CFO Studio Magazine - CFO Innovation Award Winners

46 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 2nd QUARTER 2015 CFO Studio Advisory Board & Technical Review Committee Tim Anglim YesCFO > Founder and President Andrew Savadelis Angion Biomedica > Chief Financial Officer Michael Eldredge American Sensor Technologies, Inc. > Chief Financial Officer VIEW PROFILES AT www.cfostudio.com Bert Marchio Edge Therapeutics > Chief Accounting & Operations Officer Gerald Najarian The Remington Group, LLC > Partner Howard Reba Marlin Equity Partners > Finance Director Sports Management Lessons T o be the CFO of a professional sports team is a lot like being the CFO of any company with a B2C business model. Except that in sports, the team members are high profile, high salary, easy to identify, and always in the media — which amps up the pressure to keep team members happy. Like any company with a large number of customers, CFOs like Brian Friedman of the New York Jets, Charlie Mierswa of the Brooklyn Nets, and Frank Gumienny of the Philadelphia Eagles use data and tech tools to study the behavior of customers (aka fans) and to improve the loyalty and increase the spending of those fans. At the CFO Innovation Conference, Robert Raiola, sports and entertainment group manager for O’Connor Davies, certified public accountants, moderated a popular panel featuring David Denenberg, senior vice president, global media distribution and business affairs, for the National Basketball Association, along with Friedman, Mierswa, and Gumienny. “You have a lot of issues that are the same for CFOs of a professional sports team and CFOs in other industries,” says Raiola. You’ve got to make money, you’ve got to please your customers, you’ve got to have a team of great professionals, you might very well employ business analytics and look for operating efficiencies — just as the New York Jets, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Philadelphia Eagles do. And in the end, it’s all about “the ROI of the fan experience.” Raiola wraps up the lessons from sports with a mention of analytics. The data tells you “what works and doesn’t work,” he says. “And companies are missing out if they don’t use social media.” C Get published in CFO Studio magazine. Find out more at www.cfostudio.com KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER + Visit www.CFOstudio.com to read more about the presenters