Sold to Blackstone the Morning of the IPO

Margot Carter has worked on hundreds of deals and can count the ones that went badly on one hand. Her rule: the best deal you do is sometimes the deal you don't do.

She was a New York lawyer at Morgan Lewis, specializing in roll-ups that merged eight to 10 companies and took them public at the same time, when one of her clients, FYI, later Sourcecorp, asked her to move to Dallas. At 27 she became its chief legal officer, helped finalize the IPO, and ran a deal machine that bought two or three businesses a month. FYI scanned and converted microfilm government records so they could be searched, 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 describes working alongside Howard Lutnick and helping start the foundation that supported the families. She went on to help sell SoundView to Charles Schwab, served as general counsel of The Princeton Review, and returned to Dallas in 2010 as global chief legal officer of RealPage.

She treats the legal seat as a growth job. RealPage collected billions of dollars in rent payments, so she pushed it to become a licensed money transmitter and earn a share of those payments, starting in the cities with the most rental units. On the board of Interior Logic Group, an installer of cabinets, countertops and flooring for home builders, she helped find and buy a virtual home design platform so the company would be seen as a technology platform and valued on revenue instead of EBITDA. Interior Logic ran an IPO and a sale on parallel paths, and Blackstone bought it on the morning it was set to price.

Today she sits on three NYSE boards and runs Cien, the AI company she co-founded 10 years ago and bootstrapped until it had revenue. Cien takes a copy of a company's CRM data, standardizes and analyzes it, and returns a plan to grow revenue and cut costs. For one client it found $180 million in opportunities, and $20 million was recovered within a month. She explains why COVID turned management consulting firms into customers, why she thinks token pricing will give way to outcome-based pricing, and why she believes AI is still in the first inning.

With Lane Carrick she gets into why deals fall apart before closing and why small deals are often the hardest. She shares the three-question filter she uses before joining a board, the diligence a director should do first, and how boards use a skills matrix to recruit. She also covers the Women on Boards 2020 campaign she helped start in Dallas, Living Mountain Capital, the Texas Stock Exchange and NYSE Texas, Texas versus Delaware incorporation, the World Cup, and mentoring Dallas Trinity's players. Her book pick is Michael Singer's The Surrender Experiment.