The Deal Table
The Deal Table
Podcast Description
The Deal Table is a show where entrepreneurs, executives, and investors share actionable insights, strategies, and success stories about building, scaling, and exiting businesses. It features conversations with leading voices to inspire and connect like-minded professionals.
Our target audience includes entrepreneurs, executives, and capital providers actively involved in growth, capital raising, and strategic deals.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast covers a range of themes including entrepreneurship, leadership, venture capital, and strategic business exits. Episodes delve into topics such as private equity strategies, navigating funding challenges, and lessons from industry leaders, with specific episodes highlighting key figures like Jim Keyes discussing transitions in corporate leadership and Kevin Lavelle sharing an unfiltered account of building his brand.
The Deal Table is a long-form podcast featuring the founders, operators, investors, and advisors who navigate consequential decisions around capital, control, leadership, and legacy.
Filmed at Old Parkland in Dallas, the show brings together leaders who have built, financed, governed, acquired, and exited real businesses to speak candidly about private equity, mergers and acquisitions, and what actually happens before, during, and after the deal.
For founders, executives, investors, and advisors making decisions
Sponsored by: Capital Southwest & Security National Bank
Every buyer says culture is everything. No buyer puts culture in diligence. Tony Bridwell has spent 25 years inside that gap.
More on Tony Bridwell and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/tony-bridwell
Lane Carrick opens with the paradox he has watched his whole career on the sellside: every buyer says culture makes or breaks an acquisition, and no buyer ever builds a process around it. Bridwell ran people strategy for 60,000 team members across 1,600 Chili’s and Maggiano’s restaurants at Brinker International, then did the same at Ryan LLC.
What follows is a working manual for the part of a deal nobody underwrites. Why toxicity only surfaces after the letter of intent. Why 3 percent of an organization moves 90 percent of its culture, and why it is never the 3 percent you would guess. What breaks the day the founder who was the de facto mission hands over the keys.
Then Frank, the brilliant jerk everyone tolerates because he produces, and the four options: tolerate, isolate, eliminate, rehabilitate. All four carry a cost. Chasing Frank sent Bridwell into a doctorate, where the research turned out not to be about leadership at all. Roughly $60 billion a year goes into leadership development in the United States. There is no comparable number for followership.
Dr. Tony Bridwell is Chief Talent Officer at The Encompass Group, where he leads the organizational consulting practice and the E3 Leadership Academy, and Adjunct Professor of Executive Leadership at SMU Cox School of Business. He was previously Chief People Officer at Brinker International and at Ryan LLC. He is the author of eight books, including The Follower Effect (Wiley, 2026), and is a living organ donor.
KEY MOMENTS
00:00 The deal that died 30 minutes out
08:08 Culture never shows up in diligence
11:10 Brint Ryan: tighten the lug nuts
20:21 3% of a company moves 90% of it
25:21 When the founder is the mission
34:35 What you hear in the word follower
38:41 $60 billion on leadership, zero here
49:40 Tolerate, isolate, eliminate, rehab
01:12:00 30% logic, 70% emotion
01:17:57 Why he gave a friend a kidney
Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect
The Follower Effect: amazon.com/dp/1394375034
The Courage to Be Disliked: amzn.to/45s5Npo
Man’s Search for Meaning: amzn.to/4xxm4VK
What to Make of a Life: amzn.to/4gy5JdK
Dr. Tony Bridwell: drtonybridwell.com
Southwest Transplant Alliance: organ.org
Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW
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The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.
Sponsored by Capital Southwest, Security National Bank and Blockchain.com.
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