That same year, Sig’s chief executive officer and president, Ron Cohen, sat for an interview with the magazine Management Today. Cohen had staged a dramatic turnaround at the New Hampshire-based company. When he’d taken charge five years earlier, it had recently become independent of its iconic German parent, Sig Sauer GmbH. It was sputtering, eking out tiny margins on guns still built with parts from Germany. But under Cohen’s stewardship, sales had tripled, and the company had added product lines and hundreds of employees. In the interview, Cohen extolled the company’s transformation. He compared Sig to Mercedes-Benz, then mused about what it might cost to continue expanding: “How do you grow Mercedes to be four times bigger while not losing your edge of being the quality leader? How do you grow without losing those parts of you?”