ACG New York’s Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Christine Melendez with ACG Global. I'm here at the ACG New York 20th anniversary of the wine event in historic Gotham Hall. I'm here with Tony Hill from Trivest, who is also the ACG deal Max, chair of the event. Tony, how are you doing? Great honor to be here tonight. 20 years, huh? I guess so. I mean, it seems like a lot of fun and. They seem to be having a ton of fun out there tonight, but we're here to talk about Deal Max, which is our favorite topic to talk about. So let's get into it. How about that? First of all, honor to be the chair of Deal Max 2025. So thank you for bringing me into the under the tent. Riding on a tremendous amount of momentum from prior years. We've, you know, we're I'm following the footsteps of Janna Schlageter, Aaron Pollock, excellent chair people who have really managed to just really scale up the quality and intensity and value add of deal Max. So look, it's an honor to just follow in their footsteps and you know, hoping that we can borrow a lot of what they did and also improve upon it in 2025. I think if we can continue down the trajectory that we think we're on where it's going to be. Another high watermark year for that conference. And yeah, look, one of the reasons I'm here today, of course, is the stump for Deal Max. So great to be up here for the wine tasting and, excuse me, the wine gala, but also like getting the word out. You know, we ACG Deal Max is the number one, the most dynamic and a conference in the continent for deal makers. And so, yeah, great to get the word out. Yeah, it's great to be here talking about it. You know, you talked about kind of leveling up the event. One of the things we spent a lot of time on when we first started working on it is how do we do that? Like, what are we doing? And the first thing we really talked about was bringing in fresh voices and new ideas. And people are making deals, having conversations and networking with each other. But how do you make it fun and how do you make it different? And one of those things was, you know, bringing in new people. Talk a little bit about how you really approached community formation this year. I mean, look, first of all, you guys carry the 90% of the workload on Deal Max and as Chairman, it's an honor to be able to kind of bring in different folks to help be the cheerleaders and the influencers, if you will, behind your Maxes. We deeply believe in it. We get value out of it and we want to communicate that. I think the strategy for this year and may or may not be different from prior years, the simple, you know, we want to get a lot of fresh blood in there. Ideal Max and ACG in general, look, there's a lot of, you know, usual suspects, if you will, that we all know. And they're great and we're keeping, you know, yeah, they're amazing. They're amazing. We are, we're striking the right balance between the diehards and then the next generation of deal makers and business development professionals and lawyers and accountants who, you know, we want, we want to want them to usher in, you know, the, the, the future iterations of Deal Max. So to answer your question. Look, we're sticking, we're going to keep the core DNA of the Deal Max committee, but we also want to bring in voices from across the country, you know, different practices, investment banking and private equity law, accounting, different regions, different chapters, different ages and just, you know, again, creating a lot of diversity. And the truth is that so far the impact, even though we're early in this has been extremely noticeable. I mean, I believe we're tracking ahead of where we were. Last year, Yeah, we are, which is great news. Thank you, Thank you, thank you committee. Thank you everybody. It's exciting. It's I think it could be the most diverse deal Max main committee in recent years if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, look, very happy to be a part of that. Yeah, I think we did. I think we struck a great balance, always an opportunity to do better, different, more. Room for improvement, but I think we did a solid job and I'm really happy with the work that you did. You reached out to a lot of people that we didn't have connections with, and I'm really happy we're making the tent bigger. Yeah, there's always room. We want this to continue improving. And look, we have our own ideas, but the truth is that we just want to provide an experience that is going to be value added to everybody. So yes, absolutely. Anyone who's seeing this, if you've got an idea, large or small, on how to make deal Max better. Please reach out to me or Christine or anybody. Let us know. Tony, thanks for sitting down with me at this great New York wine event. Any last words for our viewers? Yeah, well, it's my pleasure. And look, I want to see you at Deal Max. I'm going to see all of you at Deal Max. We're expecting over 3000 investment bankers and PE professionals, you name it. Don't be a square come deal. Thanks everyone.