjectives every time.
She had built Ivey Capital Partners on that rule. Twenty-five years earlier the firm had been a lending desk she ran out of a community bank's back office in Atlanta, two telephones and a filing cabinet she had bought herself because the bank would not. The bank's officers had thought of her desk as a courtesy, a small accommodation to neighborhoods the bank's main floors did not visit. She had thought of it as an education. She learned which borrowers repaid when repaying cost them something, and which repaid only when it was easy, and she learned that the difference was visible in documents long before it was visible anywhere else. When she left to found her own firm, three of those borrowers' children were among her first clients, and the filing cabinet came with her in the back of a borrowed truck.
By the autumn of the Fairhaven meeting, Ivey Capital Partners occupied two floors of a tower on Peachtree Street, employed sixty-one people, and lent money in amounts that moved state budgets. Its word anchored syndicates. That was the phrase the market used, and it was not a compliment so much as a description of mechanics: when Loretta Ivey's firm committed to a facility as anchor, other lenders committed behind it, because her firm's diligence was known to be the kind that read the appendix before the summary and the footnotes before the appendix. Deals had died in her conference room that later turned out to deserve dying. Deals had closed there that survived recessions. The market had learned, over twenty-five years, that her signature on a commitment letter meant the paper had been read by someone who believed it.
The Fairhaven Memorial Group had come to her the way most large borrowers came, through an introduction arranged by men who used the word relationship as if it were a form of collateral. Fairhaven was, by the numbers its own releases recited, the third-largest consolidator of funeral homes in the country: two hundred and twelve family funeral homes acquired over fifteen years across fourteen states, each purchase announced with the same vocabulary of stewardship, continuity, and care. Its founder and chief executive, Wesley Dunmore, had built the company out of a single funeral home his father-in-law had owned in Macon and a conviction, repeated in every interview he gave, that the funeral business was a trust business and that scale, properly managed, could protect that trust better than any single family could. The business press liked him. He photographed well at podiums. He used the word families the way other executives used the word customers, and he used it constantly.
What Fairhaven wanted was five hundred and forty million dollars: a syndicated credit facility to refinance acquisition debt and fund the next round of purchases. What it needed, for the syndicate to form at all, was an anchor whose name would quiet the questions that funeral money always raised. Funeral money was unusual money. It arrived years before it was earned, in the form of pre-need contracts: a man of sixty-eight would sit at a funeral director's desk and pay, in advance and in full, for his own funeral, so that his children would not have to. The money was held in trust, by law, until the death occurred and the service was performed. A consolidator that bought a family funeral home bought those trusts along with the building and the name, and held, in consequence, other people's funerals in its vault. Lenders knew this. Lenders' counsel knew it even better. It was why the facility needed Loretta Ivey, and everyone in the negotiation understood that it was why.