Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. We'll go first to Chad Vollen [ph] with Raymond James.
Unidentified Analyst
Good morning Brian, good morning Curt and Joe. How are you?
Curt Pullen - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Good.
Brian C. Walker - President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes Chad, how are you? [Multiple Speakers]
Unidentified Analyst
Couple of questions. First, I was obviously intrigued by the statement you made regarding evaluating alternatives for enhancing shareholder value. Could you give us a sense of how much leverage you'd be comfortable with, in terms of debt to EBITDA as well as interest coverage? And then in terms of potentially adding scale, what's your filter? What are you looking for, what are the characteristics that you'd want to see before making some sort of an investment?
Brian C. Walker - President and Chief Executive Officer
Chad, let me... this is Brian, let me take the second part of that first and then we will come back to the question on how much is doable. First of all, we've been pretty... on the track for sometime as we talked about the strategy that we thought there was some great opportunities for us, both in international areas like healthcare as well as the work that we are doing in our Convia business around infrastructure. I think it's likely that we'll look for areas like those that enable us to get platforms in place in the areas that we've targeted for future growth. We don't have anything specific obviously that we can talk about in this form but it has been a focus for us in all three of those. We did a small one as you know in Convia late last year, and we continue to look for those kind opportunities that really essentially supplement what we're doing from an internal development standpoint. We do have, of course, lots of internal development going in the product arenas and all of those areas as well as call it commercial building, distribution networks and those kinds of things. But we are seeing great success in those areas, and so our belief is we need feed those. So that's kind of a primary objective for us.
In terms of... in terms of the balance sheet and debt we have consistently said it's an important thing for us we believe to continue to be investment grade because that obviously puts in outside parameter over anything that we do we believe that especially our business it is going to run through cycles, we need to have some flexibility. And certainly when you see what you've seen happened to a lot of companies through this recent credit crunch, making sure that you are in that spot that you've got the flexibility I think it's just the right place to be.
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