And now, on to the show.
Welcome to FP&A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
Our guest today is Kelly Manke.
Kelly's finance work touches everything from grassroots youth programs to the Olympic Games.
She is the CFO and Assistant Executive Director of Finance and Administration at USA Hockey, the national governing body for ice hockey in the United States.
USA Hockey serves over 12 million members, from six-year-olds lacing up their first pair of skates to the men's and women's teams competing right now in Milan.
Before joining USA Hockey in 2019, Kelly served as CFO at Arapaho House, Colorado's largest substance abuse treatment provider, and as COO slash CFO at USA Mobility, a complex rehabilitation equipment provider.
She played hockey growing up and through college, earned her MBA in finance from the University of Colorado and has completed executive education at both Wharton and Harvard Business School.
CNBC recently profiled her as a tech leader who's deploying AI across the organization.
Kelly, welcome to the show.
Glenn, thank you so much for having me.
It's nice to be here.
Yeah, I've got to say when I see for regular listeners of the show, they will know I'm something of an AI enthusiast.
So normally the CNBC article is where I would start.
But as I was looking into your background and preparing for the show, I got so many things I want to ask you about.
So we'll get to AI, but...
But we won't just jump right into it out of the gates.
I love the narrative of from center ice to the corner office, as you were one of the only girls playing state-sanctioned high school hockey in Colorado in the early 1990s.
And won back-to-back state championships at Palmer High and went on to play NCAA Division I women's hockey at St.
Lawrence.
I'd love to hear a little bit about that experience.
And maybe does that carry over to walking into rooms where people don't expect you to be?
I love that background.
I'd love to hear more about it.
Well, you've certainly done your homework.
I come from a hockey background, and my brother played, my dad played, my great-uncles played.
It's a big hockey family, and so I spend a lot of time as a young kid child in rinks.
And my brother started playing.
He was probably five or six and he's three years younger than I am.
And so I would be in the rinks watching a lot of hockey.
And so you know, game after game, tournament after tournament, year after year.
I would want to play hockey.
And I kept asking and asking and asking and the persistence paid off.
I finally wore my parents down and they said, oh, you're not going to like it.
We're going to buy you all this equipment.
And so I was, what, 13, I believe.
So it was a lot of years I was selling them on the idea.
And I ended up loving it.
So I had such a great time.
It's been such a big part, not only of my career, but my life.
And it's just such a great game.
Incredible people, great teammates.
And it's been a lot of fun to have that start.
And it's been kind of a consistent theme throughout my life.
And then currently leading to where I am today.
What a great opportunity to get to still be involved in USA hockey and hockey in general.
Sometimes I still kind of miss being able to play.
But, well, I do play a little bit here and there.
But yeah, now it's a lot of fun because I actually can help drive the strategy and direction of of USA Hockey with my teammates in a different direction off the ice.
Yeah.
And it's just.
I love the story because something that you were passionate about and a genuine trailblazer in it.
And you go off, you go to business school, you have this other career, and then you come back to it.
It's a feel-good story.
It's like a Disney movie to me.
I have to pinch myself.
I'm very lucky I get to do what I love every day.
And also with your family.
You mentioned the hockey players, but I understand you come from a family of entrepreneurs as well.
And I think this is interesting to me and maybe we'll drill into this a little bit.
But you said you were fascinated by microeconomics from a young age.
I always tended more towards the macro side until I found behavioral economics, and then that was amazing to me.
But I don't think as a young kid I was thinking like that.
And your career path went through healthcare rehab, behavioral health and then you came to USA Hockey.
I'm wondering how, just coming from that family of entrepreneurs and that sort of microeconomic background and through your career, how did those all prepare you for what you're doing now?
That part is so interesting.
We spent a lot of time around the dinner table talking about things that I just thought everybody talked about.
You know in terms of you know, from an entrepreneurial perspective, different businesses and then running the business and what it takes to run a business and building it, and you know the revenue piece, and then you know being fiscally responsible and how you can kind of use leverage and
So from a very young age, we talked a lot about things like that.
I don't have quite the entrepreneurial spirit that my brother and father have.
I'm a little bit more risk averse than they are.
But I'm always interested kind of in the business piece and how you make things grow, how you make things better every day and how you really can create a business out of it and have more value in a number of different facets and different avenues.
Your dinner table must have been very different from mine because I've always been in business.
And when I talk about business I think the best tell of the way I talked about business and what the kids thought about it is my son.
Oh, and I got to, here's a humble brag or whatever.
I just found out right before we recorded, my son got into a PhD program in immunology.
Oh, fantastic.
Fantastic.
Yeah, so very exciting.
But he went into STEM and my daughter went into public policy and political science.
So they both wanted to go nowhere near business.
So I guess the conversations that I was having told them, yeah, you don't want to do business.
You want to do something else.
Goes one way or another, right?
Yeah.
Well, and I know and I listened to the episode, too.
You were on my friend Jack Nicola's show, The Rockstar CFOs.
So some of our listeners, I think, listen to that as well.
So some of our listeners may have heard your story before.
I want to go a little bit different and not just repeat what Jack talked about.
But you said USA Hockey has four companies under its umbrella.
And it's much more complicated than just sending people to the Olympics.
And I think I mean for most people outside of it.
Probably all we're thinking about is the Olympics, which means only every four years we're thinking about it.
So tell me a little bit more about what USA Hockey does and what the business actually looks like.
Yes.
Everybody's thinking about the Olympics now, in particular.
Our men's team is playing Latvia as we speak.
And so...
It's definitely Olympic time.
And when people think of USA hockey, that's certainly what they think of.
I myself thought that's what USA hockey was all about.
And it is.
But you started the interview in an interesting way, talking a little bit about, you know, kids that are six years old, all the way up to the Olympics.
And that's true.
I also like to say it's kind of almost as if we've got something for everybody cradle to grave.
We've got people that are in their 80s.
They're still playing hockey.
And it's an interesting.
People are surprised by that because it's such a contact, heavy and very physically involved game that people are surprised that people in their 80s are still playing.
And so yes, so to backtrack a little bit on the organization we do, we have 12 million members and we've got four companies.
We've got our operating company, which is what people think of about USA Hockey.
And USA Hockey is a membership organization underneath the USOPC.
And we are recognized by the USOPC to send teams to the Olympics.
We also have a foundation.
And under our foundation, we own our own arena.
We have a drive-in movie theater.
We have a restaurant.
And fundraising arm, of course.
And then we also have our own insurance company.
And that part has been really interesting.
It's a great intersection kind of where my career has led.
So it's a lot more complicated than people may think.
Actually, since it is FPA today, I think I have a million more questions down.
The USA Hockey Organization.
But as you mention all these businesses, I mean if you have this insurance company, the restaurant, the corporate partnerships, the Olympic responsibilities, the financial model that holds all this together has to be relatively complex.
And you're in different drivers for different parts of it.
How do you think about the business segments and roll them up into a model and drive the ultimate business bottom line in what you're targeting with USA Hockey?
It is very fluid.
A lot of the other national governing bodies will budget on a quad, what they call a quad budget.
So they'll put together a four-year budget.
And there is some benefit in doing that.
But we have complexities, especially after COVID, which we may touch on later, but complexities that yes, we've got the Olympic quad that we need to think about.
But the other piece is every year there's different categories or different segments of the business to take a priority.
And so it's a very fluid in terms of you know when we're budgeting and what we're going to prioritize and, from our strategy, you know what are we going to go and really put more of our resources in this year as opposed to last year.
And then what's what it's going to be next year in the following year?
But I guess, with all that, still membership.
But it's something like 65 of the revenue at USA Hockey comes from membership.
So like we said before, age six all the way up to the 80s.
So if you're tracking the lifetime value of a member, that's... that's pretty low churn.
I mean, maybe you know people dip in and out, maybe over the years, but if you're looking at lifetime value of a member and that membership turnover alongside more traditional CFO metrics, like you know, your cash conversion cycle, DSO and all that, how does your finance team, how do you balance planning around that stable membership base with revenue spikes that I'm sure after the Olympics or, you know, world junior championships or whatever, I'm sure that you get spikes on that?
I mean, I guess you factor all that in and you have enough historical information.
But what's the approach there that you look at for forecasting, with members just being part of the association for that long?
So we've been around since 1937, and you would think we'd have it all figured out by now.
But we are right on the crux of some exciting things that we're doing.
We've been very successful historically and built the business and built the NGB and done very well in doing that.
But we don't know what we don't know.
And so we've had online registrations and membership system since early 90s.
It used to be back in the day people would you know, you fill out your paperwork, you write in your kids names and you, you know, mail a check into usa hockey.
Well, since early 90s, we've started to kind of move towards away from team registrations into individual registrations and then now it's all online which, of course, it has to be right, but we've got this vast array of data that we really haven't delved into enough, And so in 2019, when I came to USA Hockey, we had a very different digital strategy and tech strategy than we do today.
And so one of the things that is a main priority of mine right now is analytics and AI and digital transformation.
So we don't know what we don't know.
And so we're digging into decades of data and really trying to ascertain what is customer lifetime value.
What is the cost of acquiring a customer?
What is the cost of retaining a customer?
What is our price elasticity?
So this is a really exciting time to be involved in our membership and in analyzing our business, because we are right on the cusp of digging into that, where we're going to have a lot better insight into the data and knowledge than we ever have before.
We're going to dig into that.
But I have to take a step back because I understand that one of your first moves at USA Hockey was bringing in an auditing firm to review all the expenses and, kind of to your point, get to knowing what you don't know.
But you structured it so that they only made money if they saved you money.
And I love that incentive design.
And it's great if you can get someone to work under that, but I mean, it motivates them.
And that's the goal.
If you can Do what you say, then that's what you'll be compensated on.
But I'm wondering, coming in with that, and if that was an early move, doing that before you do the deeper dive on the analytics that we'll get to and everything.
But what did that process reveal and how did it shape your roadmap for the organization after that?
Yeah, that's one of the things that was a big focus when I came in.
It was so hard to get your arms around everything.
For the size of revenue that we are, called $75 million organization, we only have 200 employees.
And so we have an immense amount of volunteers that do a ton of work out in the field.
And so trying to get your arms around all the different things that we spend money on and where our resources are going and why we do that.
And are we utilizing economies of scale and things like that?
So that organization that was a really important move for us to really look into our all of our GL transactions and take a look at categories and compare those to big companies and what they're spending and where we can save money on everything from paperclips I'm exaggerating a bit but everything from insurance and 403B all the way to paper.
So that part gave us a really good handle on.
Are we being as fiscally responsible as possible with our spending this?
This is just part of the story.
And I really, as I look at your tenure at USA hockey, it's kind of the case study for CFOs as strategic partners in the business.
And, you know, just drop the whole concept of the historical CFO being, you know, looking in the rear view mirror and all that because you come in, you do all this the analysis of the expenses and make that more efficient.
But at the same time And this I want to spend some time on this because I think it has a lot of correlations to what people are doing now with AI.
But USA Hockey at the time you came in.
Building a lot of proprietary tech makes sense, I think, when the decision's made.
But it can be, you know, it's that whole buy versus build.
But there is the long-term goal of monetizing them and building.
I've been down this road before and it's okay, this is what we do.
But if we have the resources and we can build this, then that becomes another revenue.
I mean, it's sort of like, it's a dream, but it's hard to get to in reality.
And when you came in, my understanding is you killed that strategy, but if so, that also meant well.
Now you're inheriting decades of data going back to, however you know, from the beginning of the web or whenever you were collecting it.
You have years of technical debt and now you have a workforce that ranged from you've got your early career hires to your 30-year veterans.
You're shifting direction in the middle of all that.
So if you could tell us a little bit about what was happening when you got there, how you approached the transformation, where you started, and what the new direction to come out of the other side was.
We changed our strategy significantly.
We were headed down a road, as you hinted about.
We wanted to build our own systems, and that's everything from our event management system to our registration system, to our learning management system.
We wanted to go ahead and build everything internally.
And so we were working with our senior director of IT at the time, and he was working with developers overseas and trying to build our own systems and then, from there, monetize it.
And we did that to some extent with other organizations.
We built it and then we monetized it.
But in hindsight, that's not really what we're great at.
That's not really what we do.
We didn't want systems that were going to be customizable.
We wanted to be configurable. so the difference there is you know you don't have to start from scratch but you also can make it work for you and so we're not building something that is a hundred percent customizable but there are things that we have to have customized for example our registration system is so nuanced and so different that we can't get that off the shelf or our our officiating programs we can't do that there is no nothing off the shelf that will serve that need so We moved away from trying to customize things or build our own things and now are moving towards things that are off the shelf when we can and make them configurable.
It's so tough being in that position, especially if you have someone in-house that has the skills and the resources.
Where – because I've –
I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of doing an ERP implementation, but it's these big software changes.
They're never fun and it becomes a second full-time job for everybody who's working on it.
They always take longer than expected.
And when you are finished, it's usually not exactly what you hoped for.
But if you have strong technical resources inside, you're so tempted to build.
And that opens up a whole other can of worms.
But if you do it right, there is always that thought, oh, well, We could monetize this.
But I think the reality for most businesses is it's the same reason that businesses do BPO, right?
It's like, well, this is not our expertise.
This is what we do.
Let's just outsource all that.
And I think there's probably a fine line between what you should and should not outsource, even if it's short-term costs.
But it can be a tough road and it can take years.
If an ERP implementation takes 18 months or however long it takes, depending on how big the system is and all that designing your own software could take even longer and end up being more expensive.
I understand the decision uh, to do that, but then, like i said, you're left with sort of the remnants of okay, if we're not going to build it, we're going to have to solve it with off-the-shelf stuff, and i know you described that as a lift and shift to the cloud, so replacing everything with sas solutions, kind of rebuilding the it function and then putting in subcommittees as needed.
But you alluded to COVID earlier, and this is the part I wanted to dive into a little more.
That ended up being critical once the pandemic hit.
So I think you know, for so many of us who were in business through the pandemic or even going back to the global financial crisis, there are these crisis moments where we really harden our systems and figure out what to do.
But certainly COVID changed the way and I would think especially an organization like UA Hockey did business.
But the takeaway from all that for our listeners who are trying to make a case for infrastructure investment.
Maybe it doesn't have an immediate ROI, but what you then saw in COVID
I don't know, maybe this is a long way to get to the question, but I think did that decision of moving to the SaaS solutions and not focused on the custom software did that help you get through it.
And then what did you learn coming through the pandemic?
I don't know if there was a distinct correlation between the technology transformation and COVID.
We almost went into like, okay, hunker down.
We need to really focus on how we're going to preserve cash.
Is cash on hand?
What we're going to do from a business perspective.
You know we've got travel and travel is such a big part of our business.
Do we ground people?
And we did.
And how do we really preserve as much cash and decrease our expenses as much as we can at all lengths, while still being able to serve our core membership?
And so that piece was.
It almost requires understanding about turning a business around and only the absolute necessary spending that has to be done and every dollar spending in the right direction.
And so that part was really challenging.
And specifically in our location in Michigan.
You know we had, they were hit pretty hard and we had a restaurant there and restaurants.
You know it's, it's challenging.
And I think I don't know if the lunch business has really come back for any.
You know restaurants since covid.
So that part has been, that part was challenging.
So I could see where there might be a relation between the tech piece and COVID.
And there certainly was parallels running, but we really focused just specifically on the absolute necessities that we needed to spend.
We had to look at
Unfortunately, you know.
Look at our headcount, look at do we all sacrifice a little and push the company forward?
So some very difficult, challenging decisions had to be made.
But we came out more disciplined and stronger than before.
I guess I'd sort of conflated the two issues, because I was thinking about the software change and then happening with pandemic, like it did with so many companies.
They were kind of forced into a digital transformation.
Did you find that through COVID that you beefed up or leaned more into that digital side?
Or were these just these were paths that were running simultaneous but not correlated to each other?
They were running simultaneous, maybe not as correlated as you might think.
FP&A Today is brought to you by Data Rails, the world's number one FP&A solution.
Data Rails is the artificial intelligence-powered financial planning and analysis platform built for Excel users.
That's right, you can stay in Excel.
But instead of facing hell for every budget, month-end close or forecast, you can enjoy a paradise of data consolidation, advanced visualization, reporting and AI capabilities, plus game-changing insights giving you instant answers and your story created in seconds.
Find out why more than 1,500 companies use Data Rails to uncover their company's real story.
Don't replace Excel, embrace Excel.
Learn more at datarails.com.
You make the decision on the software, you have the data.
Like you said, you've been around a long time and you've had digital data going back for as long as it's been collected on the web and in various other places.
But you talked before about having to walk before you ran on analytics.
And the first step was just understanding the data that you have, how it connected across those systems that were shifting.
Tell us about, since you've been there, what the digital transformation has been like and that process of going from We have data to we can ask now strategic questions with the data and how that data maturity has changed.
Sure.
I'm going to tell you at the most basic level.
When I first came in, I would get a stack like this, every day, of checks to hand sign.
And so I mean anything from scanning and digital signatures and things like that and really just finding any and every way that we can make things more efficient and effective.
So, I mean, that is down to like the most basic level.
Right.
And how we made things more efficient all the way up to from.
You know how we can when people register.
For example, one of the things that my senior director of IT and I were talking about today and we're working on is how can we make the process of registering easier for the family.
So a lot of times mom and dad will have three kids.
Well, rather than have to go in and sign all the waivers on every single kid and pay separately every time, and then you go and you do, you know how do we have kind of single sign-on capabilities so that when you're a returning member, you're a parent, your kids pop up, you can quickly get them renewed.
So things like that, it's just trying to find a quick wins, I would say, and how you do that.
And then, once we start walking crawling walking, and now we're really looking into getting to running.
So we'll be able to look at our revenue velocity.
That's something that's, I think, really exciting to me is all right.
If we open early registration, as you mentioned, 65 of our revenue, if we open in April 1st, if we can track the people when they typically register, if we can get them even to move up a day or two days sooner than they typically do, what does that do to our revenue velocity?
Then from an AI perspective, what does that do?
Let's say you're going to Look at the five year treasury rate.
What does that do to our cash position at the end of the year?
Then what does that build off of and build leverage that we can continue to do better and better?
Yeah.
And that seems obvious.
The more you digitize and the more you automate and the more you take out like moving away from the hand signing the checks and then from the.
Just the byproduct of that automation is that you have data around that.
What people sign and what they were doing, and what the average number of kids that a family signs up and all that.
So you start to get more data.
And when you have more data, then you can ask more questions like what does it cost to acquire and retain a member?
What happens to cash flow if renewals shift earlier in the season?
What about the timing that you just talked about, about bringing it in? earlier.
So those are all the kinds of questions that every FP&A team wants to be asking.
But I think it sounds like that automation and maybe even the original goal was to make it easier automation.
And like I said, just the byproduct of it.
But in your mind is there a playbook for going from where you were when you got there to now, with this digital transformation, with what you have.
Are there things people need to consider, a mindset or steps they should follow.
I work with enterprise companies every day that I'm shocked at how immature their data is and how scattered it is across systems and siloed and not talking to others.
Regardless of the size of your organization, it's a massive challenge.
It is a massive challenge.
I would say an intense curiosity, unrelenting curiosity, to really focus on what matters And to be really curious about that piece.
And maybe the first step is you just want to know what you're dealing with.
So, for example, when I first came on, we had one price pretty much for every member.
Everybody paid the same price.
Well, there's certain age levels or different groups of members that are going to get a lot more value than maybe others.
So how do we stratify the payment structure and who pays what, so that they feel like they're getting fair value?
Then also looking at for each group of people.
Okay, this might be a segment that you get X number of revenue per player from, but also this group may be paying half as much and they cost you three times as much.
And so trying to figure out that balance as well.
But I would say just an intense curiosity and laser focus on improving.
You know, one of the metrics that I look at is I like to look at our net assets and how much we've changed.
And since I came on, we've grown 149% increase in our net assets.
And that, I think, is just really important to look at the strength of the business and what you can do to drive that and find those big rocks if you will.
So it's, I'm just going to talk about my kids all day today.
I don't know.
It's weird because you're in Denver, right?
Yes.
So my daughter is a senior at DU and she's working with the state senator there as an intern.
And but one of the things that that she's working on is algorithmic pricing.
And that's such an interesting concept right now.
And I guess a lot of state legislatures are taking it up because it could be used in unfair ways.
And I was telling her about, well, I'm a member of the YMCA.
I pay one rate and they scale it down, you know, based on where people's incomes are.
And that's sort of the positive side of it.
But if, if they're tailoring anyway, it's a whole.
It's an interesting.
I don't think it's even close to being solved for because you know hotels can change pricing based on demand in the city or whatever.
You look at airline tickets and everything, but there's It's going to be interesting to see in the future and there's obviously discounts for certain situations.
But it's going to be interesting in the future to see how personalized pricing gets.
Whatever laws there are around price gouging for hotels or airlines or whatever, but it is.
We're going to have so much information about every consumer that tailored pricing seems like a wave of the future.
And I don't know too.
You know, like we were talking earlier about the macro versus the micro about, you know, specific customers, but it is it's fascinating to see where that's going.
Oh, now you've got my mind spinning on different things.
I know.
Yeah.
Because she was asking me about it.
And I could I mean, I can see both sides as a consumer.
I don't want to pay more than the guy sitting next to me because I have a different zip code or whatever.
But at the same time it's, if there's a way to equitably and fairly do it, it will.
It's going to impact pricing, I think, across the board.
And we'll see what the state legislatures do.
But I'm going to stop talking about my kids on this show since I'm not the I'm not the guest here.
Please carry on.
Um, so I and I do want, as I alluded to at the beginning, I'm a huge fan of AI and applications of it and finance, but before we get to the AI, that
That USA hockey's using.
I want to talk.
Maybe you know in the in the back office and what most of our listeners are thinking of.
The AI application in the in your insurance operation was pretty fascinating to me.
So digitizing claims, collecting data, what period in the game the injury occurred, where on the ice it happened, what body part was injured, whether a penalty was involved a massive amount of data.
And I think about every time you watch any.
You know NFL, I think of a lot because they're a sponsor and you always get the stats of it.
And then you hear about it around, you know, concussion protocols and everything.
So I think that this is very important information to be collecting.
But you told NBC that over that time that you had already gotten to the point where AI-driven analytics could reveal, you could get your trends, at least you know, by age period, type of injury, and then take those insights, give it back to the coaches, the officials, the safety committees.
So I'd love to hear if you could expand a little bit on that.
Let us know how far along that work is now what you've kind of revealed to this point by tracking that.
Sure.
I've had two meetings about it already today, so it is a major focus.
I think it'll be one of the most important things we do beyond financial.
You can prevent one injury, right?
I mean, that means the world to somebody.
And one of our strategic objectives is to continue to create as safe of a game as possible.
I think we've done a really good job with that.
A little over a year and a half ago, we mandated neck guards, and so neck laceration protection.
We want to continue to move in the direction where we can keep the game as safe as possible for everyone and everybody that wants to play.
The more information that we can have, we just haven't had the data before.
We'll be able to not only feed that information back to our partners.
So our equipment providers right.
That could probably be very valuable to them as well.
We'll be able to feed that data back to the coaches to the spec committee safety and protective equipment group committee.
And, you know, it'll create a lot more fun to people that want to play longer.
And so that that part is just we're just on the cusp of digging into that.
But I think that really, it's going to be a very important part of what we do from an overall meaningfulness to our players.
But also there's a lot of data in some in some facet.
If we ever wanted to monetize that, we certainly could.
And primarily, the safety and accessibility of the game by knowing you know.
This is what happened in Taylor.
I guess you know the corollary would be in the NFL, the new kickoff rules or the helmet protection thing that they wear on top of their helmets, and everything.
And coming up with that and I'm sure that's important, but also just thinking about there's so much possibility that I think in sports outside of the safety, but it could really change the game.
And I always think about, you know, So the two calls, it's either icing or offsides.
And if there were a way to track the players, you would know definitively, did this happen?
And I know that officiating is a part of the game and everything, but I think about so many sports where it goes to the review and you're waiting for such a long time across the sports and you think it feels like this is something that in the future we could have.
Sensors and AI lean towards that.
I don't know if you're just looking, I know it's for the insurance company side, but if that's even talked about as a technology to assist officiating with AI sensors or photo recognition or whatever the technology is that they're using,
Well, it's interesting you mentioned that because with our players, we are using sensor data.
And so you may look at the best skaters in the world, and you're looking at the angles of their ankle to knee flexion.
So you're looking at things like that.
And then do you train other, you know, there's some nuances there.
But then do you change the way that you have your power skating lessons, things of that nature?
And so the flex in a stick or you know the accuracy of your shots and you know the ratio of stick length to height, that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, spot on.
Yeah, pretty amazing.
So, all right.
Well, I could go down on that tangent all day, but I do want to swing it back to the way AI is being used in the back office.
And I know we're in this.
I think, if you look at the Gartner hype cycle and kind of overlay, that with the adoption curve around AI and generative AI, has now gone over the peak of inflated expectations and is sliding into the trough of disillusionment.
As you hear all these studies that you know, MIT reports that 95 of AI projects fail to achieve ROI.
You hear about other studies or reports in the news where a consulting firm gives AI generated data to a client and they have egg on their face from that.
And I think we're in finance and accounting.
We are risk averse people, but at the same time, the technology is moving so fast and you see its potential.
So how are you looking at in finance rolling out the AI tools?
I think you maybe mentioned you were using Microsoft Copilot internally, but how are you looking at rolling out the tools?
What direction does your team have?
Does USA Hockey in general have as far as back office use of AI goes?
Very cautiously, Glenn, very cautiously.
It is exciting and it can do so much.
And, you know, we also want to be very cautious of privacy.
We want to be very cautious of our data.
We want to be very cautious of, you know, getting into a situation, as you alluded to before, where people have egg on their face.
Right.
It's not we don't want to boil the ocean either.
We want to be able to kind of be really specific in where we're going to focus it and get some success and momentum there.
And then, of course, tracking ROI will be important.
At the most basic level, even if you can use it to just be more efficient in your job.
You know from the very basic level if you're writing an email or something right, reviewing it, and that you have any grammatical errors that kind of thing at the very basic level.
But I think we've got a lot of big things, like in terms of who owns the data, and a lot of things that we're looking into to make sure that when we roll things out, that we're doing in a very thoughtful way and double triple checking what we're you know, our data and producing and does it, does it track, but being very thoughtful and cautious about how we do it as well.
Yeah, I was doing training for a big accounting organization this morning on Copilot.
I always do live demos around it, and sometimes it does amazing things and sometimes it goes completely insane.
I don't try to cover that up.
I say I'm an evangelist for it, but I'm not saying that you should.
Just, you know, copy and paste whatever it does.
And sometimes it goes awry.
And honestly I kind of like it when I'm doing training and it goes wrong, because a lot of times if the training goes perfectly, it maybe sets the expectation too high that people say well, when he did it, everything worked.
And now I go and it's telling me, you know, four plus four is seven.
So it's, and I do experiment a little bit, not with client data or with PII, but I'm doing a lot of experimentation with it right now because I kind of want to be on the leading edge, because it seems like it's moving so fast that, even if it's not production ready today, having used it before and understanding how it works sort of puts you in a better spot when the technology is there.
Yep.
Smart.
I saw this is kind of out of left field, but I saw it.
A video the other day came up in my YouTube feed.
It was about how private equity is changing youth sports.
And I think hockey might have been one of the sports that they referenced.
And I know you said in a previous interview that hockey is alive and well, pretty much cradle to grave.
How is USA thinking about the dynamic with now, if you have PE involved, sort of the expectations around it get higher, get changed a little bit.
Are you seeing any impact from that, or does it change?
Or do you have a?
Does it impact anything that you're doing?
I can speak personally on how I look at it or how I thought about it.
When I first came to USA Hockey, I thought, oh, wow, this is really interesting.
We're like a monopoly and there really aren't many competitors.
I
But now you're starting to see an influx of more private equity money and buying.
You know you may have groups that are buying up a lot of rinks or associations.
And some people are afraid of it.
I welcome it.
I think it's great.
You've got free market.
How do we make it better for the consumer?
How does it make us better?
How can we learn and just continue to have an excellent product and make it better and better?
And you know, push each other to make it more competitive.
And I'm not afraid of it or shying away from it.
I think it's actually a good thing.
Yeah.
All right.
I had kind of a speed round list of questions.
We have a couple of questions at the end that we ask all of our guests that we'll get to.
But before that, you said that your most influential mentors weren't necessarily finance people.
And I think Pat Kelleher, your executive director, said publicly that the CEO-CFO partnership is critical to the organization.
What has that relationship taught you about how a CFO can have an impact beyond the numbers?
And I think we've talked about a lot that a lot of that already in the show.
But beyond that, what have you seen about the CFO role beyond just being the financial reporter?
That relationship, I can't express how important that relationship is between a CFO and CEO.
He is incredible.
He is one of the nicest, best, smartest guys I've worked with.
I really enjoy working with him.
And we push each other.
We challenge each other.
You know he's not always going to like the things that i have to say and vice versa, but it's important that we have a great uh respectful, um relationship could push each other in that way, challenge each other at the end of the day, you know um, we need to bring our way of looking at things and you know my way of what i see will be completely different from the vantage point that he has, And so I can bring the, you know, from a strategic perspective, a financial operational, I can provide my perspective on things.
And he's got a different perspective.
And most of the time we're in line.
But there will be times, you know, where we have a lot of discourse and come up with a better option than we would have on our own individually.
Yeah.
And I think in my own CFO roles it always felt better and more natural where there were a couple of roles out there, where it was stay in your lane.
You're the money guy.
And that was.
I knew that.
OK, this is not going to be, this is not going to be a good long term relationship.
But understanding with that the CFO background, that is yes, it's obviously first and foremost the financials and the stewardship of the cash flow of the business.
But beyond that, it is that analytical mindset.
And if we're looking at other, you know whatever the other KPIs are in areas that we do have a voice in.
That matters, that not that we're going to step on any other division leaders toes or anything, but that that the understanding and the partnership.
And I always.
There were a couple of CEOs I worked with where I felt like I was his right hand person.
And that was the most weirdly I've never aspired to be a CEO myself.
I was always kind of happy just being the guy that knew all the answers, sitting in in the background and could research and pipe in, you know, whenever the time committed.
But I think that understanding and it goes both ways you know sort of knowing as a CFO where you can provide value and input.
But then from the CEO side, it is understanding the full picture of what the CFO brings to the table.
I want to go back to one more thing you said before we start closing this out.
When you were talking about the transformation piece, that the most important part of it was just that relentless curiosity.
And for you, for whether it's looking at expenses or looking at the systems and processes they're using, what does that relentless curiosity look like in practice?
How does that manifest itself when you're working with your team, when you're working with members, when you're working with other people across the organization?
I think, even in the most simplest things in your day-to-day interactions, right in terms of maybe it's how you are communicating publicly.
Maybe it's how you're communicating one-on-one.
Maybe it's you're looking at loss runs and insurance.
And really wanting to deeply understand and asking the right questions, reading anything and everything you can find out about something and getting deeply curious, which I can tell you did.
I don't know if I've ever met with someone that was so well prepared as you are for this interview.
You knew all the stuff, all my answers.
So very well prepared.
I think just that relentless curiosity to know things and genuinely want to know.
Not just to know, but how it can make things better, how you can learn to communicate better with your team, how you can learn different things about helping other people accomplish their goals.
Just the curiosity about different things in the business.
There's always something that we can learn.
Yeah.
And it's, it's all I've.
I've heard uh one of my previous guests uh likened it to being an investigative journalist.
Like if you're doing FPNA, it is, you know, you keep asking why until you get to the root of it.
But when you get to the root of it, maybe that's when you finally find the lever, the metric that actually, if we move this metric, it's going to ripple all the way back up.
If you just stop at the surface level, then you have, you know, you don't have, you don't know what the cause is.
You just, you're maybe just looking at the symptoms.
So I love the idea of extrapolating that out into just the in kind of the entire approach to the role.
So yeah, that makes complete sense.
And I think it's a good definition of what it means to be a modern CFO.
So I've loved this because it just it feels like it's been a broad ranging conversation but it thematically has come back and It's seeing the transformation you've made, being in a position where you're passionate about the sport and can make a real difference.
It's been fun to hear the story.
But before I let you go, we do have two questions.
I don't know if you had time to look at everything before I sent it over, but we ask...
All of our guests these.
And the first one is, what is something that not many people know about you?
And I feel like I've already given away the secrets about you.
You might have answered with the hockey thing before, but now I'm going to make you dig deeper for that answer.
Oh, boy.
I would say this is hockey related.
I had a great opportunity after the 98 Olympics to be in an IMAX movie about the 98 Olympic team.
Wow.
That was a lot of fun.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Now I'm going to have to dig around on YouTube to see if I can find it.
I should have found it before the show with all my research.
Yeah, I have to send you the photo.
Perfect.
Okay.
And this one.
I always love asking CFOs this question because My first CFO role was in 2007 and I ended up really dating myself with the answer.
But you stop being that Excel warrior at some point and you're more of a recipient of Excel spreadsheets and a builder of them.
So I always feel like I should apologize when I ask a CFO this, but I'm still going to ask because we ask everyone.
But the last question we ask is, what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Well, I have got a fantastic controller and she sends me a lot of detailed, detailed spreadsheets.
So this will probably be your least interesting answer, but control F. Yes.
Yes.
Love it.
Love it.
And it's great.
That's honestly the best CFO roles I had where, yes, the CEO role is important.
But to me nothing was more important than having a really solid controller that could make me look way better.
So I loved the detailed spreadsheets.
Even if I didn't understand all the nested ifs and whatever next match they were doing and everything.
Goal seek is a good one, too.
I like goal seek.
Yeah, yeah.
Kelly, really appreciate you coming on the show.
And, oh, any closing thoughts?
And I know this might air after it's over.
Any predictions or thoughts about the Olympic hockey team this year?
Any overall thoughts on the Winter Games?
Oh, I'm so excited.
They're playing so well and just wish them the best.
They are really, really, really good group of people on both the men's women's sled team.
So very excited for them.
And I'm sure they will do do great things this year.
Well, Kelly, thanks so much for coming on.
