What’s the CFO equivalent of a Super Bowl? Leading a business through an IPO or a big merger?
For Dan Crumb, his Super Bowl is the Super Bowl, because he’s CFO of the Kansas City Chiefs, which on Sunday could win a record-breaking third consecutive championship.
Crumb, who’s led the team’s finances since 2010, spoke with CFO Brew about what it’s like to be an NFL CFO, from budgeting and forecasting to what it’s like on game day. (TL;DR: We did not ask about Taylor Swift.)
What’s it like being the CFO of an NFL team?
Behind the scenes, we do a lot of the same work. We’re responsible for financial statement preparation, for financial statement analysis, investment analysis, all of those things. But where the real differences come in is…game day. Being part of that and having a stadium with 70,000+ people in it is a really big difference between what I’ve done in the past and what other CFOs do.
There’s different considerations as far as risk management, how we prepare and get our building ready for the game day, and how we budget for all those things. The budgeting for that type of work is very different than budgeting or planning in a manufacturing company or a consumer packaged goods company.
There’s differences in how we business plan, how we budget. It’s very seasonal, as you can imagine, and we have very specific things that we have to plan for and budget for. In other companies, their business may be cyclical, but it’s not as focused on a specific season. Our games are very dependent on the weather, and cold weather impacts our games in different ways. So we forecast out and we budget when we prepare our plan for the year. When our games are impacts how we forecast and budget our revenues, because we know when we’re in the colder weather environment [at the] end of the season, we have a different mix of products that we sell. We tend more toward warming foods, hot chocolate, things like that—blanket sales, coats.
The IT department reports up to me. So on the game day, we’re responsible for all the technology in the building. On the finance strategy and analytics side, we have a crew that is focused on a game day dashboard. [We monitor] when vehicles are coming into the complex and getting parked and…when [fans] are going through the entry gates and getting into the building…in advance of kickoff.
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Does your financial planning and analysis include a potential Super Bowl win?
We don’t ever budget for playoffs. You just never know what’s going to happen. But what we do is, once we know we’re in, we have a pro forma built already, and we get updated expenses from and revenues from the various departments.
In our business planning, we don’t have it built into the budget. We’re always planning and preparing the same way, whether we win 17 games or we win zero games.
But I would say that for us, winning the Super Bowl [and] being on a good trajectory, we’ve capitalized in a number of ways…with the success of the team on the field. It enables us to attract new corporate partners, or to increase existing corporate partners’ investment in us.
What’s the week ahead of the Super Bowl like for you and your staff?
We're really focused on wrapping this week up. Going into next week is all the payments. There's a lot of payments for tickets. There's payments for our air charter, to get the team and to get our staff down there, hotels, etc. We're basically making sure that we get all the payments out and get everything taken care of.
When you’re at the game, will you be able to relax and just watch, or does your CFO hat have to stay on?
I’ll actually be there [as] a fan watching the game. Because all of our work will be done, and it’ll all be the team at that point.
Obviously I’m thinking as I’m watching the flow of the game…if we do win, then it’s planning…all these things we’re going to do. We’ve got plans in place for both scenarios.
So…as CFO, do you get a Super Bowl ring?
Yes. All of the full-time staff get a Super Bowl ring if we win. I get to go down on the field after the [game]. The three Super Bowls we won, I got to go down on the field and congratulate players that I knew.