The Deal Table

"This guy just made $100 million doing plumbing supplies." Michael Sarner's team wires those checks to founders, and it still tickles him.

More on Michael Sarner and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/michael-sarner

Sarner is the CEO of Capital Southwest, a publicly traded business development company that has grown from $285 million in cash to $2 billion in assets. It lends to lower middle market companies doing $3 to $15 million of EBITDA, usually as the debt in a leveraged buyout, and carries roughly $1.3 billion of market capitalization.

His core argument is a risk one. Lower middle market loans with real covenants, monthly reporting and 3 to 4 times leverage produce better risk-adjusted returns than upper middle market paper running at a true 7 times, and he calls banks competing at 3.5 times the height of irrationality. Monthly reporting is not paperwork, it is an early warning system.

For any owner thinking about institutional capital, the checklist is the value here: positive cash flow, bench strength underneath the founder, no customer or supplier concentration, financials that survive scrutiny, and a three to five year plan. Also covered: what rescue capital actually is, and why "if you get hit by a bus" is a genuine underwriting question.

Michael Sarner is the chief executive of Capital Southwest, a publicly traded business development company in Dallas that lends to lower middle market businesses. Under his leadership the firm has grown from $285 million in cash to roughly $2 billion in assets.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 What a BDC actually does

07:25 Why lower middle market is safer

08:35 The typical deal: $3M to $15M EBITDA

12:10 Bank competition and irrationality

16:40 Covenants as an early warning system

19:06 What rescue capital really is

21:58 Being the first institutional money in

39:10 True leverage: 3.5x against 7x

51:41 "$100 million doing plumbing supplies"

55:15 Roll-ups and what founders build toward

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Capital Southwest: capitalsouthwest.com

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 and Vela Wood.

"This isn't a 5-year thing. This is a 2 or 3 months from now thing." Lane Kasselman thinks AI agents are about to start settling in crypto.

More on Lane Kasselman and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/lane-kasselman

The argument is mechanical rather than ideological: when a machine pays another machine, it will use whatever rail is cheapest and fastest, and that is not the banking system. He explains atomic settlement, what it changes about how money actually moves, and why the store-of-value case is clearest in Argentina rather than on Wall Street.

Kasselman is president and chief business officer of Blockchain.com, which turned 13 during this recording, founded the same year as Coinbase. The company holds 90 million wallets and 42 million verified users across 190 countries, offers more than 800 assets, and runs the world's largest non-custodial brokerage. He has led it through seven acquisitions and a partnership with the Dallas Cowboys, after earlier stints at AT&T and a very early Uber.

He is also useful on the operating side: what non-custodial security means at 90 million accounts, why he wants a permanent regulatory framework rather than case-by-case enforcement, the three rules he took from Uber, why the company moved to Dallas for reasons he insists were not the tax rate, and how he reversed remote work without going back to nine to five.

Lane Kasselman is the president and chief business officer of Blockchain.com, one of the oldest companies in crypto, with 90 million wallets and 42 million verified users across 190 countries. He previously held senior roles at AT&T and at Uber in its early years, and is the founder of Kestrel Financial.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 90 million wallets, 190 countries

04:00 From "fake internet money" to believer

09:08 Argentina and the store of value case

14:05 "It's 2 or 3 months from now"

19:45 Atomic settlement against the old rails

25:15 Non-custodial at 90 million accounts

27:47 Wanting a permanent rulebook

33:34 The three rules he learned at Uber

44:45 Seven acquisitions, three strategies

54:27 Reversing remote work

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Blockchain.com: blockchain.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.

In 2008 Troy Eckard lost 85 percent of his net worth in six months. Three of his five banks went insolvent and called his loans.

More on Troy Eckard and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/troy-eckard

Eleven years later he had eight employees in one room, and COVID opened the window he had been waiting 40 years for. Starting in 2019 with 120 private partners, Eckard Enterprises acquired $1.1 billion in assets over five and a half years and now holds interests in roughly 8,500 wells and 90,000 net mineral acres, with its own exploration company drilling.

He is blunt about an industry he calls the worst marketer on the planet, and about the food chain that paid everyone before the investor ever saw a return. He explains why drill baby drill does not move a single rig when the economics do not work, why the country can have 500 years of oil and still leave it underground, and what he saw in 2015, when more billion-dollar companies went broke in twelve months than in any industry he knows.

The operating lessons are the quiet part: rebuilding discipline after 50, running a few hundred million dollars on spreadsheets until someone asked what happens if he gets hit by a bus, spending the marketing budget on rooms instead of ads, and building a 10-year plan in a business where everyone else builds a 12-month one.

Troy Eckard is the chairman of Eckard Enterprises, a family-owned energy company he has run through every major oil and gas cycle since the mid-1980s. The firm holds interests in roughly 8,500 wells and 90,000 net mineral acres and operates its own exploration arm.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Why "drill baby drill" is not working

03:54 Surviving multiple industry crashes

06:40 The COVID window: 8 people to $1.1B

11:22 "Money is easy. Good deals are not."

33:56 500 years of oil: price against scarcity

42:28 2008: 85% gone, three banks insolvent

54:04 "Too much success scares bankers"

56:34 "What if I got run over by a bus?"

58:27 40 years of waiting for this window

01:08:09 Marketing budget on rooms, not ads

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

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.

"Work-life balance doesn't exist. That's a false narrative." Brint Ryan built a $1.7 billion firm on the alternative.

More on Brint Ryan and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/brint-ryan

Ryan is the founder and chief executive of Ryan, the largest firm in the world dedicated exclusively to business taxes. He started it as a two-person business in 1991 and has grown it every year since, 33 consecutive years, to 6,100 employees, 18,000 clients across 60 countries, roughly $1.7 billion in revenue and $400 million of EBITDA. It has run a results-only, remote-capable model since 2008.

He explains what work-life success means in practice and how it changed the way the firm pays people, why he treats generative AI as a force multiplier after starting with narrow machine learning years earlier, and how tax moves from an annual compliance exercise to real-time optimization and managed services.

The origin story is worth the listen on its own: leaving the Big Six with no clients, and a first big win of $300,000 recovered that produced a $61,000 fee, which set the success-based model the firm still runs on. Also covered: sitting on the Lieutenant Governor's tax advisory committee, the first private equity deal, and the $50 million gift to the University of North Texas.

Brint Ryan is the founder and CEO of Ryan, the largest tax services firm in the world focused exclusively on business taxes, with 6,100 employees and roughly $1.7 billion in revenue. He founded the firm in Dallas in 1991 and chairs the University of North Texas System Board of Regents.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 "Imagine taking government out of tax"

06:40 Work-life balance is a false narrative

08:58 Why almost everything is success-based

14:28 Tax grows 5 to 7% globally, every year

17:44 Generative AI as a force multiplier

22:58 Where managed services started

43:05 "In the room when it was written"

49:20 The UNT gift as an investment

57:38 The first private equity deal

01:05:22 Do not wait until you are ready to sell

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

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.

A friend hot-glued a sensor onto a plastic breathing device over a weekend. That prototype cleared clinical trials and went to the FDA.

More on Alex Farahmand and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/alex-farahmand

Dr. Alex Farahmand is an emergency medicine physician and the co-founder and president of Tidal Medical Technologies. After his fellowship he spent six months reading and rebuilding his sense of what he was actually good at, then launched and scaled a group of urgent care clinics before turning to devices.

The business mechanic is what makes the product valuable. When a patient leaves the hospital without pneumonia and comes back inside 30 days, it counts as hospital-acquired pneumonia, and Medicare treats that very differently. His connected incentive spirometer sits directly on that reimbursement line, which is why a hospital will pay for prevention.

He is candid about building a device category that did not exist: proving a brand new patented product through trials from scratch, why bedbound patients carry the highest risk, whether to integrate with hospital records or stand alone, and a go-to-market of smaller hospitals first, founder-led sales and American manufacturing.

Dr. Alex Farahmand is an emergency medicine physician and the co-founder and president of Tidal Medical Technologies, which makes InSee, a connected incentive spirometer built to reduce postoperative pneumonia and hospital readmissions. He previously launched and scaled a group of urgent care clinics.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The weekend hot-glue prototype

05:10 The identity crisis after fellowship

11:00 Scaling urgent care clinics

19:00 How the smart spirometer was born

21:30 The Medicare readmission incentive

28:20 SaaS plus risk reduction

32:00 Integrate with records or stand alone

39:40 Trials, FDA, and revenue

44:00 American-made, founder-led sales

53:00 Smaller hospitals first

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.

Weeks into his term as Mayor of Dallas, Tom Leppert cold-called the CEO of AT&T. Eleven months later the headquarters moved to Dallas.

More on Tom Leppert and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/tom-leppert

He walks through the relocation in detail: the $5 million Dallas put on the table, why he never believed the 800-jobs figure everyone quoted, and the $55 million in AT&T community giving he counted sixteen months after the move. It is the clearest account of incentive math a city has offered on this show.

Leppert is the former Mayor of Dallas and the former chief executive of Turner Construction and Kaplan. A White House Fellow who served in the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, he took the Turner job on one condition: that he could move the company's headquarters out of New York.

The rest is what a mayor sees that a resident does not. Why companies keep leaving the coasts, where Dallas growth is now straining, the policy mistakes other states keep making, and what he thinks is broken in K-12 and in the cost structure of higher education.

Tom Leppert is the former Mayor of Dallas and the former chief executive of Turner Construction and Kaplan. He was a White House Fellow in the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, became a chief executive at 34, and now hosts the Intersections podcast.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 The cold call to AT&T

08:23 McKinsey, and a CEO job at 34

10:20 Lessons from the White House

18:59 Why he ran for mayor

32:00 Moving Turner's HQ to Dallas

37:32 The AT&T relocation, in full

41:22 What the move was actually worth

44:05 Growth, and where it strains

47:29 Policy mistakes other states make

01:20:04 High-speed rail to Houston

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.

A Memphis trustee wanted to liquidate the Elvis Presley estate into municipal bonds. Chris Gannett helped build the alternative.

More on Chris Gannett and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/chris-gannett

He describes the Graceland job as being a custodian rather than a marketer, and the intellectual property strategy that followed turned an estate into a global business with a measurable effect on Memphis tourism. From there came American Idol, the 19 Entertainment and FremantleMedia joint venture, and the 2012 sale that funded his own firm.

What he does now is stranger and more useful. Gannett treats the founder as the biggest risk variable in any deal, and uses cognitive behavioral coaching, grounded in a Berkeley methodology, as the way to de-risk a person the way you would de-risk a balance sheet. His firm combines coaching, advisory and capital in one structure.

The personal thread is losing his father and the reprioritization that followed, plus a clear-eyed view of what replaced the era of three networks and three record labels.

Chris Gannett has held chief marketing officer and general manager roles at Sony, American Idol, Elvis Presley Enterprises, TheBlaze and MediaMath. That work contributed to multiple Grammy and Emmy Awards, three Guinness Records, three turnarounds and three exits. In 2022 he founded Gannett Partners, combining coaching, advisory and capital across 10 countries.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Custodian of the Elvis estate

03:15 Graceland and Memphis tourism

06:30 The IP strategy that saved it

10:45 Founding Gannett Partners

14:30 Coaching, advisory, and capital

18:45 Cognitive behavioral coaching

22:40 The founder as the risk variable

27:45 What "permission to win" means

50:30 Losing his father, and refocusing

01:03:00 American Idol and artist development

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.

More than 15,000 Johnson Controls engineers became CBRE employees on day one. Jimmy Tran spent two years on the buyer's side of that carve-out.

More on Jimmy Tran and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/jimmy-tran

He led over $2 billion in acquisitions at CBRE, closing roughly a deal a month, and earnings tripled across eight years. Two years of work on the carve-out came down to about 90 days of real diligence, and he is candid about what that pace does to a team and to a thesis.

Then he went the other direction. An area development agreement signed in 2019, a Code Ninjas center opened in Preston Hollow months before COVID shut customer-facing businesses, two more centers bought from an owner who wanted out, 15 staff, and all three sold this January. Escrow, lawyers, and a seller's perspective on what a small business is actually worth.

Both ends of the same job produce the same conclusion: culture eats strategy for breakfast, three in ten deals near $50 million die between letter of intent and closing, and you can destroy an enormous amount of value in an acquisition that looked good on paper.

Jimmy Tran is the founder of Oak Lawn Ventures and the former vice president of corporate strategy and M&A at CBRE, where he led over $2 billion in acquisitions. He consulted at Bain and Company in Dallas, Hong Kong and Singapore, holds a joint Harvard degree, and serves on the board of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Refugee, not immigrant

11:05 Bain paid for Harvard, on a deal

33:05 Why you buy: capability or market

35:55 A deal a month, a dozen a year

36:28 The Johnson Controls carve-out

40:41 Two years of work, 90 days of diligence

42:32 Culture eats strategy for breakfast

53:53 Sellers who think it is worth $20M

01:01:11 3 in 10 deals die after the LOI

01:03:56 How M&A destroys value

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.

Scott Harper and his co-founder quit over an ethical disagreement and started Dialexa with $50 and a domain name. Twelve years later IBM bought it.

More on Scott Harper and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/scott-harper

He is specific about the parts founders usually skip. Selling consulting before he had the experience to deliver it. Hiring for talent over experience, then fixing the mismatches that creates. The difference between corporate DNA and entrepreneurial DNA in the people you bring in. Going from control freak to chief executive, and hiring a chief operating officer to make growth survivable.

The exit sequence is the useful part for any owner. He sold a minority stake to a private equity group in February 2020, one month before COVID. Then he decided to run an actual process rather than wait for a buyer to knock, and chose on price, fit and people, with equity distributed to employees.

Along the way Dialexa served Uber, Amazon and Toyota, helped define digital product engineering as a category, and incubated ventures including Vinli and Robin Autopilot.

Scott Harper co-founded Dialexa in 2010 and grew it into a digital product engineering firm serving Uber, Amazon and Toyota before IBM acquired it in 2022. He has incubated ventures including Vinli and Robin Autopilot, and was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Quitting over ethics, starting with $50

05:20 Consulting without the experience

07:40 Product engineering against IT

20:00 Spinning out Vinli and Robin

26:00 Hiring talent over experience

33:00 Corporate DNA against founder DNA

39:50 From control freak to CEO

44:00 Hiring a COO to grow

48:30 Run a process, do not wait

54:30 Equity and employee ownership

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.

Attackers are already stealing encrypted data they cannot read, and storing it. Quantum computing is what turns that into a strategy.

More on John Donovan and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/john-donovan

John Donovan explains steal-and-store in plain language, why the quantum race is really a security race, and what that means for anyone whose data is sitting in someone else's archive waiting for the machine that opens it.

He was CEO of AT&T Communications, where he ran innovation strategy for more than a decade, drove the global 5G rollout and pushed the company toward software-defined networking. He now runs Qudit, investing in quantum computing, AI, hypersonics and high-performance systems, and sits on the board of Lockheed Martin.

On AI he is precise rather than breathless: four real constraints, accuracy, cost, privacy and explainability, why the race is still wide open, and what DeepSeek changed. He is also unusually direct about how he learns. Cold-calling experts he has never met, reading three books at a time on one subject, and checking the author's bio before reading a single line.

John Donovan is the founder of Qudit, investing in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonics. He was previously chief executive of AT&T Communications, where he led the global 5G rollout, and he serves on the board of Lockheed Martin.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Cold calling experts he has never met

05:45 Bleeding edge against leading edge

10:15 The three-book framework

15:20 Why resumes are obsolete

32:10 Read the author bio first

52:20 AI's four real constraints

56:30 DeepSeek, and a wide open race

01:04:15 Quantum computing, explained simply

01:06:10 Steal-and-store, and your old data

01:12:30 Hypersonics: bullet against bullet

Newsletter: thedealtablepodcast.com/connect

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

Instagram: instagram.com/thedealtablepodcast/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-deal-table/

The Deal Table is hosted by Ryan Harper and Lane Carrick, filmed in Dallas, and produced by Harper Belmont Media.