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, IMA & Blockchain.com
Margot Carter has worked on hundreds of deals and can count the bad ones on one hand. Her rule: the best deal is sometimes the one you don’t do.
More on Margot Carter and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/margot-carter
Carter was chief legal officer of FYI, later Sourcecorp, at 27, after helping it merge its first eight companies and go public. It went on to buy two or three businesses a month, and Jerry Jones, an original investor, still tells people it was one of his best investments. Days after September 11, her old law firm asked her to help rebuild the legal department at Cantor Fitzgerald, where about a third of the employees were left. She went on to SoundView, which she helped sell to Charles Schwab, and The Princeton Review, then spent 2010 to 2015 as global chief legal officer of RealPage.
She treats the legal seat as a growth job. At RealPage she pushed the company to become a licensed money transmitter so it could earn a share of the rent payments it already collected. On the board of Interior Logic Group she helped buy a virtual home design platform so the company would be valued on revenue instead of EBITDA. It sold to Blackstone on the morning it was set to price its IPO.
Today she sits on three NYSE boards and runs Cien, the AI company she co-founded 10 years ago. She explains how Cien turns CRM data into a growth plan, the client where it found $180 million in opportunities and recovered $20 million within a month, the three questions she asks before joining a board, how boards recruit directors, why deals fall apart before closing, and why she thinks AI is still in the first inning.
Margot Carter is founder and president of Living Mountain Capital, which she started in 1998, and co-founder of Cien.ai, an AI sales-intelligence platform. She is lead independent director of Installed Building Products and an independent director of Eagle Materials and Tyler Technologies, all NYSE listed. She was EVP, global chief legal officer and corporate secretary of RealPage from 2010 to 2015, and earlier held general counsel roles at FYI/Sourcecorp, SoundView Technology Group and The Princeton Review after starting her career at Morgan Lewis. She holds a J.D. from Fordham and is chair emeritus of NACD North Texas.
KEY MOMENTS
00:00 Intro
04:45 Chief legal officer at 27
08:29 A third of Cantor was left
14:55 Turning rent payments into revenue
16:21 Sold to Blackstone on IPO morning
22:41 $180 million found in one CRM
30:47 The best deal is the one you skip
34:16 Her three-question board filter
39:36 “We’re in the first inning”
57:59 Michael Singer’s Surrender Experiment
Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect
Cien: cien.ai
Give and Take, Adam Grant: amzn.to/46lxErw
Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW
Follow The Deal Table: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X
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, Blockchain.com and IMA Financial Group.
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