If you would like to earn CPE credit for listening to the show,
visit earmarkcpe.com slash FPA.
Download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate.
Finally, if you enjoy listening to FPNA today,
please go to your podcast platform of choice,
click the subscribe button, and leave a rating and review of the show.
And now, onto the show.
From Data Reels, this is FPNA Today.
It's not very often we get to put FPNA in the same sentence as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran,
and Katy Perry. But that's what we have for you today, as we're delighted to be joined on FPNA
today by Michael Stottland, Vice President of FPNA at AEG Presents. AEG presents as one of the
largest live music companies in the world, supporting the tourists of artists such as
the aforementioned Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones,
as well as 25 music festivals, including the iconic Coachella Valley music and arts fest,
along with stage coach New Orleans Jazz Fest, Hangout Fest, Electric Forest, and Firefly.
Prior to this role, Mike spent over five years at Marvista Entertainment,
initially as the director of FPNA before being promoted to Vice President. His career journey
also includes notable positions such as Senior Finance Manager for TV Distribution at 20th Century
Fox and working at FPNA at MGM. He holds an MBA in Finance from Pepperdine and a BA in Finance
from Cal State University Northridge. We are thrilled to have Michael join us today to share his
insights on FPNA. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thank you for having me. Love reading about your
career and can't wait to hear some of the stories you have and looking at your background
in FPNA and then the industry that you've gone into. I guess two-part question,
what led you to FPNA and how did you end up in the entertainment industry?
I've always been pretty inclined towards numbers and metrics. I ran cross-country and track in
high school, across-country and track in Division I, Cal State Northridge. It was right around the time
where the Garmin Sports Watch was having its Renaissance where you were getting metrics around
times and pace, stride-length, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and all of these things were
areas that I was for all intensive purposes obsessed with. I had decided that I wanted to have
a career where this was kind of a focal point where I could look at numbers and metrics and tell
stories based on that, make determinations. I was an econ major in undergrad. I had changed
to finance after that simply because I found econ to be fascinating but largely theoretical and I
wanted something a little bit more practical. I grew up in Los Angeles. The entertainment is the
large industry here, whether that's the studios or that is live entertainment. I spent a long
portion of my career at the studios starting with MGM. I was there for a couple of years, but a year
into it, the company went through a leverage buyout. I left to 20th Century Fox without,
you know, there was no guarantee of employment on the other side of the LBL. So,
when to 20th Century Fox really got a chance to spread my wings there. Learn the business, learn
how studios operate and films get produced and distributed. I got my MBA while I was working
full-time there. Following the MBA, I wanted to spread my wings a little bit more and I made the
jump over to Marvista, which was a significant change because 20th Century Fox was a company of
10,000 or so and Marvista was a company of 70. I really got a wide range of experience building
up the FPNA function at Marvista and taking the skills that I had learned at the larger companies
and implementing systems and getting us out of this Excel heavy world and helping that company grow.
And then I ultimately, you know, during COVID, there were certainly a lot of challenges, but
Marvista was a TV movie production company. A lot of people were at home watching TV content. We
had a fantastic year and for me as an FPNA person, I thrive on solving problems, on having
finding those issues that need a solution. And when the world is for all intents and purposes
on fire, we had this really successful year and I found this opportunity to go to live entertainment
during a time where live entertainment wasn't really allowed and to help the company reemerge from
the epist for lack of better words was, has been a fantastic experience and I really enjoyed my time
here at AEG. That's great and it's got to feel like it's, I mean, with, you know, post COVID,
ever the world getting back to normal and watching that sort of return to business, that's got to
be satisfying to watch something come back like that and to do it through an FPNA lens.
Oh, absolutely. It's being able to see the financials related to the bounce back.
There's always talked about how much pent up demand there was, but to actually see those
metrics come to fruition and then of course, you know, you had mentioned Taylor Swift and Elton
John, you know, all of those tours picked right back up. You really see it in the, uh,
financials. I was also thinking and I hung up on your early studies in economics because I
talked to a lot of FPNA people and I always think there's, there's some alternate universe out there
where I went and got a PhD in economics and instead of doing FPNA podcasts, I was some policy
wonk, you know, sitting in a think tank or whatever going through it, but I, I wonder, you know,
because you had the interest in economics and, you know, the theory is, is fun and interesting
and man going through COVID, you know, what greater exogenous factor could we have dreamed up,
uh, you know, trying to roll that into FPNA, but I wonder does that sort of economics base
find its way into your approach to FPNA? Do you find yourself like trying to pull external
data in when you're doing your, I mean, I guess you, in this industry, I guess you'd have to
really, um, but pulling stuff from the whether it's the Fed or whatever into your FPNA forecasts.
Absolutely. In this industry, we operate on luxury goods. The price elasticity here is, is sensitive
because if we start increasing ticket prices, you can see a precipitous drop off in demand.
And so we, we definitely factor those in where we're consistently looking at, at heat maps and,
and how we, we price the product and how, you know, how much beer costs that are venue and relative
to the cost of living in the location where that venue exists. So yeah, we're definitely
factoring in the macroeconomics into our pricing decisions. Yeah, that's great. And I can't wait
to dive into that a little more, but I guess to give us a, a little bit of a foundation, maybe let's,
let's back up and look at, uh, just we're very practical here because this is, you know, by FPNA
people, for FPNA people. So we really like to think about and understand the different team structures
and sort of the key KPIs and metrics that you're tracking. So first, give us a little bit more
of an overview of AEG and then let's focus on how your team is structured there and what kinds
of metrics and KPIs you're tracking. Yeah, absolutely. We segment our business into a few lines of
business, uh, namely we have our, our venues business. We have our festivals, our tours, uh,
we also do artist management and then we kind of have our corporate really GNA cost center. And
the way that my team is segmented is my direct team that works with me on, on the corporate
function in LA, we're split up. I have three distinct areas. One is primarily focused on
budgets, forecasts, financial reporting, the general day to day FPNA requirements. I have a systems
team that's responsible for the day to day management of our forecast tool, our process, uh, both
from a development and a troubleshooting standpoint. And then I have a third group which are mostly
business strategy folks and they're tasked with analyzing strategic initiatives, acquisition targets
and and located those business efficiencies. We're global. So we have offices all over North
America. We have offices in Europe, Asia and Australia. And I have local FPNA functions in all of
those offices. And the rationale is, and this goes hand in hand with what I mentioned is we are
looking at local macro economics in terms of our business decisions. And we need those regional
executives to have local support from the FPNA folks who are, uh, closer to the product, closer to
you know, to the venues that are local to them and are, uh, are just closer to the business. And so
it's constant because there's a time zone factor. As I mentioned, I have folks that are in Singapore
and so I'm having a jump on calls with them at all hours, same thing with the UK. It makes things
interesting, but we are very much global and we make sure we're staffing appropriately.
Gotcha. And I guess having the FPNA personnel in country means they're more embedded rather than
just reporting to someone at corporate. And do you find, I mean, I guess it's knowing the local
country and culture and what's going on there. But as far as being able to work with the other
groups in the business, do you find that that's more beneficial than having everyone centrally
located? Absolutely. There's a lot of overlap in these businesses. We'll do, you know, we have
global tours that'll span all of those regional offices and territories. But we also have local
artists in our Asia office. We'll have local artists that span the pan-Asia countries that
will never necessarily see North America and I won't ever get any exposure to that. And when it
ultimately comes down to, we're all storytellers and for me to be able to consolidate our entire
company, which is made up of more than 120 companies, I need my locals to be able to synthesize
that information for me so that I can then report that up to our C-suite.
I would imagine they are, but are the KPIs and metrics the same across all countries and regions
that you're looking at? For all intents and purposes, yes. We're looking at ticket sales relative to,
you know, ticket sales drive all of our downstream landslare areas, not all but most. And that's
the most important metric. But it's ticket sales relative to similar shows, similar artists,
in other areas, you know, as a percentage of capacity. It's looking at per person spend on food
and beverage. It's very normalized across the board for all of our businesses. By and large,
the drivers of the business don't change a whole lot. There are certainly local and regional
factors, government regulations that will impact some of this. But for the most part, it is normalized.
Gotcha. And I was, it's funny as you were talking about the food and beverage sales going and then
thinking back to our economics conversation. I was like, I bet you have a version of like the
Big Mac index where you're like, so a beer in the US is this. And then what does that translate to
and whatever the other countries and all that? Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, as I mentioned, you know,
a beer in LA is going to be more expensive in our venues than a beer in Columbus, Ohio.
Yeah. So even within the same country, obviously, different markets will pay different, that makes
sense. So just thinking about, you know, all the different industries and then the caliber and the
the level of celebrity and recognition and how everything is driven by, you know, who this artist
is and what kind of crowd they're drawing. And I'm thinking about what is it swift dynamics,
which is Taylor Swift's economic influence. And I'm thinking about, I mean, you know, everybody knows
this, but a sense of the scale of Taylor Swift, I mean, the era's tour is grossed more than a
more than a billion dollars so far, I think. And I'm wondering for something that big, what part
does or what part can FPNA play in an event for, you know, big artists like that or maybe even like,
you know, you're less known artists than that. So there's an interesting stat when it comes to the
Taylor Swift tour. And in North America, the average person spent $1,300 to attend a show. It's an
astronomical figure when it comes to shows, especially because you go to a local theater and
tickets can be as low as 20 bucks. And, you know, you go to a stadium show and you'll usually
spend a couple hundred bucks, but 1,300 and they also sold out and they also sold out in record time.
And it was just such a unicorn of a tour. And there's an level of appreciation being on the inside
looking at it, knowing that we may not see another tour quite like this in our lifetime. She did
50 some shows in North America and Elton John's Fair Wild Tour was over 300 shows and she
obliterated the gross that Elton made and Elton sold out every show. And so it's just fascinating
to watch. From an FPNA standpoint, you know, this business is a difficult business. Margions are
pretty thin and we have to very, very, very carefully manage our cost structure and our pricing
models looking at heat maps and understanding how we can optimize and maximize these things.
The cost to put on a tour like Taylors or even a festival like Coachella is eye popping. And so the
dollars that you see going in and out are expansive. And as you noted, a tour like Taylors can create
micro economies of their own in the cities that they go to. And Coachella is another example of that
where the city of India benefits greatly from these events and the amount of people that
that go to that city. If we didn't have our arms around the costs associated with these things,
it'll be really, really difficult to make profit march. And we do make our most of our margin on
volume because of that because they are thin. But that's where FPNA really comes in as to make sure
that we're keeping these things in mind. It's really easy. You've heard the phrase death by a
thousand cuts. Really easy to see a little bit of cost overruns here and there. It's not on
their own. They're minor, but then collectively they'll add up. And it creates a big red mark on
the P&L. That's really where we come in on these big events. I'm sure this is way more detailed
than we could cover in the show here. But just now thinking about that and how you evaluate the
KPIs that you're tracking and everything on these tours. If you have a new artist and I don't
take your pick at whatever level of your A list or B list or whatever or it's these bands from
the 70s that are new reformations for the 10th time of a band in their plan at state fairs and
all that. If you're evaluating an artist in a tour or a festival, what's your starting point?
Do you look at their previous tours? Do you look at comps? Do you look at where they are now?
The Spotify plays like what all goes is factored in when you're considering that and budgeting for it?
It's a little of all the above that you just mentioned. It is definitely a factor of popularity.
It's a factor of what kind of buildings that they'll be able to fill out relative to their stats.
Is it an artist that we need to put in our tour of 500 cap rooms where we can get their name out
and grow them or is it an artist like Taylor or the Rolling Stones where we're putting them in
stadiums and nowhere else? The ultimate driver of all of this is how many tickets do we think we
can sell? We have a team dedicated to data team that studies similar artists, similar artist profiles
to understand some of the history here. There's certainly a negotiation here with artists and
agents to understand what kind of tour work or planning and how we intend to grow them.
Someone that plays arenas and stadiums probably isn't going to play the small theaters and clubs.
That's not an end all. We have some theaters and clubs that are high capacity rooms,
but nothing like an arena or stadium. Once an artist gets to that level, they're not necessarily
going backwards. Not unless it's for some special event. All of these factors are considered when
the tour is proposed and artists are secured. There are so many variables and things you have to
account for here. When you build out these forecasts, I think probably even more highlighted because
the margins are so thin. You've got to be really spot on with your forecasting. Thinking about
the nature of the work that you do, what would your assessment be? What do you think are the most
critical skills that would translate in your industry and beyond? Basically, just your most
critical skills for success in FPNA. I guess maybe with all that, have you seen these evolve in
recent years, thinking about with the advent of advanced analytics and more and more automation
and more and more data? There's an internal joke that I had with some folks on my team.
As we developed a lot of new metrics and a lot of new ways to analyze this business,
someone asked me, how did they do this before? Before we had all this data. I think I'll hope
in a prayer. I'm not entirely sure. Somehow they made it this far. But you're right. The critical
skill, in my view, is really developing a smell test. It's being able to sniff out those problem
areas and create solutions for them. There's no problem. It's too small. I mentioned death by a
thousand cuts. In our business, we sell tens of millions of tickets. We analyze our revenue streams,
our cost structures on a per person basis. If you're able to get 50 cents more on a per attendance
basis, that's $5 million to the bottom line. That's where I meant is there's really no problem
too small. I've made a career out of solving those types of issues in terms of getting additional
data, building additional metrics and reporting and really systemizing so much of what we do.
I've grown to this point in my career by fixing problems. Some of those problems aren't necessarily
even problems with the operations of the business. Some of those problems are just in the way that we
operate internally. Some of our controls that are in place, or not in place depending on how you
want to look at it, on the way that we process data, the way that we report data. No company does
it perfectly. There's always ways to do it better. It's creating those efficiencies, creating those
optimizations that is really going to move the needle in the long run. I don't know what the
opposite of death by a thousand cuts is, but the idea here is you keep solving these small issues
and it ultimately builds up. Many times over my career, almost at every company I've been with,
I've pulled us out of an Excel heavy world and implemented some sort of system, an FP&A tool,
an EPM solution. I've worked with a number of vendors. I'm currently in the middle of a project.
I've also implemented in the last six, 12 months the use of Power BI. I taught myself how to write
DAX measures. I retop myself how to write SQL queries because it's been 13 years since I last
used Microsoft access. I had to re-teach myself how to write a query. I'm leveraging a lot of the
data warehousing that we're currently doing and data is just languishing there. No one's
necessarily using it. I'm finding that there's so much rich information that I'm now just waiting
in that water and trying to make heads and tails of it and how can I incorporate this into my reporting
and I've started to build new reports. I've been working with my locals to build similar reporting
out of Power BI. It's those skills that I think are critical and then with that is curiosity.
I find myself talking to so many people across different operating functions to understand
their day to day what it is that they're doing and why they're doing it. What kind of data do they
have and how can I get access to it? How can I marry that up to the financials? How can I find
where those synergies are and I almost take using that word that's so NBA of me? How do I find
those intersections that I can really build off and produce information that is actionable?
That would be anyone that's looking to grow and build skills and be successful in FPNA.
I think those are all absolutely critical. I love to hear what you said about talking to the
other departments and finding out what data they have and my approach when I come into a company
as CFO, I'm introductions to the finance team and all that. That's great. But beyond that,
the first thing I'm going to do is we're going to walk through the customer lifecycle from prospect,
lead generation, all that. What data do we have up here? Are we using the CRM correctly?
We have project management tools. Let me look at that too. Then I love to just jam it all together
and start finding spurious correlations or whatever and make assumptions off of them and all that.
Truthfully, that's more and more in FPNA and that's why I think the term business partnering
is getting is used more often now because it's really it's not just take us out of that
ivory tower of finance and accounting and let us be embedded in the teams and understand all
the data because we can use all of it. Absolutely. It's just a forecaster of the bread and butter
of what we do and there's no getting away from that and they're certainly incredibly important
and critical tool to business function. I couldn't agree more that the FPNA function itself has
moved away from that. It seems it's just kind of the regular course of business. It's really the
real value that we're providing is those business insights. It's bridging the gap between what are
marketing folks are doing versus what are talent bookers are doing versus what the venue operations
folks are doing and figuring out like are we underpricing our own food beverage or are we overpricing
it? Could we sell more? So there's any number of ways to find those efficiencies across those
those funcial teams. It's just navigating that that environment and figuring out what those are.
Yeah and this is I mean you really nailed what we do in FPNA so first it's making sense out of all
that data aggregating it and turning it into something useful and then you earlier you
referenced the storytelling. What we haven't talked about is you aggregate all this you have the data
and you know what the KPIs are but so much of what we do is that storytelling. Could you walk us
through your process for developing FPNA reports? I'm thinking about whether it's a dashboard or a
quarterly board meeting, whatever the kind of the regular package that you're putting together
and talk about what you're thinking about as you put that together and then any tips or tricks
you've learned for how to better communicate information to whichever stakeholder whether it's
management investors or whoever the report is going to. Absolutely. It all ultimately starts with
having an idea of what your end goal is. What is the message you're trying to deliver and if it's
something as it's just reporting a forecast or a budget that it's going to be your standard PNLs
and some detailed reports behind them but if it is if it's beyond that if it's an analytical report
if it's evaluating our our show costs if it's evaluating our our ancillary metrics the idea here
and what I found at least over the course of my career is most folks who are who would be taking
action relative to this information they don't have time to sit there and wait through a spreadsheet
full of numbers and try to understand it. They want to know what they need to know today and now
and then move on to the next thing and it's really finding a way to not to convey the right message
have all the correct backup but have it be very succinct and really provide the information that
like I said is necessary and if you don't start with the end goal and work backwards you're going to
find yourself building a lot of spreadsheets and realizing that you can't necessarily use them or put
them in front of anybody it becomes data for the sake of data and so it really needs to be a deliberate
exercise you'll find yourself spinning your wheels a lot less working backwards and then you also
might find that if you had an idea of what it is that you want to present and your data starts to
yield a different result that's fine you can at least pivot on on what the presentation was it's
certainly possible you you thought you were going to present bad news and your your data is actually
indicating oh actually this is good news for for all the types of purposes this is actually how I
approach my power BI build especially with a system like BI or or any sort of a EPM tool the level
of rework that has to be done if you find that you've gone completely off the path that maybe you
had intended or now you've decided oh you know I should have done this a different way is very
labor intensive to rework at all rather than do it right from the first step I say this from
experience because I've done plenty of rework knowing what I know now I would have already had an
idea in mind of how this is how this needs to be done and how this needs to be the most
efficient way and everything hinges on how engaging your presentation is and I've found that if I
just stick up spreadsheet full of numbers in front of people their eyes glaze over and the
meeting is generally unproductive for me personally my my brain thinks in numbers and I think in
you know I enjoy data and details but I think I'm the exception to the rule in most cases I can sit
with our head of marketing and she's absolutely brilliant but her brain works differently than mine does
I have to pivot in the way that I present to her in a way that's engaging for her that is
meaningful in terms of how she runs her marketing departments and so I have to be very specific in
who I present to and what I'm presenting to them yeah it makes makes perfect sense and I'm thinking
about earlier when you said you know you have to start with the end in mind and of course as finance
folks you know we can't have an agenda the data is what the data is but we need to know that
why part of it so knowing okay I'm setting out to report this and but let me understand how
or why this happened but maybe in that why is where it comes out oh wait this actually isn't bad
because here's the reason and this is a positive trend something that's happening under the hood
and I and I think another big part of the storytelling and being able to get the right message across
is you have to establish that level of trust with the rest of the management team so it's the trust is
you know don't report any numbers that you have that you haven't triple checked and all the standards
there but I a big part of that especially is we have more and more data and we're using more and
more of it for our modeling is thinking about data quality and data management and I think
that a lot of FPNA pros right now it's just we want you know whether you're using traditional
statistical modeling or modeling in Excel or if you're using some kind of machine learning modeling
you want as many data points and as many features and parameters as you can that are going to help you
you know make a better model but as with the amount of data that you're dealing with what strategies
are you using or if you found effective for ensuring that the data is accurate and that you can
trust the integrity of the data like what is your approach if you're whether you're defining a new
metric or verifying existing ones how are you dealing with the data situation yeah you know the phrase
it takes a village comes to mind and I have the benefit today in working at a company where we have
a lot of departments and and they are segregated such that they own a certain portion of data there's
some level of trust that I that my accounting team and the data I'm getting from my ERP is correct
and accurate there's a level of trust that the folks who are running our CRM and our booking tool
are putting in correct data and I'm getting good information that comes from the forecast now
FPA as a function we're sort of the in my view the last stand here in terms of ensuring that data is
correct I certainly find a cruise that have been booked that that I question I certainly see
forecast data that's coming out of our booking tool that I question but that's that is part of
that job of data governance and making sure that I'm getting good data is it's looking at that
level of detail I don't always have the time to be in the weeds but I do enjoy being in the weeds
asking those questions it's really building strong teams around that it's making sure that the systems
in place aren't operating in silos that they're aligned in in some form of fashion that you have
those checks and balances baked in that it's not just data that goes into a system and just lives
there and people can pull it but it's not marrying up to anything else you know we look at how our
accounting actuals are coming in relative to what went into our booking system we look at what's
in our forecast relative to everything else those other two systems as well and we're also comparing
you know we're looking for those anomalies right did someone input something that that looks
really off and and that's where the metrics help if suddenly you see that one year a venue was
was averaging eight dollars per person in food and beverage and all of a sudden they're going up
to 15 it's like whoa what's going on and FPNA is a huge function in creating those checks and
balances and creating those that integrity of that data FPNA today is brought to you by data rails
the world's number one FPNA 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 and 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 a
thousand finance teams use data rails to uncover their company's real story don't replace Excel
embrace Excel learn more at data rails dot com so i've always pushed for i feel like finance should
own all the metrics in the company because i just you know we're impartial reporters of the
financial data so we're not going to have an agenda so i think you know we can define and understand
what these KPIs and metrics are and we report consistently but maybe it's a bad quarter for sales
so sales comes up with a new metric that they want to track or whatever so being able to handle
that and deal for it and thinking about that the way that we treat the data and the metrics and
when you're doing these forecasts i think about in entertainment scenario planning has to be i mean
you can't you know black black swan event of covid whatever the outside of that but heavy rainfall
year that is ruining these outdoor venues or whatever so do you do a lot of sensitivity analysis
and scenario planning in your modeling yeah absolutely when i was at marviss dimension that that's
when covid started and we more or less had to scrap our entire our plans for the year uh we didn't
we had to figure out how we were going to produce movies we had to figure out what you know how
many people would even have on set at any given time we had to factor in ppe and all of our production
budgets that was not a thing before we you know at the time i ran seven concurrent forecast scenarios
to understand what is the the right mix of our slate what can we produce during what time of the year
wouldn't we anticipate that some of the uh restrictions were going to get lifted so we can get more
people on set what are the costs that we're not going to be additive to our budgets and we ultimately
i mentioned we had the second best year in the company's history and that was largely because we
were very diligent and very deliberate in how we scheduled that slate and and when we produced those
films we happened to just produce a lot of christmas films because covid started in March we had some time
to to plan this out and hallmark was one of our biggest partners so we produced a bunch of christmas
movies for them and it all worked for for both of us the biggest scenario that we plan for is
show cancellations it was actually not a big thing prior to covid it's a bigger issue now while
it's not that prevalent we definitely factor in seasonality into our venues we factor in the artist
mix that we get year after year one of the you know one of the fun parts of this industry and even
in the film industry is it's a different business year after year our mix of shows or mix of artists
are are always changing our you know we'll have the recurring events we'll have we have venues where
we know we'll put certain amount of shows in but that mix is always changing and it's it's a different
company today than it was when i started and even when i was at the entertainment that the excuse
me be the movie companies similarly we had a different film slate every single year and when i
was a 20th century fox when we had avatar it was a fantastic year and because it blew up the entire
box office but then you don't have an avatar every single year and so it definitely made things
fascinating and a little bit volatile but it keeps things uh if you're on your toes for sure
but it it's really that sensitivity is around that mix of slate that mix of artists and um and then
what it was that do for the year we're we're also a large portfolio business we have as i mentioned
we have festivals tours venues we have one year where the tours are softer than than another year
but the festivals do better and so we're we're managing those fluctuations across the lines of business
as well to make sure we're protecting our profits that's great and i was thinking about what you
were saying about the movie business avatar obviously home run it's it's the errors tour of of
movies but the gambles that the studios take on just because such huge budgets and that you get a
you string a couple of flops together and suddenly the whole did found it and i guess we've seen that
absolutely i think what people a lot of people don't realize is in the studios most movies uh
operate in the red until they head tv distribution and that's when um you know the the marketing
budget for theatrical film is it's astronomical home entertainment as a business is
is largely tanking and has been for for quite some time and but television revenues are in perpetuity
you can license a film out forever and um and so that's really where studios make their money is in
the tv distribution space and gm is a good example of this because at the time that i did start with
mgm they didn't have very many theatrical films anymore but they were making money off of the
james bond library and the and the rocky catalog and these films were already pretty aged at that point
but people are still licensing them and and you you can probably still find them on tv now
yeah if you're willing to go through cable and watch 50% commercials and
right exactly yeah but i guess they got to pay the the the broadcast stations have to pay for it
so 50% commercials today but a company like a cam survive for a long time on the back of old
catalogs yep makes sense and now they're all trying to consolidate their catalogs and have
their own streaming services and now we have this fractured system again yeah and then on the
entertainment side i was thinking when you were talking about the success of certain movies versus
others and when you're trying to factor in for scenario analysis i picture uh i'm sure there are
certain artists where you have to put in some factor that artists may not show tonight you know
for cancellations and everything yeah we you know we had this problem even last year where
Kanye West was announced as a headliner at Coachella and then suddenly yeap out and we had to
scramble and and replace him and that wasn't cheap to get someone last minute uh we also had an
issue with uh Travis Scott when Astral World wasn't our event but we had him in our events subsequent
to that and we had to scramble and you know we had to had to make changes because that was such a
and admittedly that was a bit of a black swan event in the industry but we had to uh
pivot and quickly yeah in fpna you know in our own industry we have our things that we have to
factor in but it's been fascinating to hear about um entertainment and film industry as well
i'm thinking about how how much data you have and how much you're using and i'm about as bullish as
they come on what AI is going to do for us and i've talked for years and used and and seeing great
examples of using what i guess we'll call traditional AI meaning machine learning to build
cooler models that have more features and that you can do more with machine learning than you could
just you know with a simple regression model for forecasts or whatever i'm wondering in in you said
you know now you're using power BI so this is a stepping stone in that direction and certainly
you can use that functionality to to drive the models as well what do you think stand where we are
now seeing how you're transitioning to incorporating power BI and what do you think are the
opportunities and challenges for fpna say maybe in the next five or ten years and what would you advise
people working in fpna do right now to kind of position themselves to to ride that wave of
wherever we're headed yeah i i think AI is going to be the big challenge in the next five ten years
it's it's not a not the challenge that it exists it's a challenge of how do we incorporate it
because i've made it to this point my career because i've continued to learn i've continued to
adapt and i've continued to to optimize my process based on the technology that i have available
to me at any given time whether it's something as simple as getting out of excel into something else
or or it's starting to leverage power BI or you know you mentioned machine learning and that is
something that we're dabbling in a little bit as well to try to look at past events look at how
ticket sales performed for those events relative you know so artist genre theater or club and theater
location um any there's large number of metrics that that go into it but they really try to
understand how can we improve that model of of projecting how our shows are going to perform
on a contribution margin basis i certainly don't think AI is going to replace any of us i think you
will find yourself very much behind the curve if you don't find ways to include that in your day to
day process use in the right way it can only help us to be better at what we do and be better at how
we present our data one area that i've always focused on where my career is is to focus on limiting
the amount of time it takes to process data and uh increasing the amount of time you're actually
analyzing it and and speaking to it what you'd find in most places is there's an inordinate amount of
time being spent processing data to leverage some of these AI tools to do that for you to basically
put you in a position where you're spending that time understanding the business what's happening
and telling those stories that's the real value and it's it's not easy i mean leveraging AI is
is difficult it for you know a number of reasons i mean even if you try to it's not really build
something in house you know using chat gpt is a risky proposition you don't want to put anything
proprietary in there so i use chat gpt for you know helping me write syntax for things like
DAX measures or uh things along those lines but i certainly wouldn't put uh shows statistics or
ticketing data or anything like that into into chat gpt so there's definitely ways that to use this
and i think that it would be prudent for fp and a professionals to look to leverage that in the
near term yeah and i think you know the issues you have are the same that everyone else is it's a
data governance security and you know proprietary information and then the fact that um
lulms can hallucinate from time to time you don't want your analyst to be hallucinating when they're
reporting something back to you but it's we're at that super early stage where we see the potential
i haven't seen anyone yet knock it out of the park and i think we're going to start saying it
AI kind of rolled into a lot of the software that we're already using it's just going to be baked
in it's going to be a whole new dimension to dashboards absolutely it's there's always some
resistance to implementing a tool like that but the pros outweigh the cons and uh if you if anyone
can get their exacts on board with implementing a solution like that it's it's worth please
well you mentioned you know that you're you're new to power bi i'm wondering what's top of mind for
you um for your career at the moment what i mean is there something you're working on trying to
learn or master at this point so my ultimate goal as is with a lot of people on on the podcast is
CFL level that's what i'm always working towards it's i'm always building my skills around knowing
i i don't have a traditional accounting background i'm very heated on the debit some credits i
studied the CPA exam i just didn't sit for it i find it highly enjoyable and find it very
sporting to argue with auditors and it's it's one of the most fun parts of my job is defending and
you know why we're not going to take an impairment on an asset or or it's something that it's
it goes hand in hand with the storytelling but right now it's yeah it's it's looking to optimize the
way that we're currently doing it in a here i believe that i currently have a best in class
at PNA department and the what we're currently building and what we're developing is only going to
improve on that and it's it's ultimately another notch in my belt on on that path and that's
my big focus and part of that is learning power bi part of that is getting involved in in the
machine learning side on our show models and being involved in building out new venue performance and
and you know i have my strategy team dedicated to that finding where what can be more efficient in
the way we put on our festivals you know i right now i'm definitely enjoying the work that i'm doing
but but my eye isn't off the ball ultimately is like i mentioned is is to move toward the CIP at
level yeah and you know these days i mean i know it used to be you had to go CPA audit move come
up that path uh we are saying more and more fpna and my background was fpna as well fp a
positions move into that cfo role but i think the cfo role has evolved from what it was too and now
it's just it kind of goes hand in hand with the data so being able to understand
use this data and having a proven track record there and then kind of having this strategic
element that is here's the data driven decision making i mean it does make sense for a very good path
to the to the seat you know the cfo role wasn't that long ago that the role was largely you know keep
keep us all out of prison and now it is truly a strategic role and it's a seat in the room to talk
about what we're doing and why we're doing it and whether it makes financial sense to do it and
all of these things that uh no question that someone with an accounting background could do the job
but i agree the strategic nature of fpna lens well to the modern cfo all right so we are
we're we're we're the point of the show it's the uh the getting to know you section which i found
a lot of uh finance folks really uh they'd much rather just talk numbers than this but i'm going
to put you in the hot seat now i heard that you were a d1 cross country and track runner so that's
something i probably and not a lot of people know tell us something else that uh we wouldn't know
about you that we couldn't find online i mentioned i was a little bit obsessed with with those metrics
you know during the the guard that garment watch run a songson i continued that on the side even
as i started my opinion a career i i became a triathlete for many years um i completed a couple
of ironmans uh about uh five half ironmans i eventually became a triathlon coach i coach the fox
triathlon team when i was at the company and then later i joined team called tri-trained endurance
and i coached them for a few years then i had kids and all that fell apart yeah but you know i was
uh i was very competitive in sport i have a few uh podiums in my um uh on my belt and at one point
competed in the age group nationals in 2015 got obliterated but it was uh it was just a fun experience
just qualifying and being there and competing with some of the best um not amateur triathletes in
the country and it's something i while i no longer these days i picked up a golf club and
uh put put away my bike but you know it it allowed me to expand on those metrics because now i wasn't
just looking at my running metrics i was looking at my swim times and my splits i was looking at my
my bike metrics i was looking at nutrition i i was able to continue nerding out on on all of this
and then with coaching being able to share that with other people as well yeah especially for an
endurance event like a an ironman where you have to balance all of it to obviously the training
and all that but even during the event where you know okay uh you know and i don't know what level of
detail you have but your VO2 and in whatever that you're looking at in training and it's like well
how is my run gonna be after the bike and the transition and knowing you know what your nutrition
strategies and all there i could see that been uh in taz perfectly to fpna too it's something i did
without realizing why i loved it and just looking hindsight i'm like oh that actually makes a lot of
sense metrics and and stats and and like this is the world that i live in and this is how i i i
use these tools to understand the world more or less understand my world and that my transition
to being a golfer has been kind of the same it's understanding you know what club my distances and
and but amount of power to put behind a swing relative to the distance i'm trying to achieve or
the kind of ball flight i want to achieve it's all it's all interconnected and it's all like
delivers in fpna it's just like what do i need to do to tweak this this way or that yeah love it love it
i so i'm actually gonna throw in an extra question in the getting to know you uh thing and i
know your fpna you're not on the uh on the front lines but do you ever get to meet the artist and
do you have a like a favorite gig or or or cure that you've been a part of so you're right i mean
it's not not often but we definitely you know on occasion do get to meet and greet uh with the
artists my favorite story that i like to tell uh as far as my favorite gig and tour it was my first
show i attended after starting with the company i started in 2021 and it was right as we were coming
back online post-COVID and i went to go see the rolling stones at so-fi stadium and i walked into
the stadium just as they were announcing stones i missed the opener i'll never forget the roar of
crowd when they announced the stones and and mcjire came on and and Keith Richards started playing
and it was uh an incredible energy in that stadium this was also the first time in in my life that
i found myself looking at the at the audience more than i was looking at the band it dawned on me
that this is why we do this this you know it's it's really for the fans it's for the artists and
and we kind of just exist to facilitate uh those experiences and create those memories that show
will probably be my favorite for a long time for that reason it i think it was it was that sort of
eye-opening moment for me of like i get it now this is what we're doing yeah if you had the full
customer experience and you got to see that you got instant feedback from from all the other customers
that's great yeah so our normal last question is always um what is your favorite excel function but
since you're messing around in a power bi you can still answer the excel question or if you've found
some cool new thing in power bi that you're really liking as far as excel goes my favorite function
is and i know a lot of people say if you look up but for me it's actually some if or some ifs i
i know that a lot of what the sum if and sum of function does can just be utilized with pivot tables
but my data is tends to be very robust with a lot of duplication of the metadata and so for me to
aggregate those and and sum up by a category or by some field i use some ifs religiously and
and i found it to be powerful i also you know be lookups i in data sets like mine tend to be dangerous
because it'll only take the first value it finds it it ignores subsequent values and so i go with
sum ifs or um and even with be lookups i use index match more often that i use be lookup for power bi
one thing i'm i'm really proud of that i i developed recently so i'm getting data fed into my power
bi model from our epm tool and we do a lot of versioning of our forecasts of our budgets i was able
to develop a DAX measure where i could i have to have two different slicers on a page that uh
control two different measures within the same visual and that took me weeks to develop and figure
out how to do it i certainly had a little bit of help from my my uh strategy folks uh to and
and chat to be tea to help me with some syntax but you know it's i even went on the the power bi
community boards and and they weren't able to figure out quite what i was looking to do uh but once
i got it done i was quite proud of it i was it was at that moment that i was able to uh share my
dashboard with cfo because that's what he was looking for is to say you know i want to use this
report or i want to have this dashboard and be able to have multiple versions within one visual
that's the power bi aspect of it i love that you uh mentioned slicers because just this morning
we've got a power bi instance and we've got in the backlog there's two projects that are some
fairly complicated slicers and they stay in the backlog they never seem to come up into a
sprint and this morning i i said on the slicers is uh anybody gonna pull the pull those forward so
yeah so great accomplishment and and great use of it and it does it's great to give that sort of
drag and drop cool way to to show data so okay last question i guess if anyone wants to follow you
or or uh get in touch with you how can how can our listeners uh connect with you and learn
more about your work yeah linkedin is the best i'm uh you know anybody wants to send me a message
i'd be happy to respond and there's only a couple of mic stop ones around but i'm the one from
Los Angeles at at AEG well mic i really appreciate your time this has been fascinating conversation
