CFO Studio Magazine with Alison Cornell

12 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM Q1 2017 and it was being played at Tulane Stadium in his hometown of New Orleans. He remembers the team that won: the American Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs, by a lopsided score (23–7) over the National Football League’s Vikings. It was 1970, the last year the two leagues held a playoff game; they merged a few months later under the NFL organization. Forty years on, Crumb was CFO of the National Basketball Association franchise, the New Orleans Hornets, when the Chiefs came calling, looking for a chief financial officer. The team “ultimately made me an offer, and it was an offer I could not turn down,” he says. In no small part, he was excited to be working for the Hunt family and to work for an organization that “has such a rich tradition, such a rich history as the Kansas City Chiefs.” The late Lamar Hunt founded the AFL and the Chiefs, as well as Major League Soccer, and coined the name “Super Bowl,” among other accomplishments. Crumb, who earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the University of New Orleans and an MBA from Tulane, initially worked for KPMG, and has since had six successive CFO positions, prior to joining the Chiefs. He says the most challenging part of the CFO’s job is that with technology constantly advancing, it is difficult to identify “where to put your technology investment.” Both from a financial and a personnel perspective, the CFO has to determine which technology will best support the organization in achieving its objectives as both the technology and the organization evolve. It’s a tough call. At the Chiefs, he has made significant investments to upgrade connectivity at Arrowhead Stadium, which was built in 1972 and is leased by the Chiefs. “We put in a complete Wi-Fi system, and we put in a DAS — a distributed antenna system— for cellular coverage,” he says, adding, “People want to be able to post photos, they want others to know they’re at Arrowhead Stadium watching a Chiefs football game, so we had to deliver that.” A husband, father of two, and a community volunteer, Crumb is also an avid historian, a horseman, and an amateur welder. He gets a kick out of working in operational jobs, and it’s more fun when no one knows his true identity. He once went “undercover,” making balloon animals and tossing T-shirts to the fans during a Hornets game; he has also wielded his welding torch incognito in the repair shop of another company where he was CFO. Recently, he sold tickets in the Chiefs’ 50/50 raffle. “It’s a good way for me to understand the business,” he says, adding that taking on such initiatives can be very helpful in getting to know some of the people in the organization. While in his CFO role Crumb gets a charge out of throwing himself into “looking at ways to improve.” Rethinking the business planning system, he says, was very appealing because it involved “how to improve processes and be more efficient. Those are things that I’m passionate about.” C Dan Crumb (center) at the Souper Bowl of Caring, packing food for Harvesters — the Community Food Network Crumb, who serves on the Board of Trustees of the National WWI Museum & Memorial, presents a check representing the nonprofit’s share of one game’s 50/50 Raffle receipts to Dr. Matthew Naylor, the museum’s President & CEO Every quarter, the CFO Breakfast Learning Series, with CPE credits. Reserve your seat at www.cfostudio.com + FEATURED CFO