What does the CFO of Burning Man put in his spreadsheets?

It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Burning Man’s CFO’s KPIs for the arts and creativity festival would involve bonfires and art installations. While attendees might gauge the success of weeklong cultural event by the size of the burn pile, CFO Juho Parkkinen has his eyes on “burners” and their wallets.

Parkkinen recently spoke with CFO Brew about measuring costs, why Burning Man is a different type of company, and figuring out pricing.

Leading Indicators is a CFO Brew series on important or interesting KPIs. Is there a unique KPI in your industry you’d like us to know about? Get in touch with us at [email protected].

What is a key metric you keep an eye on?

We measure many things to try to understand how the financial performance is doing, but the cost per attendee is a massive and very helpful metric. On Reddit boards and Facebook, people are very concerned: Why are the ticket prices this much? What am I paying? We provide more information as to “this is the cost of Black Rock City,” and when you divide that by the number of people that show up, this is the cost per participant.

How has that impacted how you price tickets?

What we’re asking is for people to self-identify to the minimum amount that they would give back and allow that city to happen. Managing the actual live ticket sales towards that number is an interesting KPI…But fundamentally, this comes back to being able to articulate the impact around financials.

How is that different from other event companies?

Let me first disclaim that I’m not from the event production industry, so I can’t tell you for sure, but those companies generally are for-profit companies, so they also would be after some sort of a net margin…Then they would probably go: This is how much we’re getting sponsorship revenue from. Then they got all their food vendors to give them a cut. Then what’s left, most likely, is just what the market is willing to pay. They will just price it the way that people will pay, whereas we are much more like, “Hey, this is actually what it costs to put this together.”