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 the perks of being on the league's most dominant team. (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.
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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.
Being the CFO of an NFL team, does it have its perks?
There are plenty. The first thing is I work for the Kansas City Chiefs…and it’s just such a blessing to be part of this historic run that we’re on.
We’re in the same building that the players and their coaches are in. So I have ridden the elevator up with Patrick Mahomes, and I do see Travis Kelce from time to time. This year, after we won the AFC championship game, our entire staff got to go down on the field and see the Lamar Hunt trophy presentation, and I got to see one of the players that I know best, Charles Omenihu, and I got to go congratulate him.
Some of the players have businesses, and I’ve been fortunate to get to know some of these players and work with them and be a sounding board, maybe give them advice [on] how to operate a business. I get to participate in the financial literacy sessions for our rookie players and our veteran players, which is a passion of mine. I want every player to be in a position to be successful when their playing career is over. To help out in that effort is very meaningful to me.