How an NFL Revenue Marker Gave Way to a New Strategic Plan | Chris Halpin, CFO, IAC

But to make them you know, you needed a long term plan for both employees, for all our stakeholders, employees, the owners, union partners, everyone to say, we’re gonna do this. This is what we’re looking to generate, and it’s going to generate XY and Z and the end. To that point, the only strategic marker that was publicly out there was the revenue goal of 25 billion that had by 2027. That had been put out in 2010. And it was a matter of, let’s really go down understand all our businesses get them unified, develop prioritization, which is a huge point of focus, a common language to have the businesses understand how they need to groups within it, football, Player Health and Safety, media sponsorship ticketing are 32 teams who were both local franchisees and owners, and come up with a framework that would lead to collective success. We there I think an important job of any CFO is to understand the complexity, and then simplify it to to a framework that will drive the organization forward, enable prioritization and resource allocation and motivate people along with others. And, you know, a single revenue goal or any financial goal, I think, is the least motivating element possible, partly because it’s so abstract, partly because there’s a whole host of really important people who have, you know, no line of sight to driving revenue or EBIT da it’s everything from your HR and your security people, but also all the way to your product people. They want to build a killer product, they don’t know if it’s going to generate 25 or, you know, million or 2.5 billion in revenue. And so we came up with a framework of we had three major priority game fans engagement game is the product make that as good as as safe as as technologically advanced as possible. The game is the product that drives fans at Starbucks. It’s coffee drives, consumers have as diverse and rich a fan base that we truly understand from a data and analytics perspective. To make sure that we’re shored up across demographics reach young fans reach international young fans especially, and, and drive that fan base to new levels, and then engagement. And that’s everything from buying a ticket to buying a t shirt to playing Madden to watching on TV or on your iPhone, liking something on Facebook and fans times engagement is the health. And then that generates revenue. And if you’re setting ROI on what you’re investing there, and ROI targets, you’ll drive profitability. It was it was really helpful it was the hope. But it was really helpful for understand for everyone understanding here’s how the football people plug in their the product, their central, if people aren’t happy with the replay review times, or the pace of the game that’s going to hurt everything down, down funnel, get getting people’s, you know, and this is also using data and analytics to frame out what is either prove out what are people’s assumptions, or prove them false. By showing them real data. It’s obvious but it’s such a more effective tool than battling you know, not to use a football term but armchair quarterbacks telling you what’s happening. And then emphasizing all of these produce financial outcomes rather than focus on the financial outcome. It was it was a very formative and positively reinforcing experience for me of of how to orient an organization and also make decisions in a fixed resource pool.