Author: Herman Cain

ZIAD K. ABDELNOUR is President and CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a private equity family office that focuses on originating, structuring, and acting as an equity investor in management-led buyouts, strategic minority equity investments, equity private placements, consolidations, buildups, and growth capital financings. Since 1985, Mr. Abdelnour has been involved in over 125 transactions, worth in aggregate over ten billion dollars, in the investment banking, high-yield bond, and distressed debt markets and has been widely recognized for playing an integral role in those three key market sectors. Mr. Abdelnour also serves on the board of TMax Capital, on the advisory board of DPG Investments, and Flat World Capital. Abdelnour holds an MBA in finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in economics, summa cum laude, from the American University of Beirut and is a speaker on private equity and venture capital topics at industry conferences nationwide. WESLEY A. WHITTAKER has been writing professionally for thirty-five years, producing business proposals, white papers, and research reports. He was in the 1977 National Collegiate Poets Anthology and wrote a satirical column for a monthly magazine in Atlanta in the mid-1980s. On the creative side, Whittaker has written two plays, two screenplays, and is completing work on his first novel. This is his first nonfiction book.