January 1985 started with an opportunity for Ginny Shields, a relationship manager for Omni Bank, N.A., and Jeff Finch, a member of the bank’s corporate-finance department, to expand the bank’s reputation for providing financial advisory services to existing credit customers. Shields, who had moved to Omni Bank’s regional office in Miami two months earlier, had identified the need to restructure the balance sheet (shown in Exhibit 1, with debt components in Exhibit 2) of Merit Marine Corporation, the Florida distributor of Olympus brand marine products. Omni Bank was a large money-center financial institution.