Tom Montgomery and the business behind the numbers

In early 2025, Tom Montgomery founded an investment firm with two of his sons. Woodfin Capital Partners would invest in private equity deals as a principal. For a career already crowded with partnerships, portfolios and company names, this was a particularly personal addition: another business to build, this time with family at the table.

The route there began with accounting. Montgomery earned his undergraduate degree at Texas Tech in 1980 and his master’s in 1981. He became a CPA, helped establish a Dallas accounting practice, built an investment operation at Beal Bank, and co-founded the firm whose initials, MCG, would become familiar to hundreds of colleagues. Today he is Managing Member of Montgomery Capital Advisers in Plano.

That sequence has an interesting rhythm. Advising businesses led to financing them. Building a professional practice led to joining a larger one. Years of working with other owners eventually led to a new venture with his own sons. The recurring subject is the operating business: how it is organized, how it gets money, and what the people running it can do next.

Two degrees, then a seat beside the owner

Montgomery’s two Texas Tech degrees arrived one year apart: a BBA in accounting in 1980, followed by an MS in accounting and taxation in 1981. Accounting supplied the professional foundation for a career that would keep crossing into mergers, acquisitions and financing. The qualifications stayed relevant even as the size and type of his work changed.

Before Beal Capital Markets, he was the founding and managing partner of Montgomery Baggett & Drews, a full-service Dallas CPA firm with 25 professionals. His work there centered on companies dealing with tax questions, transactions and financing. These were matters that brought an accountant close to consequential decisions, well beyond the annual ritual of getting the books in order.

A merger puts a price on years of work. Financing creates obligations that persist after the signatures dry. Tax planning affects what the participants keep. Montgomery’s early specialties sat alongside one another at precisely those points. His later career makes more sense when viewed from that starting position: a professional already working where ownership, money and business plans meet.

Texas Tech remains part of the picture. He appears on the university’s School of Accounting advisory council and among its 2025 accounting alumni honorees. The connection joins his present work to the classroom credentials at the beginning. The accounting degree has had a long working life; it has certainly earned more than a frame.

When the adviser began deploying capital

At Beal Capital Markets, Montgomery was responsible for starting and growing an investment subsidiary of Beal Bank focused on public and private corporate finance. By the time he left, it had invested more than $2 billion in high-yield bonds and direct company investments. That figure belongs to the operation’s portfolio, a measure of institutional activity rather than personal wealth.

The move widened his responsibilities. An adviser can help a company weigh a transaction. An investment operation must also decide where its own capital goes. In Montgomery’s career, those roles became connected: the background in tax and transactions accompanied work in securities and direct investments, bringing the mechanics of a business into the investment decision.

The portfolio combined high-yield bonds with investments directly in companies. That range is worth pausing over. Public securities and individual businesses present different routes into corporate finance. Montgomery’s Beal chapter placed both within the same professional remit, before his later work concentrated on private investments and the needs of owner-managed enterprises.

It is tempting to let the billion-dollar number swallow the rest of the story. Yet his next major chapter was an accounting and advisory partnership. The career did not proceed along a simple ladder from small practice to large portfolio. It moved between building firms and financing businesses, with the transaction experience traveling in both directions.

A partnership that grew beyond its initials

In 2003, Montgomery co-founded Montgomery Coscia Greilich. The full-service CPA firm grew to more than 300 professionals. By January 2019, it counted 29 partners and offered taxation, assurance, sales and use tax, and consulting services. A founder’s name on the door had become an organization with several disciplines and hundreds of working relationships.

Baker Tilly announced the combination that January, specifying an effective date of June 1, 2019. MCG would join a larger accounting and advisory business as Baker Tilly expanded its Texas presence. For Montgomery’s career, the transaction closed a substantial chapter of firm building: a practice started in 2003 had become part of a broader organization sixteen years later.

The human scale of that growth appears in the recollections of former colleagues. Chase Murphy, looking back on joining MCG in January 2010, thanked Montgomery and Matt Coscia for hiring him. His reflection followed sixteen years with MCG and then Baker Tilly. A hiring decision at one firm had become the beginning of a career that continued through the change of name.

Montgomery responded warmly to that anniversary, celebrating Murphy’s effect on people and the community. In another public exchange, former MCG colleague Roman Villard remembered Montgomery’s influence and a phrase associated with him: being significant in the lives of others. These are small, specific glimpses of the relationships left behind when a business outgrows its original sign.

The businesses between the financing categories

Montgomery’s present work at MCA brings the story back to owners. The firm concentrates on lower middle market, owner-managed businesses, using debt, equity and distressed investments. Its stated mission includes direct term debt and preferred equity investments in Texas companies, with emphasis on businesses for which traditional financing options are unavailable.

That focus gives the work a recognizable audience. The owner is part of the investment context, alongside the company and its capital needs. MCA also provides advisory services to businesses in its portfolios. Financing and advice remain joined, much as tax, transactions and financing were joined in Montgomery’s earlier professional practice.

The firm describes an approach built around selecting compatible partners, tailoring structures and growth plans, and addressing intricate or overlooked situations. These are its stated intentions, rather than a promise about the outcome of any investment. Still, they explain the kind of assignment MCA chooses to pursue: a situation that calls for attention to the particular business.

Montgomery’s investment work has ranged across commercial real estate, oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, professional services, technology and financial services. A 2022 finance roundtable biography also identified him as the lead on several large multifamily and mixed-use development investments in North Texas and elsewhere in the state. His professional territory extends from operating companies to physical developments.

The people around him bring their own experience. Carlos Lacayo joined MCA in 2019 after work at Citi and Nomura. Sharla Gunn has supported Montgomery and the firm’s operations since 2009. Fund controller Myra Flick joined in 2017. Credit, structuring, operations and accounting all appear in the team, giving the founder’s broad remit a set of distinct working counterparts.

A conversation that keeps returning to people

Montgomery’s public comments about the Dallas chapter of Financial Executives International emphasize peer relationships, candid dialogue and practical insight. He calls it a forum for working through difficult decisions with other finance leaders. For someone whose roles have spanned advice, investment and firm building, that is a fitting professional circle: people who have had to make decisions, too.

In September 2025, he joined Rogers Healy for episode 98 of the Rogers That podcast. Their conversation covered his route from accounting into investing, leadership, time management and handing over responsibility. The episode’s chapter list moves from schooling to motivation, from the origin of his company to what comes next. It gives the career room to extend beyond its balance-sheet milestones.

The late portion of the interview turns to legacy and advice. Those subjects sit naturally beside the comments from former MCG colleagues. There is a business history measured in portfolio size and professional headcount, and another visible in people who still remember who hired them. Both belong in a profile of a founder whose work has involved building partnerships.

Montgomery also serves as a trustee of Communities Foundation of Texas. The civic role adds a further institutional connection to his investment and advisory work. It places his financial experience in a community setting, alongside the university association and professional network that have remained part of his public life.

“strong peer relationships and candid, experience-driven dialogue that builds real trust”

Tom Montgomery, on FEI Dallas

The next partnership shares a surname

Woodfin Capital Partners adds a new configuration to this history. Founded in early 2025 with two of Montgomery’s sons, the firm focuses on private equity investing as a principal. The detail is modest enough to fit in a biography’s opening paragraph, but it changes the feel of the career: a new company now has a family relationship built into its founding.

The earlier chapters make that addition interesting. Montgomery has already helped build a 25-professional practice, an investment operation with a multibillion-dollar portfolio, and an advisory firm with more than 300 professionals. Woodfin arrives after those experiences. Its significance at this stage lies in the venture’s actual founding and its shared participants, rather than projections about what it might become.

The thread running through Montgomery’s work is easier to see from this end of the story. Numbers have accompanied it throughout: two degrees, a large portfolio, a growing partnership. So have people: fellow founders, company owners, colleagues, peers and, now, sons. His career keeps bringing those two sets of facts into the same room. The newest partnership offers another occasion to put them to work.