His protégé, Pat Mulcahy, who would later run the business, described Stiritz’s approach to the seminal Energizer acquisition: “When the opportunity to buy Energizer came up, a small group of us met at 1:00 PM and got the seller’s books. We performed a back of the envelope LBO model, met again at 4:00 PM and decided to bid $1.4 billion. Simple as that. We knew what we needed to focus on. No massive studies and no bankers.”5 Again, Stiritz’s approach (similar to those of Tom Murphy, John Malone, Katharine Graham, and others) featured a single sheet of paper and an intense focus on key
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