But I think you’ve extended if this really is the beginning, and again, I’m not calling that. It just has a sense that people are — there are companies — and by the way, I think it’s a bit of a barbell. There are the companies that have been waiting around 16 months, and now they want to execute strategic plan, they have the ability and they’re ready to execute, whether that be sell a division, buy a division, whatever. I think the other side of that barbell is a group of companies that have to do something. So that might have waited a long time and the environment has stayed where it is and the motivation for that group might be, we have to do something. But I think that time frame, I hope does not — if this is the beginning and the new business review committee type of environment starts.
I don’t think it should extend out that long, but it might — if it does, we’ll just have to look at what the revenue situation looks like then for our comp ratio. We’ve had a very unique confluence of events for our comp ratio. I mean, we caused it. So I don’t want to make it a passive thing, but we hired 19 people, 19 MDs, managing directors and two more to come. And it’s a very tough revenue year. So that confluence of events is causing us to have to recognize we’ve almost bought, if you think about it, it’s almost like buying a 15% or 20% firm the size of us with 20 MDs. But we do run that through the income statement because we’re hiring them each individually. There’s no — nothing goes on the balance sheet. I think that the method by which we’ve set the organization up now, we’ve improved our facing of technology by more than double, we’ve improved our healthcare focus by 50%.
These are by a number of managing directors and industrials by about 50% and media and telecom by about 33%. I think that should come out in the revenue line, but that’s to be determined.
Brendan O’Brien: That’s great color. Thank you, Ken. And, I guess, switching over for my follow-up, I want to just touch on the dividend really quick. You’re able to build cash this quarter despite the negative earnings trend, which is encouraging, but cash remains at fairly low levels from a historical perspective. And the biggest source of cash strain is really when you pay out bonuses in 1Q of next year, given the revenue environment is likely to remain at least relatively subdued over the next couple of quarters; I want to get a sense as to how confident you are in your ability to sustain the dividend from here?
Ken Moelis: I see no problem with the dividend. Again, I think we’ve improved the go-to-market of the firm significantly with what I call a significant restructuring of our market-facing managing directors. We have no debt, and we have $190 million plus of cash on the balance sheet. So I don’t see any problem with the dividend.
Brendan O’Brien: Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brennan Hawken with UBS Financial. Please go ahead.
Ben Rubin: Hi, this is Ben Rubin, filling in for Brennan. My first question is based is kind of similar to the follow-up that you just got regarding capital. Obviously, the environment remains challenging. You guys have $195 million of cash and liquid investments on the balance sheet. And you guys obviously have been very successful in recruiting, would you be willing to take on external funding or debt to help fund your growth aspirations and/or continue to fund the dividend at these levels if it came down to that?
