Benjamin Milberg founded the Company with two partners in 1936 to provide financing for leveraged companies with seasonal business requirements and fluctuations in cash flow. Benjamin Milberg's decision to enter the commercial finance business occurred during the most protracted and severe financial depression this country has ever seen. A gregarious, larger-than-life personality, he was already a successful businessman, a member of a well known textile family who "knew everyone" and did business on a handshake.

A man known for his boundless optimism -- in the 1930s he would need to draw on every bit of it. Business was still struggling to recover from the collapse of the nation's banking system, when millions of panicky depositors tried to withdraw savings that banks had tied up in illiquid loans and investments. Although the emergency Banking Act of 1933 provided the liquidity the banks needed to reopen, they were still reluctant to lend. When they did, it was limited to the one thing they understood -- unsecured balance sheet loans.

But the vigorous and seasonally driven textile business needed short-term funds from lenders who understood the uneven nature of the business, familiar with the problems of seasonal swings in cash flow and earnings. Ben Milberg understood. With his brother Irving and a third partner, he opened the doors of MGM Factors, the company that would eventually bear his name.

At MGM, the decision to lend was based on first hand inquiry; what the partners could ascertain from the people they knew about a company's reputation, its position in the industry and most important of all, the borrower's character.

Today, Milberg Factors, Inc. is a diversified finance company with client sales volume of more than $2 billion. Rigorous financial analysis and due diligence have supplanted earlier, less formal methods of inquiry. But those early tenets for doing business, based on reputation and character, remain essentially unchanged to this day.