Growing The Game: Kelly Mahncke On Leading USA Hockey’s Financial Future

While most nonprofits need not be as focused on the bottom line, the power of healthy margins can’t be underestimated. Kelly Mahncke, the CFO of USA Hockey, knows this well, having led the organization through the highs of Olympics seasons, and the lows of the pandemic. She asks herself, “How do we positively impact more people? How do we grow our revenue? How do we thoughtfully do that as well?” Ultimately, winning not only feels good, but does good.

Mahncke joins Jack McCullough for an episode of Secrets of Rockstar CFOs to share how she approaches strategic financial decision-making in the nonprofit sector, the unique challenges and triumphs of leading a sports organization and how she’s helping sustain growth for the future. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly edited and trimmed for clarity, follows.

My guest is Kelly Mahncke. She is the CFO of USA Hockey. Kelly, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.

Thank you, Jack. I’m pleased to be here.

When I was researching you, I came across Mahncke Park in San Antonio. Are you familiar with that one?

I am familiar with that park. I have never been there, but my dad and brother both went, and it was fun walking down memory lane.

You’re not related to that Mahncke?

There was Hans Mahncke who was related to the founder of the hotel in that park in that area. I can’t prove it, but I believe we are.

The name is somewhat apparent, but why don’t you share a little about USA Hockey and what your mission is?

We are under the umbrella of the USOPC. Most people believe what we do at USA Hockey is we send teams to the Olympics. We do that. We send men’s teams, women’s teams and then sled teams to the Olympics. What surprised me when I first got here is we’re a youth sports organization. We do those things but we do a lot more. We are looking to develop players, officials and coaches across the United States in hockey, and help grow the game. We have several different companies under our umbrella. We have our operating company. That’s probably what we’ll talk about the most today. We also have a foundation, and under our foundation, we own an arena, a drive-in, a concession and a restaurant, and then we have our own capital insurance company as well. I spend a lot of time in that area too. To give you a little bit of framework, we have over a million members at USA Hockey across the United States. A lot of those are volunteers, and they play a huge part in what we do here at USA Hockey.

I understand you play a little hockey.

I have to pinch myself every day that I get to be here at USA Hockey. It’s funny how I got into hockey. I came from a long line of hockey players. It took me probably about five years to convince my parents to let me play hockey, and finally, they acquiesced. I was quite persistent. I started playing at about 13 years old, and then I went on to play in college for a couple of years. Now I get to work in hockey and play here locally in Colorado for a high school hockey team. We won state one year and that was a lot of fun. That was before any girls or women were playing hockey certainly in Colorado. That was a lot of fun.

Good for you for your persistence, because I know back then there were boy sports and girl sports. Ice hockey, not a lot of girls were playing it at the time. There was field hockey, I suppose.

Yes. Three broken collarbones later and here we are.

I’ve always said that as hockey expands, it’s the best sport to watch in person. I was in Seattle when they were getting their hockey team. I’m guessing none of you have seen hockey at the arena. It’s such a phenomenal game to watch. Football is made for TV, but for an in-person sporting event, I’ve never seen anything more exciting than a well-played hockey game.

I concur. It’s a great game to see in person. It’s electric being in the stands. I would agree with that.

Given your passion, your youth and your educational background, probably more than anyone I know, you’re in a perfect job for yourself at this point in your career.

I’m very fortunate.

Before we get into the business stuff, just a little bit about you. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Did you live there your entire life?

All except for a couple of years when I went to play hockey at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. I moved and lived in Denver for 20 years until I was recruited to come over to USA Hockey and work at USA Hockey.

I know you studied economics as an undergraduate and got an MBA. It seems like you had a natural affinity towards business and finance. Is that correct? Did you figure that out at a relatively young age?

I did. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, and I’ve always been fascinated [by it], more so microeconomics. I like macro as well, but business has always been something that I’ve been very interested in. I enjoyed the program and I graduated from Colorado College with an econ background. I waited a little while and got some more experience under my belt before I went back to get my MBA with an emphasis in finance.

That’s wise. For everybody who gets an MBA, any business professional, it’s a great credential for them. When I hear people getting it immediately out of undergraduate, I think it’s too bad they couldn’t get three or five years of experience beforehand. It sounds like you did that.

It makes a big difference. It did for me anyway.

I got my undergraduate degree at the same time as most of my classmates at 22, but I was 31 when I got my master’s degree and completed it. I walked into it when I had seven or eight years of experience. It made me appreciate it so much more.

I was looking at your career path, and I won’t say that you’ve worked for nonprofits because that’s not the case, but the companies that you’ve worked for seem to have a philanthropic mission. USA Mobility, which is medical devices, and then Arapahoe House. Now, you’re working for USA Hockey. All of these organizations seem like they’re making the world a better place to live in their ways. Is that something that comes naturally to you? Were you raised that way or is it something that you developed in your career path?

I wish I could say that it was. It wasn’t something that I thought about or planned. Everything fell into place, but one of the most rewarding things that I’ve done is working in companies that have a mission and a greater contribution to the greater good. It does impact you. Anytime you come to work and the work that you’re doing, even in finance and IT, is making a positive difference to the mission of the organization, that part is fun.

That makes sense. You worded it exactly the way I was trying to. Tell me a little about the progression. The 22-year-old version probably didn’t see yourself as the CFO for the hockey association at some point in your career. Were some of these planned out thoughtfully or is it more a “That’s a great opportunity, I’m going to jump on it” type of thing, or did you have a mission?

I graduated from a liberal arts school. You start in kindergarten, you go to first grade, and then second grade, and everything’s laid out. I thought, “What am I going to do next?” I knew I wanted to do something in business and probably finance, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. My first job out of college was as an accountant. I saw the salespeople and they seemed like they had such a fun job. They were busy all the time and out of the office. They seemed like they did well financially. I thought, “That’s pretty cool. Maybe I want to get into that.”

I got into business development and did a little bit of that. That was interesting, and I enjoyed it. When I think about where I want to be, I look at how I want to spend my days. Do I want to spend my days engaged in things that are mentally challenging and interesting? Do I want to spend my time in a more social-type job? Do I want to spend my time more in an individual-type pursuit?

That helped me think about what I wanted to do with my career, then I started working backward. I started looking at some people that I knew and the jobs that they had. I worked backward like, “That’s a pretty cool job. What type of background do you need to have that job?” I did a lot of research that way in terms of what my strengths were and what jobs seemed appealing to me and started working backward.

That is a unique approach. Good for you. I was that way too. After elementary school, I went to middle school, then to high school and then to college because that’s what all my friends were doing. It wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I realized I could deviate from the standard path. I want to get back to your organization. Let’s talk a little about what your mission is and, critically, how you, as the financial head of that organization, can support the organization’s missions and goals.

We’ve worked with a lot of focus on our new strategic plan. It does have a lot of finance focus in it, which is a bit unusual for a nonprofit. Our executive director is terrific. He’s leading the charge, and we have a great group of people on the leadership team that are helping push this forward. One of the most important things we can do is grow the game. That helps us serve our mission for sure, but also how do we positively impact more people? How do we grow our revenue? How do we thoughtfully do that as well? We’re striving for a four percent surplus every year. In turn, we’re very cyclical with the Olympics and how we operate. We’re trying to even that out and have a little bit more consistency in our revenue and expenses.

That’s a huge part of what we’re doing. We also want to take into account safety in the game. We talked a little bit too about diversity, equity and inclusion, and how important that is in our game. There are a lot of moving parts, but there is a big slant to the financial strength of the organization embedded within the strategic plan.

I’m working very closely with the executive director, the board and our senior staff. How do we drive that mission forward? How do we weave it into everything that we do? That is important because sometimes in a nonprofit, you can lose sight of that piece or the importance of margin. There is no mission without margin. Here, I think we’re doing a much better job of that and it’s fun to be a part of.

Somehow I’ve never heard that expression before. “There’s no mission without margin.” That’s great. That’s why sometimes, people who don’t work in the nonprofit sector, when I talk to them, they think, “Nice people, mission-centric and whatnot. Their finances aren’t critical.” No. They need to be ruthlessly efficient in the nonprofit sector financially. Sure, a lot of them are about the mission and not about making a dollar per se, but that almost puts more pressure on the finance team.

We talked about this a little bit before and hospitals seem to get that. They can be very profitable, but yet they’re a nonprofit. They’re very focused on that and how you can serve more people. By and large, you’re correct. Most nonprofits are not as focused on the bottom line.

Nor should they be, but I tell my friends who worked at venture capital-backed companies or something like that when things are slowing down a little bit, and they need to cut expenses, I say, “Talk to someone in the nonprofit sector. You think you’re cutting expenses. You’re a rank amateur compared to some of the things that they’ve learned to live without.” I’m curious, with something like this, you’ve tried to build a world-class team to support some of your goals. Tell me a little about your team. How many people report to you in the world of finance and accounting?

I did not count. What I can tell you is IT, finance, treasury, accounting, admin, facilities and insurance roll up to me. It’s a lot of departments. For the size of our revenue, we have very few employees, which is very interesting. I can explain a little bit more about that. We have roughly 155 employees across all of our companies. For the revenue that we do, that’s a small number of employees. We rely heavily on our volunteers or as we often refer to our volunteers as our unpaid professionals and they do an immense amount of work. In collaboration with them, we’re able to do a lot of work. Off the top of my head, I would say roughly five people report directly to me.

Enough that you know all of them on a first-name basis and that type of thing.

Yes, we have a lot of communication.

For someone like you, you’re probably very concerned with developing them in a mentor type of role. Do you embrace that in your role as the leader of the organization that you’re mentoring them and helping them become as good as they can be professionally?

I enjoy that part of it. One of the things that is unique to USA Hockey is we have people who have been here for more than 30 years and a very high percentage that have been here for a very long time. The mentoring I’ve done hasn’t been so much at USA Hockey. I do enjoy that, but many people have been here. I probably have six or seven people on my team that have been here for 25 to 30 years, which is remarkable. I am bringing in some new people and that part is fun. The mentoring piece is a lot of fun, learning about them and where they want to go, and how I can help support that.

Some of the younger folks in IT over the last several years, we’re helping them figure out where they want to be, what they want to do, where they want to go and being supportive of that. I think that our leadership team does that pretty well. We communicate with one another. You may have somebody that might be in our development group and they want to work in high performance or they want to work on the international side.

We’re very good at supporting that because we have such a relatively low turnover. In some of the more entry-level jobs, we have more turnover, but we don’t have a ton of turnover. We’re trying to give people the opportunity to grow whether that’s through education or different opportunities in different areas. We try and do that, but the majority of my mentoring has been outside of this particular role and in prior roles, which has been a lot of fun.

When you were climbing the ranks, did you have any significant mentors who stuck out and made a big impact on your career growth?

I’m so glad you asked that. I had many mentors, two in particular, who were incredibly important to my success and my development. One is Virg Setzer and he was one of my professors getting my MBA. He’s also an executive coach. The growth that I had working with him after I graduated propelled me beyond what I could have imagined. He challenged me and gave me some confidence to help grow my career to do the hard things and have the hard conversations. His background is in HR. It wasn’t so much finance-related, but it was more about working with people and communicating and having difficult conversations. He was fantastic.

Another mentor that I had was Mike Butler. He was the CEO of one of the companies I work for. He was an outstanding mentor for building teams and how you work within the team. Again, similar, about having hard conversations, but extremely positive. He didn’t shy away from those hard conversations either and having a lot of those conversations creates opportunities to grow your courage.

It’s interesting none of them were finance and accounting type mentors. It’s more about leadership skills, team building and collaboration skills. People who aren’t CFOs or work directly with CFOs don’t fully appreciate the strategic and leadership element of the job.

I find that part almost more important than the X’s and O’s sometimes. I have incredible teammates who are very good at that. They are very good at accounting and working with the auditors, very good at IT and insurance. I rely heavily on them.

Those skills are invaluable, but to get to the next level, you need people-centric skills. Is it fair to call your organization a governing body? Is that a fair way to categorize it?

One hundred percent.

It has to be some very unique challenges and opportunities that come with leading a national governing body in a sport. What are some of the things that are a little different for your company? There aren’t many governing bodies in sports in the United States.

I underestimated the collective positivity when you’re profitable and winning. That can’t be overstated. It is fun. Even when you have people who don’t pick the team, they don’t play on the team, they don’t coach the team, but everybody feels like they’re a part of it. Everybody in every position contributes to us winning gold medals. That’s another important part of our strategic plan. We want to win at every level and bring home gold medals. We’ve been thankfully very fortunate and successful there.

The Olympic focus is unique to companies. It is again how we started the conversation. It’s such an interesting part to have something bigger than yourself to be a part of, which is a lot of fun. There’s a camaraderie that comes with that that’s neat. Recently, we’ve had some more challenges with administration and some of the things that we’ve had to put in place for good reason. Things that happened with safe sport and some of the other unfortunate incidents with other national governing bodies.

It’s a big job to try and make sure that safety is a priority within our organization. We believe it is. We believe we do a good job of it and we do the best we can to train people, do background checks and do everything else to make sure that the game is as safe as it possibly can be. Not just from a safe sports perspective but also, it’s a rough game. It’s funny, somebody said, “You’ve got knives on your feet, clubs in your hand, a bullet you’re shooting and you’re in an arena.” You put it that way and it can be a little tough. We want to make sure that people are safe too in the arena and with body checking and everything else. That part is different too. Those are the two things that come to mind initially.

I’m old enough to remember not every goalie even wore a face mask. Some insisted that it would impact their peripheral vision and they were willing to take a couple. In hindsight, it seems like it’s nuts. But safety for sports, particularly because you’re such role models for young people too, you want to have the best practices for it. Not a lot of the CFO guests I had talked about that sort of thing on their jobs. What was the quote that you said, you have knives on your shoes?

I hope I’m getting this right. Knives on your feet, clubs in your hand and you’re shooting bullets.

How hard is an elite shooter? The hockey puck must be going 100 miles an hour, right?

Absolutely. It’s fun to watch the NHL All-Stars. They’ll have these tests, how fast people are skating and how hard they’re shooting the puck, at the high 90s or 100. Pretty fast.

That’s insane but cool. You mentioned the budgeting thing before we went on the air. Right now you’re in your budgeting and planning cycles. Budgeting and planning support strategy, and the other way around, but it must be pretty unique because you’ve got your ongoing everyday type of operations, and then you’ve got these unicorn-type events, little thing, the Olympics, and then World Hockey Championships. How does that impact your budgeting and strategic planning when we’ve got these individually significant events that are critical?

The Olympics are certainly a big part of every four years. We are also very excited to announce that we’re hosting the Men’s World Junior Championships. The last time we did that was in 2018, and I missed it. We are hosting it in 2026. We go through these long periods without hosting. That is probably an incredibly important event to us financially.

We go through these long periods where we may not be as financially fluid or as financially well off as we are during these years. The years when we were able to host the Men’s World Junior Championships, historically, have been very profitable for us. We anticipate it’s going to be an incredible event and hopefully profitable for our host and USA Hockey as well.

When you host it, is that like the Olympics where everything takes place in one city or is it across the country?

It’s in one city. In 2026, it’ll be in two rinks. Internationally, it’s a very big event, especially in Europe. People love to go and they come from all countries to come to that event. It’s a signature marquee event for the game of ice hockey and it’s the IIHF event, International Ice Hockey Federation event. It’s a big deal and very exciting for all of us involved.

That’s pretty exciting stuff. Is that the typical cycle that we get to host it every eight years?

It happens every year, and it could be every five, seven, or 10. We don’t know when we’ll get to host it again, but we’re hopeful that we’ll get the opportunity to host it again in the not-too-distant future.

This is on the men’s side, right?

Correct, yes.

It occurs to me, every business was impacted by COVID-19. Yours, I would think certainly more than most, even the financial viability of an organization that makes its money by hosting in-person events. How did you adapt? How did COVID-19 and the shutdowns impact your operations and your strategic planning? Thank God, it was relatively short. At the time, we didn’t know it wouldn’t be multiple years, but it had to change everything, I would think.

It was almost exactly four years ago. I remember we were in our conference room and talking about the arena. We thought we shut down our arena in Plymouth, Michigan for the weekend. Little did we know in Michigan in particular, things were shut down for a long time and every state was different. It was challenging for everyone in every company, but ice arenas and rinks in particular, we didn’t know if it was airborne or contagious. Different states were able to keep things open more so than other states. That was a bit challenging.

It was a communications challenge for sure. From a financial perspective, it was challenging. We had some nuances. One of the things is my prior role prepared us for navigating this very well. We ran our financials in parallel. We went to a forecast and daily we looked at our day’s cash on hand and we managed that very closely. The timing of our revenue happened to be very advantageous for USA Hockey because we opened up our registration, which was 65 percent of our revenue in April.

It reaches a peak in September and October. A lot of that cash propels us for the rest of the year. We were fortunate that we had collected a lot of our revenue and we didn’t have as many expenses because we weren’t traveling as often. I know this is a little bit in the weeds, but that certainly helped us preserve our cash. It was a very difficult time for players, families, our volunteers and all staff. It was certainly very challenging, but we weathered it very well.

There’s no way you could plan for a pandemic that’s going to shut down your sport.

We didn’t see that coming in risk management.

You come up with 10 worst-case scenarios. Not many people would have even thought to include that. One of them, not on this show, but somebody who spoke at one of our conferences. She’s the CFO of the Ladies Professional Golfing Association. They were in a lot of trouble because that’s such a truly global sport.

Most sports are global these days. You’d host an event in Florida, and you’d theoretically have people coming from 30 or 40 countries and the players by the way. No other sport has that to the same extent. It’s truly challenging to survive that, good for you. You did it and the organization is stronger than ever.

I’m happy to report that we are and God willing, we’ll stay that way.

What are some of the key initiatives or projects that USA Hockey is focusing on from a financial perspective and how are these likely to shape the future of the organization?

Important question. I’m glad you asked. One of our major priorities right now is IT and how we revolutionize the way that we’re doing business now to bring us as current as possible. And also think into the future, about how we, to use an analogy, skate to where the puck is going to be, as Wayne Gretzky used to say. How do we create systems that are going to be more forward-looking and cutting edge if you will?

Historically, back in 2017–18, we changed our IT strategy entirely. We wanted to bring everything in-house and do it ourselves, and then potentially have the opportunity to monetize that. We’re not an IT company, and unfortunately, it didn’t come to fruition like we had imagined it would. We’re in the middle of changing our strategy right now to switch what we can to SaaS products.

For example, the learning management system is what we’re focused on now, and looking at different learning management systems. We’ve partnered with a firm to help us through that. We’ve invested a lot of time, money and energy in doing that, but we’re excited about where we’re going and where we think the future will be. That’s been one of the biggest projects we’re doing to date.

Everyone is talking about gen AI. Is this something that you’re embracing yet or is that more down the road? A lot of CFOs still aren’t sure that they want to be amongst the early adopters of it.

I love it. I’m fascinated with it. I understand the limitations and some of the concerns, but I think it helps us in what we’re doing every day. Some of the companies that you see are helping finance and accounting, just being able to use technology to not have to input every invoice into your computer system. Is it 100 percent all the time? No, but I think it frees up time, energy and money for people to work on higher-level, more strategic things. I’m encouraged by it and I like it. I can’t say I use it in my job other than some of the memos I send. We’ll get some feedback there, but I think it’s pretty powerful and will continue to get better and better.

It is remarkable. It’s a technology. I don’t know about you, but I never heard of generative AI until the rest of the world heard of it. One day nobody had heard of it and the next day seemingly everybody heard of it. Two years ago, I couldn’t even have guessed what it was.

It was fast, wasn’t it?

A moment ago you mentioned Wayne Gretzky. I want to preface this by saying I grew up in Massachusetts in the 1960s and ‘70s. Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr, who’s the greatest hockey player who’s ever lived? I put you on the spot there. I have an opinion on it, but I’d love to hear yours.

It’s a tough question. I’m going to have to go with Bobby Orr for several reasons. It’s amazing what a difference the equipment makes too, even within a few years. For example, the skates today are so lightweight that you can fly. It’s a tough choice, but I’d have to go with Bobby Orr.

To anyone from Detroit who’s listening, I apologize for not mentioning Gordie Howe. I never saw him play myself. When I did, maybe he was pretty old at the time. It seems to me he played into his 50s. That’s an argument right there that he was the best player ever. Is there a female Wayne Gretzky, someone who is light years ahead of her contemporaries?

The talent that we have in the women’s game is incredible. Of course, I have to pick an American player and I would otherwise, but I might get myself into trouble playing favorites. I would say we’ve got an incredible team. We’ve got some young women that are up and coming who are very good. It’s an exciting time to be in women’s hockey and be a part of it. I think we’re going to have a strong team coming up and we do now too. It’s exciting where it’s going.

Very diplomatic. If you get bored with finance, you should maybe take a diplomacy course, something like that. But you’re right. The quality of the game and how much it’s improved in the last twenty years is phenomenal. You must be proud to play a big part in that.

It’s fun to be part of it.

It’s got to be so. When I visited your website, there was a lot of talk about safety, which you’ve already discussed. Also, there was a lot of emphasis on inclusivity and making the sport more inclusive and more accessible for everybody. Can you tell us a little about that? That must be a source of pride for you.

It is a source of pride for us. It’s something that we put a lot of time and energy into and are committed to making our game as welcoming and inclusive as we possibly can. As with any sport, it’s a journey, but it’s important. I firmly believe the game of hockey teaches people so much, not just about the game of hockey, but about life and being good stewards and good people.

Typically, I may be a little biased, but you see that hockey players are typically quite humble people. It’s a great game to be a part of. It’s given me so much in my life that I would love to share it with everybody and anybody open to it. It is a big part of our commitment. One of our biggest partners is with the NHL, and they’re very committed to that as well. We work together to make every effort we can to make it as inclusive and accessible as possible. I think we’ve done a pretty good job and we’re just getting started.

Good for you. That’s fantastic. It’s funny you mentioned hockey players are friendlier because like in Boston, we don’t have a lot of movie stars who live in Boston. I suppose now we have Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Athletes are our celebrities. Growing up around here, it was always that it was well known that the hockey players were a lot more approachable. The Bruins players were friendlier than say the Celtics, Red Sox or Patriots. I have to admit, we always attributed it to the fact that most of them grew up in Canada, as opposed to that it was hockey versus another sport. Do you think hockey players generally, even American hockey players, are friendly?

I do. I think you might be on to something with the Canadian thing. That could be too but I do. I think it’s part of the game and part of focusing on the team first. I do think it’s part of the culture.

It’s interesting because as an adult, I got to know Ray Bourque a little bit. We’re certainly not friends, but you wouldn’t think he’s one of the 10 best hockey players who ever lived if he still is considered in that category. He’s a very normal and friendly guy. He talks to you. He worked out of the same gym as me. As you might imagine, he outperformed me a little bit at the gym.

I don’t believe it.

I could match your elite hockey player for sure. I want to ask you, you’ve got a lot going on, you’re the CFO, a highly visible role, and I know you’re very philanthropic here. You do some volunteer work in the community. How do you balance all of the things that you have going on in your life to have a fulfilling life outside of your professional self?

I don’t know if I’d say I balance. I try to balance, but if I’m doing something, I want to go all in on it. I enjoy being a part of some of the groups that I’ve joined recently. We have met some wonderful people and learned a lot. I think it’s rewarding for me. A lot of it gives me energy back. When you’re getting energy back, it’s not as hard to balance and juggle those things.

That makes a lot of sense. I always like to ask my guests, is there a fun fact about you or something about you that when people learn it, surprises you? For me, people who don’t know are surprised to learn that I’m a big headbanger. That’s how I got the name for this show. I listen to Metallica and AC/DC and those sorts of bands. Did you have a fun fact or a surprising fact about you?

I would say a fun fact or surprise. There are certainly a lot of examples I could give to embarrass myself. I would say something that was fun is after the ‘98 Olympics, I had a friend of mine who said, “What are you doing this afternoon? Would you like to come down and be in this movie called Olympic Glory?” It’s an IMAX movie.

That was a lot of fun. I got to participate in that and had a ball. It was a lot of fun going down to the arena and reenacting the game. The actors do have a hard job having to do the same thing with as much enthusiasm as you did the first time on the 100th time. That’s fun. That was a fun fact, I think.

That’s pretty cool. I’d love to get your advice. We talked earlier about mentoring, but any advice you can give to the next generation of CFOs so they achieve some of the same success that you and other members of your generation have achieved?

We talked a little bit about working backward. We talked a little bit about courage. The other piece that has been important to my career has been curiosity and being relentlessly curious about the business, about everything, but about the business. If you find a job or something that looks like it might interest you or a career path might interest you or someone that interests you, get curious about it. I find that it is helpful in determining what you want to do in your career and it’s been very valuable for me.

I think that’s great. I’ve always thought I’d take somebody who’s intellectually curious over somebody who’s purely smart but not intellectually curious. They’re both valuable. This has been great. I enjoyed hearing your story and I’m sure our audience will too. With that, I want to thank you for being a guest on Secrets of Rockstar CFOs, and also give you the final word.

I think you said it well. I couldn’t improve on it. Thank you for having me.