The Deal Table

SMU undergraduate applications rose 64 percent in a single year, then another 10 percent. The dean of Cox has a specific theory: the move to the ACC.

More on Todd Milbourn and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/todd-milbourn

Todd Milbourn is six months into the job after 25 years at Washington University in St. Louis, and he runs the business school like a division of a holding company, including what he calls the taxes we pay to center. He is also blunt that higher education is not too big to fail.

His case for Division I sports is not about sports. Sharing a box score with Stanford does more academic work than a ranking does, which is why it was a hard requirement in his deanship search. Around that: a school that is a net importer of IQ points, with more than two thirds of SMU students and closer to three quarters of Cox students coming from outside Texas, and 75 percent of Cox graduates taking a job in Dallas.

The pressure is real too. Fewer children were born during the Great Recession, small colleges are folding, and students line up after class to ask whether the entry-level job will still exist. He answers that directly, with the Industrial Revolution as the comparison. Plus Y'all Street: Goldman on track to have more people in Dallas than New York, JPMorgan north of the city, Schwab's headquarters, and the exchanges following.

Todd Milbourn is the 10th dean of the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, where he also holds the Tolleson Chair of Business Leadership. He spent 25 years at Washington University in St. Louis before moving to Dallas.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Is higher education too big to fail

02:57 The ACC move as academic accelerant

07:19 The university as a holding company

12:52 "The taxes we pay to center"

18:11 Student or employer: who is the customer

21:49 Is the degree still worth it

33:10 Will AI take the entry-level job

49:16 Y'all Street and the new exchange

54:33 Finance, real estate, and energy

57:50 Applications up 64%, then 10% more

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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.

This episode brought to you by: SMU Cox School of Business

Sponsored by Capital Southwest.

1,200 people move to North Texas every day. At 300 homes per subdivision, that is three new subdivisions a day, every day of the year.

More on Scott Theeringer and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/scott-theeringer

Scott Theeringer buys and entitles the raw land those subdivisions get built on, and he explains why supply cannot catch up. A two to three year entitlement timeline before a single house goes vertical. Cities that burned through their entire 20 year infrastructure plans during the housing boom. And a grid that data centers are draining faster than anyone modeled.

The demographics underneath it are the part people miss. The Texas Triangle of Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio is the fifth strongest economy in the country, holding 66 percent of the state's population and about three quarters of its GDP, and 87 percent of people born in Texas stay in Texas. That is the stickiest population in America sitting on top of the migration.

He is direct on power: two to four year transformer backlogs, million square foot data centers drawing more than most cities, why nuclear is the only real answer and why you still need a blended grid. Plus how a family farm held for 70 years becomes approved lots that D.R. Horton and Lennar bid on, the seven day rule behind chronic homelessness, and a California entitlement that ended with a year spent watching flowers grow.

Scott Theeringer is the founder and CEO of M&A DevCo, a Texas land development and private equity firm that acquires and entitles raw land for residential subdivisions across the Texas Triangle, and is building a data center strategy alongside it.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The Texas Triangle Land Fund

02:41 87% of Texans stay in Texas

03:45 How the pandemic ate every lot

14:16 What entitlement actually means

17:07 Inside a one gigawatt facility

19:28 Why nuclear is the only answer

23:16 1,200 a day, three subdivisions

27:59 Seven days to hold, ninety to stabilize

44:59 California, Texas, and a botany study

48:22 China builds 30 reactors, America 2

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.

A $14.73 personal check turned up in the quality of earnings review, and the seller nearly walked over it. JJ Barto explains why that happens.

More on JJ Barto and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/jj-barto

Barto is a partner at Broadwing Capital, a Dallas lower middle market private equity firm focused on first-time institutional capital: founders and families who spent 20 to 40 years building businesses doing $5 to $50 million of EBITDA in business services and niche manufacturing. His description of the firm is that they are sharp folks with really soft elbows.

This is one of the most candid explanations of how lower middle market private equity actually works that a founder can get. Why 60 percent of businesses that go to market never transact, why 30 percent of signed letters of intent fall apart before closing, and why identity loss rather than money is the hardest part of selling a company you built.

He walks through Broadwing's founder intention planning, a diligence process for understanding what the seller wants after the deal closes, and the delegation framework he sums up as a river without boundaries becomes a swamp. Plus who is really competing for these deals now, family offices against searchers against independent sponsors, and how tariffs and uncertainty move valuations.

JJ Barto is a partner at Broadwing Capital, a Dallas private equity firm investing in lower middle market business services and niche manufacturing companies. He has more than 20 years of experience with privately held companies and started his career building log cabins in Colorado.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 "Sharp folks with really soft elbows"

00:47 What lower middle market means

03:39 The private equity villain narrative

05:37 Identity loss when you sell

07:18 Founder intention planning

10:13 A river without boundaries

13:27 Searchers and the new buyer universe

27:25 60% never sell, 30% of LOIs die

30:39 The $14.73 check that broke a seller

47:07 AI as a tool, not a strategy

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.

Major League Soccer folded on Dan Hunt's first day. His brother Clark said congratulations, you have been hired and fired on the same day.

More on Dan Hunt and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/dan-hunt

The Hunt family owns the Kansas City Chiefs and FC Dallas and bought into the Chicago Bulls at the beginning. Clark runs the Chiefs, Dan runs FC Dallas, and they speak at least five times a day. Dan also co-chairs the North Texas FIFA World Cup 2026 organizing committee, a bid he spent eight years working on.

He lays out the business logic behind two stadium projects, one at $200 million and one at $87 million, why Arrowhead comes next, and why North Texas expects the largest economic impact of any 2026 host market, on the order of $2 billion. He is also candid about what sports gambling is doing to the integrity of the game.

Then the family stories, which he says are not told anywhere. Why his parents owned the Bulls from the start and never met Michael Jordan. The night Pele came running across a room shouting his father's name. And getting his mother, the only woman to attend the first 57 Super Bowls, to Arizona when her health was failing. Their father Lamar Hunt presided over the NFL and AFL merger, named the Super Bowl, put $67,000 into the Bulls and founded two other leagues, all before he turned 36.

Dan Hunt is the president and part-owner of FC Dallas and co-chair of the North Texas FIFA World Cup 2026 organizing committee. He is the son of Lamar Hunt, who founded the American Football League, named the Super Bowl and helped bring professional soccer to the United States.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The Taylor Swift effect on the NFL

04:14 Two stadiums, $200M and $87M

12:52 November 2001: the day MLS folded

15:46 The eight-year fight for the bid

23:42 The $2 billion economic impact

27:12 Sports gambling in Texas

33:24 Meeting Pele as a kid

35:18 Why his father would not meet Jordan

39:58 Norma Hunt and 57 Super Bowls

46:58 The $67,000 stake in the Bulls

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.

A founder selling for the first time has done one deal. The private equity buyer across the table has done hundreds. That is a knife to a gunfight.

More on John Willding and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/john-willding

John Willding is a corporate and securities attorney at Stinson who forms roughly 400 business entities a year, about 375 of them limited liability companies, and works across fund formation, private placements and founder-led M&A. Decades into his career he went back to school, and is currently in Georgetown's tax law program.

He walks through what founders get wrong before a sale: why the quality of earnings work has to start long before there is a buyer, how an asset sale and an equity sale produce very different tax outcomes, and how Section 1202 of the tax code lets a founder exempt certain gain entirely. He also explains the four legs of a private equity fund from the lawyer's side.

The tactical advice is the part most attorneys will not say out loud: draft the purchase agreement yourself, first, because whoever holds the pen holds the leverage. Also covered, the current deal landscape, what rate expectations do to timing, the Texas Stock Exchange, and the Clarity Act on digital assets.

John Willding is a corporate and securities attorney at Stinson LLP and a US Army veteran. He represents entrepreneurs through recapitalizations and founder-led M&A, forms roughly 400 entities a year, and works on fund formation and private placements.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The current M&A landscape

11:40 What private equity is doing now

13:47 Rates, and what they do to timing

18:22 The Texas Stock Exchange

21:33 The Clarity Act and digital currency

45:43 The four legs of a PE fund

50:40 Section 1202: exempting founder gain

59:30 Knife to a gunfight

01:00:57 $5,000 of borrowed cash

01:10:08 How to win an M&A negotiation

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.

Level at 3,000 feet in solid cloud on the way back to Dallas, one engine quit. Buddy Ozanne declared an emergency. Then the second engine quit.

More on Buddy Ozanne and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/buddy-ozanne

He tells the whole story here, including what the tower said and the worn wire and droplet of water that caused it. He was a private pilot with 1,700 hours, an instrument rating and a multi-engine rating, until he lost his medical.

The rest of the conversation is about inheritance in a broader sense. Ozanne took over his father's insurance agency in 1976, learned estate planning when the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent, and later moved the firm out of transactional sales into the fee-only registered investment advisor model well before that was normal.

His framework is three kinds of capital a family passes down, human, financial and intellectual, and he argues the third is the hardest to transfer and the most valuable. Around it: why clients stay for communication rather than performance, why you do not need home runs to win, what the Tech Wreck taught him about fundamental research, and hiring people smarter than yourself.

Buddy Ozanne is the founder and president of Probity Advisors, a Dallas fee-only registered investment advisor. He took over his father's insurance agency in 1976 and converted the firm to a fiduciary model, and he specializes in estate planning and multigenerational wealth.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Wealth is not just assets

01:23 Taking over the family business in 1976

03:53 Estate planning at a 70% tax rate

08:10 Switching to a fee-only model

20:44 Hiring people smarter than yourself

27:40 Human, financial, intellectual capital

30:05 Transferring the intellectual kind

34:55 Why clients really stay

49:50 A cold front and a flight plan

54:58 The second engine quits at 3,000 feet

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.

Energy fell from 7 or 8 percent of the S&P to under 2 percent. Institutional capital vacated the sector and left a shortage behind.

More on Jason Downie and Edward Herring and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/jason-downie-edward-herring

Jason Downie and Edward Herring have spent twelve years investing into that gap. They are co-founders and managing partners of Tailwater Capital, one of the most active private equity firms in US energy and environmental infrastructure, running three strategies: a flagship fund that is mostly institutional, a non-operated program targeting a minimum 15 percent cash-on-cash yield, and a royalties vehicle funded largely by family offices.

Their case is that AI and data centers changed the demand picture permanently, because that infrastructure has to run at 99.9999 percent reliability and renewables alone cannot deliver it. Family offices walked deliberately into the void that ESG mandates created, and the returns followed the scarcity of capital rather than the scarcity of hydrocarbons.

They are specific about where the bottlenecks actually sit across upstream, midstream and power, why they avoid subsidies and hyper-leverage, what nuclear realistically contributes and when, and why five of the deals in their fifth fund are repeat relationships. There is also a good stretch on partnership mechanics, including the no yelling rule.

Jason Downie and Edward Herring are the co-founders and managing partners of Tailwater Capital, a Dallas private equity firm focused on energy and environmental infrastructure. Founded in 2013, the firm runs flagship, non-operated and royalties strategies across the energy value chain.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 AI, data centers, and reliable power

04:08 Why institutional capital left energy

05:32 The shale revolution, explained

08:25 Capital scarcity and higher returns

18:45 Target returns and risk discipline

28:06 Family offices against institutions

31:43 Policy risk, and avoiding subsidies

39:27 Nuclear power, regulation, and reality

45:24 Where the bottlenecks actually are

52:58 "No yelling" and the rules they run on

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 and Vela Wood.

"On top of the world Monday morning, and lost it all Monday night." Tracy Curry was 21 with a number one record when a car accident took his voice.

More on Tracy "The D.O.C." Curry and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/tracy-doc-curry

He spent 35 years waiting for it to come back. It now looks like AI will bring it back for him, reconstituted from old stems in partnership with Howard University's new AI and Black Music department. He wants to release a record in his current voice first, to make the case that this voice is powerful and beautiful too.

The D.O.C. wrote for N.W.A and Eazy-E and co-founded Death Row Records with Dr. Dre, shaping the sound of an era while, as he puts it, experiencing success through other people. He is direct here about why it never felt like his, and about the 35 years in between that nobody asks about.

What he is building now is in southern Dallas: Dreams Experience Academy, a school organized around gaming, music, the creator economy and software development, where attendance is the price of admission. He is also a minority owner of Radcliffe Football Club and is working on a documentary.

Tracy Curry, known as The D.O.C., is a rapper and songwriter who wrote for N.W.A and Eazy-E and co-founded Death Row Records with Dr. Dre. He lost his voice in a car accident at 21. He now runs DOC Cares and is building Dreams Experience Academy in southern Dallas.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The accident, and surviving it at 21

00:59 "Go from number 1 to 0"

04:21 Why he built a school

05:52 Attendance as the price of admission

12:28 "It felt like it wasn't my success"

18:17 The school's four verticals

19:42 Using AI to rebuild the old voice

21:18 The documentary, and the Dre scene

40:36 "I wouldn't change a single thing"

59:35 Happiness over the prison of wealth

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

DOC Cares: doccares.org/

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 and Vela Wood.

There are 4,400 public companies in the US. Nicole Chambers says about 1,700 of them would not qualify to list on the Texas Stock Exchange.

More on Nicole Chambers and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/nicole-chambers

The point, she argues, is not exclusivity. It is cleaning up a market that shrank from more than 9,000 public companies in the 1990s to 4,400 today while exchanges elsewhere in the world grew. She explains what a duopoly does to pricing and responsiveness when both incumbents win half the time by default, and what listing standards are actually for.

Chambers is global managing director of the Texas Stock Exchange, which has Form 1 approval from the SEC and is targeting a 2026 launch, backed by BlackRock, Citadel and Charles Schwab. She spent nearly 17 years in capital markets, most recently as senior managing director of listings at Nasdaq.

Also covered: Delaware against Texas corporate law and why companies are reconsidering where they incorporate, the talent migration out of New York, what it takes technically to build a trading engine and market center from scratch with about 100 people, and why she reads Y'all Street as Wall Street made accessible rather than a joke about Texas.

Nicole Chambers is the Global Managing Director of the Texas Stock Exchange, a new national securities exchange backed by BlackRock, Citadel and Charles Schwab. She spent nearly 17 years in capital markets, most recently as senior managing director of listings at Nasdaq, and is an SMU graduate.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The public company problem

05:32 9,000 public companies then, 4,400 now

07:42 What a duopoly does to issuers

08:19 Why TXSE exists

16:38 Delaware alternatives for companies

27:18 BlackRock, Citadel, and Schwab

32:29 About 100 people building an exchange

43:35 Why 1,700 companies would not qualify

50:03 The DFW Airport comparison

01:00:18 The launch timeline

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Texas Stock Exchange: txse.com

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 and Vela Wood.

"Yellow lights don't turn green." Ken Hersh built a $20 billion energy firm on acting on the small warning instead of explaining it away.

More on Ken Hersh and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/ken-hersh

He co-founded NGP Energy Capital Management in 1988 and grew it past $20 billion under management across multiple funds, deploying more than $12 billion and generating a 30 percent annualized return over 27 years. From 2016 to 2025 he was president and chief executive of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

The method is the interesting part. He backs operators rather than assets, and he thinks probabilistically in a business where most exploration carries roughly a 30 percent chance of success, which makes a deterministic spreadsheet worse than useless. He screens hard for the documented biases that destroy returns: groupthink, escalation of commitment, recency bias.

He also tells the Richard Rainwater story and explains what Rainwater's actual magic was, why first-day panic is a sign you are in the right job, how to read integrity in a management team, and what feeding the ducks means when liquidity appears and everyone else is waiting for a better price.

Ken Hersh co-founded NGP Energy Capital Management and built it into a natural resources private equity firm with more than $20 billion under management. He served as president and chief executive of the George W. Bush Presidential Center from 2016 to 2025 and wrote The Fastest Tortoise: Winning in Industries I Knew Nothing About.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 How he changed energy private equity

01:17 Why first-day panic is a good sign

07:47 Partnering with Richard Rainwater

11:30 The simple equation that built NGP

13:30 Backing operators, not assets

19:10 Humans are terrible decision-makers

21:17 Yellow lights do not turn green

27:24 How to evaluate people and integrity

40:57 Feeding the ducks while they quack

47:53 Base hits over spreadsheet heroes

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

The Fastest Tortoise: amzn.to/4i9ZU5H

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 and Vela Wood.