The Price Point | Financial Management Is More Than Money

May is here and normally the Media Financial Management Association would be putting the finishing touches on its annual conference. Instead, it was among the first to convert this year’s convention to a 10-week virtual conference starting in June.

If you are familiar with the MFM, you know it is the undisputed all-things-financial organization for every form of media, from legacy to startup. Education, networking and the latest ideas are among the benefits. You’ve seen some of those ideas in President-CEO Mary Collins’ “Front Office” column here in TVNewsCheck.

Though the MFN’s 1,200 members range from top corporate executives on down, the financial person closest to my heart has always been the local station business manager.

Unless you have served as a unit head, it’s impossible to appreciate just how critical the financial job is. It’s not about numbers. Numbers are a tool. The job is about achieving success for the television station on every metric. The bottom line is obviously the scorecard, but I was fortunate enough to work for companies that also cared how we got there.

Whether they be called business manager, controller or some other name, I always thought of the financial person as my partner in running the station. The business manager was the only other person who knew every financial detail and how those pieces fit together to create a picture. When we submitted a budget, the financial plan was inseparable from the strategic plan.

Every time I started work with a new business manager, I explained my most important rule: “Your first job is to keep me out of jail.” By that I meant, never stretch any financial rule for any reason. Better to sleep at night.

It is only when you have confidence in the numbers that you can concentrate on what is really important. Every financial manager I worked with understood that our joint goal was to achieve the station’s strategic plan. If you do that, the bottom line is a result.

As I said earlier, the strategic and financial plans were intertwined, but I wanted the business manager, as well as the other department heads, to also understand the budget served the plan, not the other way around.

When a sales manager wanted to spend crazy money on something, just saying no was the easy answer, but might also mean a missed opportunity. Instead, I expected the business manager to work hand-in-hand with the sales manager to find a solution. If the solution did not advance our strategic plan, or turned out to actually be crazy, I expected the business manager to give me a straight answer.

Because business managers interact with the entire station, they are also a great source of accurate information. It’s not unusual for an employee to go to the business office about an issue they do not want to take all the way up to the top. A good manager knows when to keep a confidence and when to say, “Sorry, the GM has to know about this.”

In recent years it has become standard practice for business managers to also handle human resources, which has made the job even more difficult. It’s not easy to pivot from helping an employee in distress to asking the news director why overtime was out of control in a week with little breaking news. The best are up to the challenge, but it is one more reason why the job is so critical.

If you are a GM, by now you are shaking your head in agreement. If you are a GM and don’t feel that way, you need to reassess your relationship with your business manager. Your job will get a lot easier if you do.

Hank Price is a media consultant, author and speaker. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a handbook for general managers. He spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis. He also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.