Good morning,
AMC certainly couldn’t have forecasted this.
As productions ground to a halt, and theaters around the world shuttered last March, the entertainment giant was forced to pivot—fast.
“When you think about COVID and what it did to our worlds in the financial space, it wasn’t really about ‘How am I going to do against the budget?’ because this time last year your budget was very different; it didn’t predict COVID,” said Christina Spade, the executive vice president and CFO at AMC Networks.
Spade was appointed CFO at AMC in January. She was previously the executive vice president and CFO at ViacomCBS, and also had CFO roles at CBS Corporation and Showtime Networks, where Spade spent more than two decades.
During the past year, the company has leaned into its streaming platform much faster than it could have imagined pre-pandemic. Spade said that by mid-2020 the company surpassed its streaming projections for all of 2021. “It’s important to be nimble,” she said during Tuesday’s virtual CFO Collaborative event which was put on by Fortune and Workday.
“I always like to say, whenever you’re done with the budget, when you put the pencil down, it’s already wrong,” she said. “Because so much has changed. The budget gives you a set of guidelines to work with that you’ve thought through strategically, but it’s not something that you follow like a Bible.”
The “power of the forecasting” occurs when a collaborative group across the company assesses “how you’re doing in real time against the budget, what new measures you’re seeing that you didn’t anticipate in the budget, and how to adjust accordingly,” Spade explained.
“You can’t really forecast and say we’re going to be at x in 12 months,” she said. “You can have goals and a vision for it, but it’s all about the execution.”
Though there’s still one code Spade has yet to crack: “We’d love for data to be able to predict all the hit programming out there before we invest in it,” she said. “But unfortunately, we have not cracked the code for that yet.”
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Big deal
Global A.I. Adoption Index 2021, new research commissioned by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, indicated the top three barriers to A.I. adoption for businesses.
Courtesy of IBM
Going deeper
Post-coronavirus pandemic, workers want continued flexibility, according to EY's 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey. About 54% of 16,000 employees across 16 countries surveyed said they would consider leaving their job if not given flexibility in where and when they work. Thoughts on job retention differ by age as Millennials are twice as likely as Baby Boomers to quit, the survey found.
Leaderboard
Wetteny Joseph was named EVP and CFO at Zoetis Inc., an animal health company, effective June 1. Glenn David, the current EVP and CFO, was named EVP and group president. Joseph has served as SVP and CFO of Catalent since 2018.
Vance Chang was named CFO at Dine Brands Global, Inc., the parent company of Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar and IHOP restaurants. Chang will begin his role June 14. Most recently, he served as CFO for Exer Urgent Care.
Overheard
"In our case, this is something that we cannot simply pass on to the end user, since that would defeat the purpose of trying to create affordable housing."
— Brian Higgins, executive director of Parsons Avenue Redevelopment Corporation, a small nonprofit that develops affordable housing, on the increasing prices of lumber causing a "10% bump in the overall construction cost" of a building, as told to Fortune.
