CFO Studio Magazine with Alison Cornell

call “arm talent” — in the finance world, it’s an ability to be strategic. Up until the 2016 fiscal year, Crumb received business plans from the 20 departments (IT, retail, marketing, security, corporate partnerships, and ticket sales & services, among them) that support the team, each plan in a separate three-ring binder. The plans used no uniform software program—Microsoft Word and Excel and Adobe Acrobat were all employed — in describing the departments’ objectives for the year, how they planned to accomplish the objectives, the capital and operating budgets, and other resources that every department would need. Each department head would then have three binders assembled: one for Crumb; one for the ball club’s president, Mark Donovan; and one to keep. It was an ungainly process. Crumb wanted the mission statement and long-term goals to be top-of-mind during the entire planning operation. He believed the best way to do this was to ask that the department’s objectives link directly to the strategic goals that support the mission statement. An automatic prompt should ask, “ ‘What goal does this objective support?’ ” says Crumb. So he set out his objectives: Make the business planning process more uniform, make it more strategic, make it more visible, make it more efficient. No off-the-shelf product gave Crumb all he needed. “We’re sort of a specialized business,” he says. “There are only 122 professional sports franchises in America.” So, he looked at the Chiefs’ internal resources. The SharePoint Solution The company uses Microsoft’s SharePoint in most departments for content sharing and collaboration. Crumb, who oversees IT, knew he had a couple of good programmers on staff, so he gave one of them the vision and the assignment. He also okayed hiring an outside consultant who, like the programmer, had experience with the Microsoft application. “We’ve got the resources, and [the software application] gives us a really good platform, so I felt we could do this,” says Crumb. The programmer created a prototype. Crumb asked department heads to provide feedback. And the final prototype debuted for all to review and critique at the annual planning colloquium. The entire process took around four months. “We knew exactly what we wanted this to do ... and I think having the other department heads weigh in and help out in the process was critical,” he says. Besides eliminating the stacks of binders, one of the things Crumb is most excited about is the “accountability layer” via a dashboard that gives Crumb and the Chiefs considerable visibility into where department heads are at any particular stage in the planning cycle, and insight into how well they are doing in accomplishing their objectives. In December 2015, the new system launched. It was used throughout the process of creating and approving FY2016 business plans (the sports franchise’s fiscal year began April 1). Crumb has checked the dashboards quarterly to see how departments’ plans have met reality. A Personal Connection Dan Crumb watched Super Bowl IV on television back when he was just shy of six years old. He has a sharp recollection of that event because it was the first football game he can recall watching, Q1 2017 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 11 “Having the other department heads weigh in and help out in the process was critical.” — Dan Crumb, Chief Financial Officer of the Kansas City Chiefs Asset to Two Communities “You walk around the parking lot on a game day, and you smell all the great barbecue, and you see people just having a great time, getting excited about going into the stadium for the kickoff,” says Kansas City Chiefs CFO Dan Crumb. That’s what it’s like to be the CFO of a professional football team (at least the one in Kansas City, MO). Before he took a job in professional sports, Crumb was CFO for New Orleans–based Abita Springs Water Company, which had its bottling plant destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He considers the time surrounding that episode, and the results that were born from chaos, as the biggest success of his career, as well as the biggest challenge. Crumb and the company’s leaders transformed their business plan, changing from that of a bottler to a distributor of other sources’ water, a solution “we had to invent on the fly.” Meanwhile, the company’s leadership “had to be the glue” to hold the tenuous bits of normal life together and to help employees get back on their feet, says Crumb. The company survived, and ultimately the owners decided they wanted to sell. Subsequently, he worked for three years for the New Orleans Hornets and in 2010 became CFO for the Chiefs. “This is arguably the richest history/tradition– oriented organization that I’ve worked for,” he says. “To be part of what I view as a community asset — that’s very exciting and that’s what separates it from just a regular corporate business…. It makes it really gratifying.”