The Deal Table

"It's projected we'll exceed Chicago as the third largest metro in the country by 2030." Ken Malcolmson gives the mechanics, not the brochure.

More on Ken Malcolmson and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/ken-malcolmson

DFW Airport is third in the world by passenger volume behind Atlanta and Dubai and is midway through a $12 billion capital improvement project with a new Terminal F. Love Field went from a projected 8.5 million passengers to 18.5 million this year, with a $2.5 billion rebuild breaking ground in 2027. The convention center rebuild is $3.5 billion. Scotiabank came down to Charlotte or Dallas and picked Dallas for roughly a thousand jobs.

He credits culture as much as cost. Ross Perot's framing of hard advantages against soft ones, and the soft one that closes deals: Goldman Sachs came in part because the chief executive's daughter went to SMU. Fidelity now has more employees in Dallas than in Boston, Wells Fargo built a $450 million campus in Las Colinas, and Dallas will be the only city in the country with three exchanges.

He also names the weakness. Autonomy is the enemy: a 14 county region with 16 cities over 100,000 people that will not go to Austin with one voice. Plus the density argument, since almost all of the city's property tax revenue comes from downtown, Uptown and Preston Center, and the 2019 tornado that destroyed the Chamber's building and ended up funding an endowment.

Ken Malcolmson is president emeritus of the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce, which he led until February 1. He spent his corporate career at Humana and serves on roughly nine boards, including the YMCA of Metropolitan Dallas.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 DFW's $12 billion capital project

01:36 Passing Chicago by 2030

03:39 Ross Perot's hard advantages

04:26 "Culture wins": Goldman and SMU

11:56 Love Field: 8.5 million to 18.5

15:06 "We need to get used to more density"

17:29 The $3.5 billion convention center

30:20 "Autonomy is the enemy"

48:36 The tornado that took the building

54:06 Scotiabank picks Dallas

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Two of the oldest names in cowboy boots, founded in 1900 and 1889, cost Thomas Gleason closer to $100,000 than $100 million.

More on Thomas Gleason and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/thomas-gleason

He never left the oil business. It still pays his bills, and it funded both brands: Olsen-Stelzer, founded in 1900 in Henrietta, Texas, which he bought in 2018, and Dixon Boot Company, founded in 1889, added in 2022. Neither came with a factory, meaningful inventory or a boot maker. He has never taken a salary from either one, and is now finishing a merger with a larger western boot company, stepping out of the chief executive seat and taking his first paycheck.

The economics are refreshingly plain. Their alligator boot runs $5,500 top to bottom, and he says the identical boot from a bigger label sells for $16,500. The real edge is a three month turnaround on custom work when a Fort Worth competitor quotes 18 to 24 months. Western wear is a $60 billion industry growing 8 to 10 percent a year, and he expects the Taylor Sheridan effect to hold through 2029 or 2030 before it plateaus.

Also here: the CEO candidate who took the offer letter back to his own employer, corporate boot orders as a channel, meeting Jane Seymour in a nearly empty airport club and putting her Open Hearts boot on sale inside a year, and Boots for Warriors, the nonprofit built around a boot maker in his 80s already making zippered boots for veterans with prosthetics.

Thomas Gleason owns Olsen-Stelzer Boots, founded in 1900, and Dixon Boot Company, founded in 1889, and still runs his oil and gas business. A fifth generation Texan who started as a field landman, he founded Boots for Warriors, a nonprofit making custom boots for veterans with prosthetics.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 He only wears his own boots now

01:21 Oil and gas first, as a landman

04:57 Olsen-Stelzer, founded 1900

06:31 Why custom boots do not scale

11:43 The merger with a bigger brand

21:13 Closer to $100,000 than $100 million

32:21 $5,500 here, $16,500 elsewhere

33:00 Three months against 18 to 24

40:45 Boots for Warriors

50:30 The Jane Seymour boot

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Jay Young learned the business gauging tanks by hand for his grandfather, then ignored his father's advice: never get in the oil business.

More on Jay Young and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/jay-young

He is a fourth generation Texas oilman and the CEO of King Operating Corporation, and he is unusually direct about what has gone wrong along the way. "We took too much risk in the first two funds." Fund three does not wildcat at all. It is infield drilling only, in Panhandle fields where 7,000 wells have already been drilled and he knows where the oil is and is not.

The model is ADD, acquire, develop, divest, lifted off a 2015 chairlift at Beaver Creek from an apartment operator. The proof it works: two horizontal wells outside Snyder, 40 percent sold down for $13 million in a little over a year. He also explains why 95 percent of oil promoters have no exit at all.

The numbers land throughout. Wells that break even at $25 to $35 a barrel. A rig you can lock at $15,000 a day that becomes $25,000 the moment everyone wants to drill. Natural gas down from $13 to $2 and the AI data center plants that will burn it. And Texas Rangers ownership: $20 million for a board seat, two American League rings, and the million dollar a year cash calls that made him sell.

Jay Young is the founder and CEO of King Operating Corporation, a Dallas oil and gas operator, and a fourth generation Texas oilman. He is the author of The Upside of Oil and Gas Investing, hosts The Jay Young Show, and was previously an owner of the Texas Rangers.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 "There's so much oil out there"

07:06 Gauging tanks: 1.67 barrels an inch

07:53 "Don't get in the oil business"

13:45 The Rangers, and the cash calls

19:26 ADD: acquire, develop, divest

23:34 Selling 40% of a well for $13 million

27:10 "We took too much risk"

34:37 Lock the rig before it doubles

52:11 The AI plants will run on gas

59:15 "It's singles and doubles"

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Preston Dunlap ran about $75 billion a year of Air Force and Space Force technology spending, and wrote the first government checks into SpaceX.

More on Preston Dunlap and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/preston-dunlap

He was the first chief technology officer and chief architect for the US Air Force and Space Force, and he is the person who named Conventional Prompt Strike, still the Navy and Army hypersonic missile program. He now runs Arkenstone Capital, an industrial technology firm named for Tolkien's most valuable gem, the one buried deepest inside the mountain.

The clearest thread is why the missile against drone math breaks. An exquisite solution built for one target falls apart the moment you take two coming in, then three, then fifty. He argues Ukraine and the Iran and Israel exchanges are not the same drone war, that the US is badly underutilizing cheap drones, and that the supply chain behind them is broken.

For founders there are real numbers. Roughly $10 billion to $15 billion sits in the innovation organizations out of a near trillion dollar budget. Selling to the government means six people turning keys at once, and every one of them rotates out every 18 to 24 months. Space Force has gone from $19 billion a year to $35 billion or $40 billion, and total US government space spending approaches $70 billion of about $95 billion worldwide.

Preston Dunlap is the founder and managing partner of Arkenstone Capital, an industrial technology investment firm. He was the first chief technology officer and chief architect for the US Air Force and Space Force, overseeing roughly $75 billion a year in research, development, acquisition and procurement.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Why the US is the place to be in space

07:56 The Pentagon as a boardroom

10:45 First checks into Android and SpaceX

15:53 One drone against a hundred

21:46 The 2022 warning about China

33:24 Naming Conventional Prompt Strike

35:39 Project Maven, and Google walking out

38:31 $10B to $15B of innovation money

40:21 Six key-turners, 18-month rotations

49:32 Bringing Starlink into the Pentagon

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Randall Bryant was elected chair of DART on October 28. The next day, six member cities began moving toward withdrawal elections.

More on Randall Bryant and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/randall-bryant

Those cities represented 650,000 residents and about 33 percent of DART's general fund revenue, and he had roughly 120 days to keep a 13 city, $1.6 billion transit system from losing 30 percent of its revenue and its service. He had been on the board less than two years, with no transit experience at all.

The negotiation is the substance. Cities wanted 25 percent of their sales tax back, a number produced by an Ernst and Young study behind House Bill 3187. DART countered with a guaranteed minimum of 5 percent rising to 10 percent over six years, for all 13 cities, built on a $42.5 million general mobility program that seven cities had never claimed. Plano, Irving and Farmers Branch rescinded and took the deal. His board passed it 14 to 1.

He also lays out the consequences nobody was discussing. State law stops all five modes of service the day a city leaves. If light rail goes dark, decades-old environmental covenants put the region out of air quality attainment and the sanctions arrive as lane closures. Two thirds of DART riders are transit dependent, including his father, who is 90 percent blind.

Randall Bryant is the chair of the DART board of directors and the youngest person to hold the seat. He grew up in Hamilton Park in Dallas and led the negotiation that kept the 13 member cities of the $1.6 billion transit system together.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The youngest DART chair

02:50 Elected on October 28, then everything

03:56 120 days, or lose 30% of revenue

15:18 The ask: 25% of sales tax back

22:10 The board passes it 14 to 1

24:05 If a city leaves, service stops

29:16 75% of riders back, BART under 50%

33:31 His father, 90% blind, rides DART

51:26 Every $1 in transit returns $5

01:07:43 The EPA sanctions nobody discussed

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Chris Fisher climbed all 58 of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks in a single winter, in 72 days, beating the only other person who had ever done it.

More on Chris Fisher and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/chris-fisher

He was aiming for 50 and had knocked out more than half in 17 days before food poisoning cost him the pace. Before any of it he lost his senior football season to a failed drug test, lost his best friend to an overdose, spent a year in and out of rehab, and quit hell week at BUD/S. The line he took from that: most limits are not real, they are learned.

He is 30, has summited the eighth highest mountain on earth alone without supplemental oxygen or a Sherpa, and will not spend $45,000 on Everest because he would rather put it toward 100 unclimbed 6,000 meter peaks in the Andes. The economics of high-altitude climbing get a full airing: a commercial Everest package at $45,000 to $50,000 against $15,000 to $20,000 out of pocket with no guide, and close to a million dollars to chase all 14 eight-thousanders.

He is also clear-eyed about who carries the load. Porters at $20 a day and Sherpas earning under $5,000 for a season of real risk, in a country where average income is near $1,000 a year. Plus how a record actually gets verified, and how a professional mountain athlete makes a living.

Chris Fisher is a professional mountain endurance athlete and the founder of To The Top Media. He holds the winter speed record for all 58 of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks, set in 72 days, and has summited Manaslu, the eighth highest mountain on earth, without supplemental oxygen or a Sherpa.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 "You're practically dying up there"

03:14 The drive home that started it

06:19 On pace for 50, then food poisoning

08:14 How the record gets verified

11:55 Making a living as a mountain athlete

22:32 Everest at $45,000 to $50,000

27:17 Sherpas paid under $5,000 a season

34:36 "Most limits aren't real"

40:00 Losing his best friend to an overdose

51:39 All 14 without oxygen, and the math

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Rogers Healy will tell you exactly what disqualifies a founder: showing up seven minutes late and not mentioning it. That is close to the whole test.

More on Rogers Healy and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/rogers-healy

He built one of Texas's largest independently owned real estate brokerages, worked out that a service business cannot scale past the person selling it, and hired himself out of his own job. As he puts it, he cannot show Lane's house and show Ryan a condo at the same time.

He now runs Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners, writing $2 million to $10 million checks into consumer brands one deal at a time. There is no fund. Every deal is raised as its own special purpose vehicle, which he cheerfully calls the hardest possible way to do this, across roughly 150 investments including Mosh with Patrick Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, Goat Fuel, Pathwater and Snaps.

The diligence is mostly about people: present, responsive, kind, on time. He calls it a smell test and it has cost founders deals. Also in here: meeting Kevin Lavelle while mentoring undergrads in his mid-twenties and later becoming the largest investor in Harbor, why bad news is survivable and surprises are not, and building a pitch like a Disney movie.

Rogers Healy is the founder of Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners and of Rogers Healy and Associates, one of the largest independently owned real estate brokerages in Texas. He has made roughly 150 investments, each raised as its own special purpose vehicle, across consumer brands.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Selling the Schwarzenegger family

03:49 Meeting Kevin Lavelle by mentoring

06:42 Hiring yourself out of your own job

14:36 A service business will not scale

26:41 Pre-revenue or the last check in

27:48 $2M to $10M checks, all one-off SPVs

34:25 The Mosh bar deal

37:32 Bad news survives. Surprises do not.

41:45 "You were seven minutes late"

53:05 Build the pitch like a Disney movie

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

His first season selling for the Mavericks, the team went 11 and 71. The next year, 13 and 69. He pitched Dallas on a 20 percent improvement.

More on George Killebrew and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/george-killebrew

Nobody listened. Twenty-seven years later Mark Cuban's $280 million purchase sold at a $4 billion valuation, and George Killebrew had run sponsorship, ticket sales and arena revenue through all of it, including the American Airlines Center naming rights deal at $6.5 million a year for 30 years, the largest at the time.

His real argument is that consistency, not championships, is where the money is: a top-five revenue team year after year in a market smaller than Los Angeles, New York or Chicago. He explains what a deep playoff run does to the cash register, why a sweep is actually bad for business, and why Cuban insisted on keeping $10 seats in the building. Also the 2011 run, Phil Jackson's last game as a head coach, and the lockout that arrived thirty days after the parade.

Then two second acts. Being handed Major League Rugby as commissioner, where he added a shot clock and put names on jerseys and got called the devil for it. And pickleball, where Tom Dundon pulled him in, the association bought pickleball.com and Pickleball Central, 20 to 40 million people now play, and a franchise that went for $1 million recently sold for $16 million.

George Killebrew is the chief revenue officer of the United Pickleball Association. He spent 27 years with the Dallas Mavericks, generating more than $500 million in sponsorship sales and earning 15 NBA awards, and served as commissioner of Major League Rugby.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 What a chief revenue officer runs

01:59 Cuban buys in at $280 million

03:34 $290 million to a $4 billion exit

07:44 The Lakers at $10 billion

24:58 Sweeping the Lakers in 2011

26:10 Consistency, not championships

28:25 $10 tickets and no price gouging

30:33 11 and 71, then 13 and 69

40:19 A shot clock, and being called the devil

54:26 A $1M franchise sells for $16M

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

In February her co-founder called a light hurricane season. Not from a weather model, from the sun. Halfway through, there had been one storm.

More on Katherine Monson and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/katherine-monson

High solar activity drives high stratospheric winds, and those winds shear storm cells apart before they can build. Katherine Monson is CEO and co-founder of Hale SWx, built on heliophysicist Scott McIntosh's discovery of the forces driving the solar cycle, published in Nature. She sells that forecast to satellite operators, airlines, farmers, miners and, increasingly, to people allocating capital.

The commercial case starts with a single day when a solar storm took out a batch of satellites and cost SpaceX around $500 million. SpaceX was self-insured and absorbed it. Most companies cannot. She explains why sunspots only predict about four days out, what a model built on the physics rather than the statistics can do instead, and a long-range call locked in 2022 that is still tracking at a 0.8 skill score 22 years ahead.

From there it gets practical: atmospheric drag deciding whether a $5 million satellite earns revenue for two years or eight, what altitude to fly and when to launch once you price FCC de-orbit liability, precision GPS in agriculture and mining, and radiation loads that make a fixed aircraft maintenance schedule the wrong tool for a moving problem. Plus her own path from wanting to be Secretary of Defense to selling physics to hedge funds.

Katherine Monson is the CEO and co-founder of Hale SWx, a space weather forecasting company built on heliophysicist Scott McIntosh's Nature-published work on the solar cycle. She previously served as a fellow at the Pentagon and trained in negotiation with the Harvard Getting to Yes team at Vantage Partners.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Why space hardware bankrupts companies

03:50 Precision GPS and knowing each seed

09:44 Published in Nature: how the sun works

11:40 Avionics radiation and maintenance

15:09 The storm that cost SpaceX $500M

16:09 Drag: chicken broth or clam chowder

19:10 Sunspots only predict four days out

24:08 Calling a shot 22 years out

40:10 A light hurricane season, called early

51:13 What a company like this is worth

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.

Wyatt Smith spent his last day at Uber turning off the lights on Uber Elevate, the flying-car division he helped build and sell to Joby Aviation.

More on Wyatt Smith and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/wyatt-smith

He now runs UpSmith, an AI company for the skilled trades, and his argument is that the technology everyone is worried about is the only lever big enough to move America's builder shortage. That shortage across manufacturing and construction peaked near 1.5 million people in 2021 and still runs around a million. The stated goal: a contractor with 50 trucks in the field doing $25 million a year, run from a laptop.

The technical distinction he draws is between deterministic and probabilistic software. Bounded if-then automation could never solve booking a job, updating a record or chasing an open quote, but an agent whose marginal time cost is zero changes what is even worth solving. That is also the private equity thesis: roughly 50 percent gross margin, 30 to 35 percent operating margin, and what happens when you add $1 million of top line without one more person answering the phone.

The Uber Elevate section is worth it on its own. Global helicopter production runs about 1,000 units a year against projected demand closer to 20,000, and FAA type certification is still the blocker. He also traces the path from a farm in Alabama to Teach for America to Silicon Valley, including the terms scrawled on a paper lunch bag at the sale barn that financed his father's first chicken houses.

Wyatt Smith is the founder and CEO of UpSmith, an agentic AI company built for skilled trades businesses. He previously helped build and spin out Uber Elevate, Uber's aviation division, and worked at McKinsey and Teach for America.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 A shortage of about a million people

02:07 A pathway to 50x the productivity

07:21 His dad, a lunch bag, and a credit line

11:29 1,000 helicopters against 20,000

18:49 Why value sits in the application layer

23:42 Deterministic against probabilistic

32:13 Why PE is buying every service business

37:51 $1M of top line, nobody hired

41:05 120 NDAs on a single trades deal

01:04:32 A $50 million business from a laptop

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

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.