
This is software (AWS) generated transcription and it is not perfect.
Thank you for asking, it's, I guess, I think it's an interesting story. I don't know if others do, but since I was very young, I always wanted to work in sports and at a young age, I was fortunate enough to start working up at the University of Utah in their athletic department, in the ticket office during my high school and college years, and after working there, and I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Utah, and after working in their athletic department and graduating, I continued on with graduate school and I went to Northeastern University, where I received a master's degree in sports management. After that, I moved back to Utah and I was originally from Utah and I moved back to Utah and shortly thereafter was able to get an entry level job with the Utah Jazz. And that was 26 years ago, and I've worked at Utah Jazz since that time, and it's been a wonderful career.
Yeah. So let me start with responsibilities and decisions. I view my responsibility as, well, let me word it this way. We have a wonderful leadership team. We have individuals who lead departments such as marketing or sales or Finance Department. Human resources and people in culture, operations. I just have an incredible leadership team, and I feel that my responsibilities are number one, to let them do their job because they're so good at it, but to help create a vision for the future, where are we going? What's the direction that our company needs to be headed in and strategy. I think, strategy and vision, you got to first have the vision, but then help that leadership team develop the strategy of where we want to go. That could be, from a staffing standpoint, an organizational, strategic, and revenue-generating, watching our finances, but helping create vision and strategy for our leadership team that maximizes their teams to do the best job possible. Weekly hours, you can't pinpoint weekly hours. We work seven days a week, and when I say we work seven days a week, we take time off. But when you're in the sports business, we have games during the week, on weekends, on holidays, in the evenings, so we work when there's work to get done, with that being said, because we worked long hours and so many hours, you do try to find time to take a break, catch your breath a little bit, but working is whenever there's work to be done.
Well, the challenge of our job is that it's constantly changing. One example. I think like many other businesses technology is constantly changing. What we're trying to do, let me give you an example that our fans that come to jazz games or concerts or baseball games, all of the events that we have. They expect to have good technology. Several years, not even several years ago, a handful of years ago, we didn't have good WiFi in our venues. And when people go places, they expect to have WiFi and so technology and how we connect with our fans now. Now it's moved not only to have WiFi but how do we use that technology to connect with fans? Can we create an example or can we create experiences such as ordering their food? You're in an arena instead of missing part of the game to go wait in a long line to order food, we now have technology where you can order your food through a cell phone, get a notice that the food's ready, hurry and go pick it up and get back to your seat so you don't miss much of the game, as is maybe used to, and so the challenges, things just are changing so quickly, and we have really tried to utilize technology to connect with our fans and those people that are attending our events and make it a better experience for them, such as that example with food. We use technology to provide in-game stats. You can have your mobile device ready, and during the course of a jazz game, what kind of stats? How many points do certain players have and other types of engagement that fans can connect through their mobile device. And so those are a few examples. I guess one of the other things I will talk about, that is a challenge with the job is attending professional sports can be expensive and we take it very seriously. We want our fans to be able to afford and come to games, and not everybody could afford to, but we go to great lengths and great measures to keep portions of our tickets much more affordable than what they might be in some circumstances because we think it's important to connect with our community and try to make it, now we do have expensive tickets. I don't want to mislead anybody, but we try to have tickets that are affordable so that more people have the opportunity to attend our games.