We host our first ever FP&A guest from the US casino and gambling sector with the head of FP&A at Genting Americas, a world leader in casinos and lodging with luxurious loactions in Las Vegas, Bimini, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.
Bill Singh is VP FP&A of Genting Americas, part of the world’s largest Destination Resort operator operating as Resorts World . Genting boasting five public companies capitalized at $45 billion and employing more than 50,000 people worldwide. This episode  reveals their inside FP&A game including metrics such as “win per unit per day” tacking the “hold”. Bill is strategic leader with more than a decade leading FP&A and providing insights on skills and budgeting management, to insider advice about gaming.
In this episode:
- Getting an unexpected offer of an FP&A role at a casino in Nevada
- Why FP&A at the “nexus of data and decision-making” is an “ultimate” career pathÂ
- Critical skills you must develop in FP&AÂ
- Giving “X+1” in your FP&A answers
- Salesmanship in FP&A
- FP&A metrics: “Win per unit per day and hold”
- Lodging: occupancy, your ADR, your revenue per available room
- Odds and statistics from tables, games and FP&A modelingÂ
- Insider advice about gaming (including “Don’t play a game right by the door”)
- The power of leading budget for the operating side and the capital budget for all divisions +lessons from 10 years of budgeting Â
- The impact of AI in getting answers faster for operators
- MATCH+TEMPO – My favorite Excel function and lessons from drumming Â
Follow and connect with Bill Singh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billsinghprofile/
Transcript
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Bill Singh to the show. Bill is a seasoned corporate executive with over 15 years in the FP&A function of the gaming and hospitality industry. He is the vice president reporting to the EVP Finance at Genting Americas with a dotted line to the CFO. Some of Bill’s accomplishments include leading the company’s FP&A function through a high growth phase and shaping the company’s strategic position from year to year.
Bill holds a Bachelor’s of Science and Business Administration from the University of Nevada and is a CFA Charterholder. The Genting Group is a global company, founded in 1965 with destination resorts in Las Vegas, Bimini, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. Genting has more than 50 years of experience in the travel and leisure industry. It employs around 15,000 people and offers an unparalleled resort experience to more than 31 million visitors per year worldwide. We’re thrilled to have Bill join us today to share his insights on financial planning and analysis. Welcome to the show, Bill.
Bill Singh:
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I’m really excited to be talking about the gaming industry. I think you’re the first FP&A Today guest from the industry. So I’m really curious to hear about, uh, FP&A inside the industry. And I’m wondering what initially drew you, I guess, well, two, two parts. What initially drew you to FP&A and what led you to the gaming industry?
Bill Singh:
I would say both of them were just random chance. Uh, I went to, went through my undergrad program thinking that I would go work in investment management field. So think like a portfolio manager type person, somebody, or either in banking. Turns out that I graduated at the worst time economically, which was 2008 financial crisis, and I’m not sure, I was not able to find a job in banking. I was in Nevada, so I had to go to plan B, which was that I needed some sort of a finance job somewhere. So I was in Nevada, and of course, all around me were casinos. And, uh, one of the casinos was hiring. So, uh, I went through the interview process. It wasn’t very long and I did not think that I was going to get the job, but they ended up offering me the job. I took it, I was very happy.
So the role was in FP&A and that’s sort of how I got into it. As I went through a number of years of working in gaming lodging, I still wanted to go back to work on Wall Street. I then went to grad school of sorts, which is getting a certification. So I got the CFA, which is, which was really geared towards my ultimate goal of going to work on Wall Street. I got it, and it still didn’t happen. Nobody would still take me. And then I found a job at, at Genting that in 2013, it came my way. My heart was still to go work on Wall Street. So I was like, maybe if I move to New York, I would be able to maybe switch over to go work on Wall Street. And I had that thought in my head for a number of years that I want to eventually go there.
It still wouldn’t happen. Nobody would still take me. But eventually, after like three or four years of working with Genting, I realized that I was, even though my mind was sort of focused on going to work on Wall Street, I was doing very good at what I was doing. So sometimes in life opportunities find you, you just sometimes have great opportunities that are just like right in front of you. So I took a year off, two years off, and I was like, I’m gonna focus exclusively on what my role means for the company that I work for, and what is the expectation from me by people that surround me. And what I found was that for the most part, everybody’s looking for facts. Everybody was looking for answers. And I put myself in their role and I was like, if I was them, what would I, would I be asking me the same questions that they’re asking me?
And the answer was a resounding yes, because a lot of those questions that they were answering were in the spirit of moving the business in the right direction. So that, that’s when it hit me that I am kind of at the nexus of data and decision making process that is essential to not just gaming lodging, not just at Genting, but any business. This is the ultimate place you wanna be. If you want to use facts and data to make business decisions. On one hand, you have all the systems and technology. On the other hand, you have the executive team, and you are basically the bridge. You are the storyteller of what’s happening. And quite frankly, I, I cannot imagine a better experience in experience learning how to run a business than being in FP&A. So that’s, that’s pretty much
Glenn Hopper:
Gotcha. And it’s, you know, there’s a common theme the more and more guests I have on the show, and the more and more people I talk to in FP&A, there’s something so appealing about consolidating all of this data and telling a story with it and being able to find the signal through all the noise and be the one who can interpret and explain that to people. It, it’s almost professorial at times. You know, it’s, it’s like, ah, you know, you’re doing the research and there’s, you know, using the analytical part of your brain, but then being able to convey that information is, is such an important part of the job. And I think maybe when people come into it, they don’t realize how, how much storytelling is involved. Exactly. Um, and, and thinking about how you’ve come up in the career, um, what do you think are the critical skills that you developed along the way and that are the critical skills that, uh, anyone coming into FP&A needs to have, and maybe have you seen the role evolve in recent years since you’ve been doing this a while? I’m thinking about evolution in one, how the rest of the business perceives FP&A and two data. Uh, looking now at, there’s so much more data and now we’re using advanced analytics and automation. What do you think are the important skills for people to have through all this?
Bill Singh:
I would say that if you were to look at a professional who’s, you know, kind of in my capacity, usually it’s somebody who has been around the block for 15 or so years. So kind of segmenting this experience in two parts would be to kind of look at maybe the first 10 years and then the rest of your career in the first 10 years. I think some of the key skills that you will have will revolve a lot around data analysis. You are not the one who is going to be asking the question. You are basically trying to facilitate the answer. And a lot of the times you’ll be dealing with multiple sources of information, some clean, some dirty, and of course there’ll always be a deadline because any business decision needs to have a timely sort of resolution. So you’ll find yourself in a place where you are basically, uh, wrangling with Microsoft Excel a lot.
This is by far the application that I’ve used in my entire career. And to a large extent, my ability to get things done, <laugh> revolves around my ability to navigate through Microsoft Excel. I have constantly sought in my, for, you know, early years anyway, so I can get a 1% efficiency gain, 2% efficiency gain. So, because all I would find myself basically being tasked with questions that revolved analysis, and it needed to be done quick, it needed to be done effectively and comprehensively. So I would say knowledge of a application like Microsoft Excel is going to be paramount for you. The second, uh, piece is because you’ll have a lot of disparate sets of data coming in, checking your work for reasonability is always paramount. You always have to find some benchmark, some way to identify whether your work, your, whatever answer you’re coming up with is somewhat reasonable.
For example, if, uh, you’re analyzing, uh, an expansion of a restaurant and you are taking the amount of traffic that’s coming in from, you know, X to two x, you really wanted to really ask yourself, do you have the physical capacity to be able to service those kinds of customers? And or maybe you have the capacity. Do you have the labor to be able to service that? Is there, is there a ceiling on how much capacity you can have? Because the volume that you’re forecasting is gonna translate into all of the metrics, revenues, expenses, the things of that nature. So one way you can kind of establish credibility as a young professional is to demonstrate that you can, you’re not just somebody who takes numbers and just dumps them in and puts them in, in, in pretty graphs, et cetera, but you’re also looking at it from a business perspective to see if it makes sense.
The third thing I would say is when you are talking to your boss, don’t just take the request that they’re looking for. They might just go, I just need three rows and four columns. But try to ask them, what is the point of this? Why are, what, what do you, what question are you trying to answer with this? And a lot of the times people ar will be very willing to answer that question because they’ll immediately feel that you are really invested in answering the question, not so much as getting you the raw material that they need. It has really helped me in my early years is that it might be that your supervisor’s asking you for X, but give them x plus one. And that plus one is usually a follow up question that they will ask you to do. But if you can demonstrate that you can answer x and plus one that really demonstrate that you are genuinely interested in learning about the business and you’re not just within the silos of, you know, numbers and just an application like Excel.
So that would be, I would say the first decade of your, your career as you kind of span out after that. I think some of the big skill sets that you should have is number one, salesmanship. A lot of the times you’ll find yourself constantly selling ideas, rallying, galvanizing a team behind a mission.
You know, at, at some point you have a number of people that are working for you. And the best way you can get the best out of them is to truly sell them on the mission and why what you’re asking them to do if fits into a bigger picture. And b, it is going to have a material impact in whatever environment that you’re in. I think that really galvanizes people. And we are in the business of intelligence. We are in the business of, you know, intelligence. Whether it’s technology, whether it’s people, brain.
So you want to be able to sell, sell the mission. The other piece is, I would say is problem solving skills. So you are gonna be constantly tasked. People will come to you and they always ask you, I have this issue, and they’re sometimes lost. So it’s, sometimes it’s your responsibility to sort of dissect the problem into pieces and really try to take the noise out and really get to the bottom of the issue. You know, one example that comes to mind, I have a little bit of interest in astrophysics. So in the 17th century there was a philosopher named Kepler, , Johannes Kepler. And what he was trying to figure out was, uh, the orbit of Mars and people that came before him said that it is a perfect circle. When, when he would apply his, like he would look at Mars, he would be like, it doesn’t look like a perfect circle.
It is not a perfect circle, it’s kind of an ellipse. But he wouldn’t figure out what kind of ellipse it was. So he goes on this path of charting Mars orbit, uh, around the sun. The problem was to chart any orbit, you need two stationary points and then you draw a triangle and mathematically you can draw the orbit. The problem was that sun is a stationary object in, in the sky, but there’s nothing else that’s stationary. So it led him to this crazy problem where he could not figure out what the orbit was. And this is pre-computers, pre everything. So he comes up with this very simple but ingenious idea. What he does is he’s like, I know Mars is in the same spot every year, every every revolution. So what he did was he basically instead started charting the path of Earth instead of Mars.
’cause he would, every year, let’s say it was December 31st, we’re gonna make it up, he would look at Mars, he would look at the sun and he would see where earth is in relation to those two stationary points. He forced Mars to be stationary and then he figured out Earth’s orbit. And now that he had earth’s orbit and stationary sun, he could mathematically hold earth constant and figure out the, uh, the orbit of Mars. This is a perfect example of how even to this day, you have to solve problems in an ingenious way that does not really require a lot of technology, et cetera, but just common sense of what matters and what doesn’t matter and how you can hold things constant. Other than that, you know, clarity of thinking, you, you have to, as a leader, you have to really demonstrate that you can think very clearly in a world that is a, a bit of a mess, you have a problem at your hand.
What is the first step? What’s that second step? You become sort of a preacher, you preach the team, do let, let’s do one, let’s do two, and then we’ll stop and we’ll look at it in the, we’ll do 3, 4, 5. So to have that, that commitment and the clarity of thinking I think is key. And of course all of this leads into risk taking. So, you know, you have all these skills, problem solving, clarity of thinking, salesmanship, it will, you know, encourage you to take more risk with things in your life because you’d be, you have some risk mitigating factors. So I mean, at, at the end of the day, I would say the first 10 years technical skills, the next, you know, for the rest you just have to be able to sell well solve problems well and be able to take risk. The last piece was, uh, what is the, how has this industry evolved? I feel like since there’s a lot more data that’s available and you have to at some point start embracing and look into technology that can help you embrace this, this information. I’ll talk about artificial intelligence et cetera in, in a minute here. But really technology is a huge aspect of how we do our job. And there are, there are pieces of technology out there that you have to almost purchase and put together in a way so that, you know, you have a comprehensive solution. So that’s it.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that, that’s, uh, and great breakdown. And I, I love that in your breakdown of the skills, you know, there’s sort of the junior analyst, what you get good at, and you move up. And then when you move into management, what’s required. And one thing that I, I thought was really interesting, because I always think of this from the other side, but when you said, you know, as in those first 10 years, understanding the question behind the question, because I think about if I’ve been presenting to a board of directors or to investors or you know, senior management at times, whenever I present something, I’m always going to present at one level, but I know they’re gonna go one or two levels deeper so I know whatever numbers I give them, I need to be ready to answer those two or three levels deeper. So if you have your team under you that is already thinking that way for you, and understanding the question behind the question as as the senior leader there, you know, you’ve got that in your hip pocket and you’re asking for a certain thing maybe because that’s how it needs to look in the board deck, but it’s let me know what’s behind it because the board’s going to dig at it.
So that is exactly,
Bill Singh:
And I think it also helps you sort of, uh, you want to understand that business more and you also get better over time if you force yourself to figure out what is the question behind the question. And sure enough, if you do this over a decade or 15, 20 years, you will truly be able to go into a meeting or a discussion and really defend your position. And at the end of the day, that is very important in you coming across as a credible individual. Because let’s face it, there’s money involved, there’s reputations involved, and people seek leaders who can think clearly, who have, who can think comprehensively. And I think this exercise is a great starting point point for anybody. Yeah,
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. That’s great. And I love in the, in the Kepler example is perfect too, because, you know, we never have perfect data and it’s, well, this is the data we have, this is what I have to predict. How can I move around to get that based on what we have? What is some other piece of information that I’m, that we have that I don’t know the correlation yet or whatever it is that I can tie to it. So that’s a, a great story. Alright, well I think what our listeners really want to hear about is the, the key metrics in the gaming industry. And I know you and I talked before the show about, you know, how data-driven the industry is. So really curious to hear what are, um, some of the metrics that you track that are exclusive to gaming maybe that people outside wouldn’t even think about when we’re thinking about FP&A?
Bill Singh:
Yeah, so in, in gaming lodging, obviously gaming is a big outside of Las Vegas, for example. And we’re talking about US, gaming is a very high margin business. And of course lodging is a, an accessory. Uh, if you go to like markets like Las Vegas, you would see a little bit more lodging heavy business model. But outside of Vegas it’s very much gaming centric. And within gaming, the one metric that we really track is, uh, win per unit per day. So effectively speaking, let’s say you open a casino someplace, maybe it’s in Massachusetts or place that where there, there has not been a casino. So you’ll basically make a decision as to how many slot machines and table games you will, you will host. And the amount of units you have is going to affect the size of your building, it’s gonna affect the kind of labor you have.
And in some instances there are regulatory caps, et cetera, that you have to adhere to. So it’s a very important metric. But as this business starts, as they open doors, they will start to work towards maximizing their revenue, which sometimes means you, you shrink the amount of units that you have, because if you shrink the amount of units you have, just because you have more units doesn’t mean you’re gonna make more revenue. It just, it’s all demand driven. So sometimes you can cut your footprint by 20% and reduce expenses and then still be able to make the same revenue because the revenue concentrates on the other 80%, effectively speaking. So over time, theoretically every gaming company has maximized the amount of units that they need to maximize revenue. So when you look across the US or across a market, the win per year, per day is a pretty good bar parameter of what the spending propensity is for the customers and at the same time the the competitive forces, et cetera.
So if you are looking at across the industry, gaming industry, different segments, if you wanna do apples to apples comparisons, I think win per uni per day is a fairly good metric to look at. Um, the other, uh, piece that we, item that we track is basically our hold. It’s, it’s a lot of people think that casinos make a ton of money. We are taking all of your a hundred dollars bills, et cetera. No, that’s not the case. We are effectively providing you with, with a gambling experience and there’s you and there’s another person sitting next to you and sometimes you are playing against the house, but the house is effectively taking a cut from both of your action. And sometimes we just give a lot of your cash to them or them to you. You feel like winning today and losing tomorrow and winning today.
And that’s kind of part of the experience. We typically on, you know, slot machines for every dollar that is bets the a hundred dollars that our bet we, we keep about $9 or something. So, you know, the rest of it, uh, pretty much gets shuffled amongst people on the floor. So there’s that. And of course we talk about lodging side of things On lodging side, you know, it is, the metrics are very much similar to other non-gaming, but lodging businesses. So your occupancy, your ADR, your revenue per available room, your cost of turning a room, those are some of the key metrics that we, that we track. Occupancy being effectively. ’cause that is a very important metric. ’cause that’s, that is lit that you can transit that into a number of people that are in the house. And pretty much everything that happens at your business is gonna be governed in some way by the customers that are, that are in the hotel. So I would say those, those are the three main metrics.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s interesting. And I’m, and thinking now, so obviously occupancy drives everything because that’s the base of the model, but I’m picturing the different histograms between, okay, these are our guests that come and here’s the distribution of what they spend gambling, and then here’s the distribution of what they spend on shows, meals and everything. You’ve got sort of your median customer where you take the average of everything and put it in there, but then you’ve got your high rollers who are doing a different thing. You’ve got some people who come and don’t even walk up to a slot machine or table, they’re just there to see the shows or, or whatever. And it’s just, I could see those models being pretty interesting when you try to put all the factors in and Yeah,
Bill Singh:
Exactly. End, you start with, you know, kind of in high level projection of who’s coming. Right. And to your point, you’ll see they are, they fall on a spectrum from high to mid to low. And there are certain parts of the business that are not really, they aren’t so sensitive to high, mid low, for example, food and beverage, right? But then you could have other parts of the business, like in our case we throw parties for our casino customers. And that obviously is not driven by the entire occupancy of the hotel that that’s associated with the casino, but a subsegment of it. But then we have subs, segments of occupancy also that kind of give us what the transient business is like, what the group business is like, what the casino business is like. So either we can take all the all of ’em together and use those metrics to make forecasts or we can use subsets. So for group business that drives a certain element of our business, a transient, you know, might affect everything. And then gaming centric, more casino affects just a casino.
Glenn Hopper:
As a guest at a casino, when I go in, I think Roulette’s a lot of fun, but you know, I, I know my odds aren’t great there, but if I hit, you know, I get the 36 to one or whatever <laugh>, you know, just, and you, I’m doing all this cal this calculus in my head and it’s like, well, if I wanna play for a long time, I should just sit down and, and play blackjack or enter a poker tournament or what, or whatever it is, um, that I’m doing. But I’m thinking with your metrics, I mean, if gaming to the consumer, it’s all about the odds and certainly on the casino owner side as well, but how much do the, the odds and statistics from each game type, each table, you know, we have this many Mahjong tables versus, or you know, whatever the, uh, the tables you have set up there. How much do the odds and statistics factor into your financial modeling from different stats from the revenue generators and yeah, lines of business from rooms, entertainment, gaming, et cetera? Um,
Bill Singh:
Yeah, so, uh, the odds do vary by, by effectively segments of our product effectively. So, you know, the best way I can give you an analogy is if you walk into Costco, right, jewelry’s right at the front, it’s the most highest margin business. You might have tech right after that, and you might have clothes after that, you might have some kitchen appliances, and all the way in the back is your soda and, and milk. So in our line of business, it’s a very similar setup also. So you’ll have basically certain areas that are more, um, higher end, like our higher end rooms where you can gamble. Obviously the odds of winning are lower, but then we compensate that with higher quality of service, right? So we have to have an offsetting effect. So effectively odds of winning are lower, but it is an exclusive room where you can have a great experience. But on the other hand, we could have some video poker games all in the back by the bar there. They aren’t very pretty, but you know, the odds of winning are a lot higher there. So they’re usually holding at about two to 3%, 4%, something like that. So we look at our business, we look at the traffic flows, and then we put our product in tandem with how the traffic flows would be to maximize revenue effectively.
Glenn Hopper:
Gotcha. And I’m asking this sort of tongue in cheek, but maybe sort of not. I <laugh>, um, I’m gonna be speaking at a, uh, at a conference in Vegas later on this year. And, uh, I think, uh, <laugh>, I’ve got somebody from the, from the inside of Casino and I’m thinking, man, you see casinos, you know, you see the numbers from casinos all around the world and with the data you have with every game, every table. And, um, it’s like, what’s some, uh, some insider advice that you might be able to give to me before I, uh, before I head to Vegas next time? <laugh>
Bill Singh:
So let, let me, let me kind of explain to you what gaming business like is, right in a nutshell. I think, I think I may have to quote, uh, Steve Wynn on this. When you enter a gaming facility, and if you are a reasonably decent guest, that that does come from time to time and spends a certain level, uh, a lot of the time what you’ll find is a lot, most of everything is complimentary or heavily discounted, but the only thing that’s not complimentary is gaming. It’s the casino floor. So the business that we are in is you walk in and you are gonna get a lot of stuff for free, and then we invite you to the casino floor to gamble. Now on your first trip, you may not lose anything, you may walk away with money. So now you’re looking back at this experience and you’re like, I got everything for free.
And when I played, I actually won. That is a great feeling of victory. You walk away with money and, and, but the next time we’re keeping track of all of it. So because at the end of the day, all the free stuff you’re getting has to be paid for in some ways. But what humans do is we tend to associate more with the positive experiences, less with the negative experiences, but at the end of the day, we are just a business. And all we do is effectively over time, we are looking at a return on investment on you. And once you do the math effectively what you’ve done is you’ve paid for everything that you’ve gotten for free, and then you give us a little bit of a profit margin and return. You get this awesome, awesome experience. The other thing I can tell you is that, uh, don’t play the games that are like right by the door <laugh>.
Yes, the, you know, if there’s a game out there that looks very nice and flashy, that is right by the door, that’s the one that will have the least amount of odds for success. The other thing that is a very, it’s a huge misconception is that the lower denomination you play, the longer the game is going to to last. So like how all else, if you’re playing penny machines versus five machines, the penny machines have lower odds of winning than five dollarmachines. Now not everybody’s comfortable doing $5 bets, but generally speaking, if you’re looking at a dollar machine and a penny machine, understand that all else equal, your money will not last very long in the penny machine. But if you go higher in denominations, it’ll, and, and of course the third thing I would tell you is that unfortunately you cannot win through the house <laugh>. There’s people like me who are constantly doing math on everything, and uh, that’s all we do all day long. And, uh, just expect this to be fun experience that actually is in vogue right now across the United States. Gaming is doing very well. We serve you really well. We’ll give you a great service. You’ll basically pay the bill on the casino floor. There you go. <laugh>
Glenn Hopper:
<laugh>, that’s great. I mean, and, and truthfully, I mean everybody, you have to fundamentally understand that because it’s no business is going to sell a product for less than it costs them to make it. So gaming is the same way. It’s, this wouldn’t exist if people were coming here and winning all of our money. It would wouldn’t be a casino that was open very long. The other thing I thought about when you talked about the games close to the door, I was thinking about that movie Rainman, where he goes and he’s counting cards into a six step shoot or whatever, but then he’s, and I, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but um, when he is walking out the, the guy that was, uh, Dustin Hoffman’s character is caught by this. It’s the big wheel where they just spin and you’re guessing what number the wheel’s gonna land on <laugh> and, and, you know, started losing money on the wheel. But that’s exactly the kind of game that’s, or the, in a Vegas vacation when Chevy Chase goes to the casino, that is like the guy’s guess how many fingers I’m holding up behind my back kind of thing. <laugh>,
Bill Singh:
Right, exactly.
Glenn Hopper:
Uh, um, so that’s, I I appreciate the insight there and I think that that that’s great for our listeners to hear. Um, I guess getting back to the more practical and business side, I know with the level of the, the budgeting you do at, at Genting Americas, you led the construction of and presentation of the budget for the operating side and the capital budget for all divisions. That had to be a massive undertaking to, to do for, you know, all for the past 10 years. I’d love to hear kind of the challenges and strategy as you manage putting together something like this for so long.
Bill Singh:
Yeah, it is definitely challenging. Uh, it’s, it’s a funny anecdote. My boss’s wife, uh, when he was in my shoes, uh, he is now overseeing my department, but used to be in my shoes. And his wife would jokingly call herself a budget widow because
Glenn Hopper:
I think a lot of us can relate, yeah, <laugh>
Bill Singh:
Three, four months in summer, you know, there’s a cost and there’s a benefit to this experience. The cost obviously is that it is, you are budgeting for an entire company, you’re budgeting down to a line level detail GL by GL level detail. So all else equal, it takes time. And for a lot of us, it’s usually the summertime occupational hazard, if you wanna call it. But the major upside is that there is no better way to learn about the business than to budget for every tentacle of the business line by line. And if you do this for 10 years for a company, I’m very blessed that I’ve had this experience of doing the budget for Genting for, for 10 years. You really not only understand where the tentacles are, where are, how does, what does gaming mean to us in division A versus B versus C, but also the interplay of gaming, uh, and, and lodging.
For example, we have a property that’s in New York City where lodging isn’t really tied to gaming. The we are right next to JFK airport and a lot of lodging is driven by the airport. It doesn’t really have a huge strong connection to gaming. Whereas if you go upstate, we have a resort that is very much 70, 80%. So you see this interplay among divisions, uh, you know, and they vary from one to another. And I also think that as a company matures, and not everybody has a benefit of doing budgets for a decade, uh, but you see the evolution at a very granular level of how a business matures. So I think that this is the best MBA you can get in your life is to be able to do a budget for an entire company, come up with a theoretical idea of whether next year’s going to be, and then go through the rigor of selling that budget to the CFO and the board and do it over and over and over and over again.
And if you do this over and over again, long enough time, you understand how your boss thinks. You understand how the top levels of the management team think, and that gives you very key information about if, like, how you can participate more in the problem solving exercise. If you have a, an idea of the framework of how to think and if by doing this over and over again, I think it really, really sort of helps you. The challenge in budgeting, I would say, and we really have cracked this in the last year or so, is the technology that is associated with budgeting. So in a nutshell, you have hundreds of people that are working that are involved in the budget process. The question really is, is how do you, and it’s an inter interactive process, and the question really is, is how do you go about going back and forth with them and soliciting information and making adjustments?
What’s nice about it is that back in the day, it was Excel spreadsheet out, Excel spreadsheet in, and the volume was just overwhelming. But now we just have like one tool where we can make all of these adjustments and see basically how our budget really gets, gets scoped. So I think this is why I was talking about earlier about technology. As you think about doing a good job in FP&A, you have to have a bit one foot in in the technology world and to see what are the latest developments in technology. And they’re really material like, if you get it right, it can, you’ll still work a lot of hours, but you’ll do the right kind of work as opposed to the wrong kind of work. So
Glenn Hopper:
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As you went through the process of putting this budget together, I, I know you’ve gotten, I’m sure you’ve gotten better at it each year, as maybe as technology’s gotten better, as you’ve learned more, what would you say that you’ve learned in this? Are some things that have maybe made you better at it, made it, made you more efficient at it, made it easier over the year? And, and sort of what insights you’ve learned for other people who are maybe just starting maybe doing their annual budget for the first time, maybe some best practices.
Bill Singh:
Sure. I mean, I would say that between each budget cycle there is 12 months, roughly speaking, depending on when you start and when you end. And during those 12 months, take the time to understand the business. And when I was young and I always kind of questioned why we needed to meet every month and do an actual budget variance analysis, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a very long meeting and it takes, involves a lot of people, et cetera. But as I have gotten more seasoned, looking at your financial statements, which is really your report card every single month is very important because you start by having a hypothesis of how the year was going to go, and then reality takes over. It never turns out the way you thought it would be. And it’s important for you to take the time and study what you missed.
If what happened was different than what you had projected, how much of that is macroeconomic factors that you wouldn’t have been able to forecast anyway? And how much of that was because your model wasn’t as tight as it needed to be? I’ll give you a perfect example. We have a resort, um, that where we are trying to drive a lot of casino customers a lot more this year than we did last year. In our budget process one of the items that I missed was that I thought that as we grew customers, uh, at the resort, the spend per customer on food and beverage, et cetera, would stay exactly the same. That, that, so reality is that as you go for more fish, you’re gonna get, you’re gonna go down the tiers as far as the kind of customers you’re getting in their, they’re, you know, you go basically lower on on their spend tiers and you’re gonna get more, more spend.
So that would be a perfect example of how you budgeted X, but it did not happen. That’s very important information. And you can’t go to that analysis a month before the budget process starts. You have to do it every single month. And you have to have a framework of how you take this information in and how you are going to document it and how you’re going to evolve it. So I would say that financial reviews are very important. They also help you, they, you know, understand your business a lot better because as an FP&Ateam, theoretically you should be prepared with a commentary for a division during the financial reviews. You should start by saying, this is what I think happened. And then you have the president sitting right next to you and they may agree with on you want everything, or they may agree with you on 80% and they may like the other 20%, you kind of have it off, but it’s closed, et cetera.
But that iterative process of talking to the exports that are in the field every single month across the entire organization is worth the time. I would say that would make your budget process a lot better and you would just have muscle memory as to how division A is performing via and c and d. Um, other than that, you know, I think if you as lean into more analysis, and I know financial planning analysis, one analysis is in the title, but anytime you are asked to solve, uh, to answer a question again, look for the question behind the question, lean in heavily, see what information is out there that may not be sitting in a fancy business intelligence tool that could actually be a great addition to it and have the Microsoft Excel skills to be able to take that dirty data, clean it up, and be able to, you know, tell a story.
So as far as put yourself in the position where you are forced to tell a story, put yourself in a position where you’re forced to explain something complicated, because at the end of the day, all those analyses culminate into a strategy that needs to be baked into the budget as part of your projection. So do this, don’t do this, do more of this, don’t do any of this. This needs to be baked into the budget process. So the more, you know, in January, found one thing February, found one thing, March, April, then you have to bake this into the budget process, and that’s how you truly effectively set performance targets. So don’t waste your year, I guess is the point. <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper:
That’s a great point. And I think about, you know, the first year you do a budget, you know that you’ve got your historical financials and hopefully you have a clean chart of accounts and you’ve got all the, the data that you need, but you don’t, you don’t have that familiarity with the data so that you’ve got your data that you’re gonna use to start with, you’ve got your drivers for the budget and then you have your assumptions. But those assumptions, I mean, you know, they’re built out on historical, but the, when you’re green, it’s hard to know what those assumptions are gonna gonna be. But you mentioned, you know, you’re sitting next to the president, president’s been doing it a while, they probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of assumptions to make, but a lot of times, you know, people have been in this business and they have hunches that are great, but they’ve been in the business and they weren’t relying, it wasn’t data-driven decision making, it was just anecdotally, I know because I’ve been doing this a long time and I get it.
So data’s gotten more and more important. And I think about, um, what we all struggle with now is depending on where our company is and the kind of on the data maturity scale, the challenge of that data quality and data management as you’ve gone through over the years with the budgeting. And, and I think you get a better understanding. You sort of can better define your data when you are doing those, uh, monthly, uh, variance to budget analysis because it, it makes you dig in and it makes you think, eh, you know, maybe we’re not coding this to the right account. So it’s skewing the num, you know, we’re, we need to make changes through the year, and then you kind of clean it up through the work. Just in general, have you found some, some strategies that you like that are good ways to, uh, ensure kind of accuracy and, and integrity of the financial data? And, and then also it’s not just finance. You have to work with cross-functional teams on, on the data governance. How, how do you navigate that?
Bill Singh:
I think in a nutshell, you as an organization, you have to have one source of truth and it’s never gonna be a hundred percent, but we, you all have to agree on what that source of truth is and then invest resources on that. That’s how you, in a nutshell, you get high quality information. With Genting, what we are doing is we have a datawarehouse. I knows to use term that gets thrown around all the time, but we have effectively a, this is a very common problem that’s in all gaming lodging businesses, is you have disparate systems that don’t talk to each other. Each system is meant to do its job. A hotel system is meant to sell the hotel, to book a room. A gaming system is meant to run a slot machine, unfortunately, that’s where the resources go is the front end of the tool.
The back end of the tool is that never really quite analytics conducive to analytics. So what we have done is we have brought all of this information in to, into a central repository, and we have people that are dedicated to do to doing nothing but moving information from all the disparate system into a central location. And then of course, there’s an element of finance that is really like the finance wing of FP&A. So there’s a data wing and there’s a finance wing. The finance wing is kind of checks and balances on the data side because they’re basically running a high level report to ensure that the data that’s coming in is accurate. In a nutshell, what I find is that a lot of the times you have a lot of analysts that are always pulling information directly from different systems, systems and then they struggle in combining it all together.
And usually they will do this under the stress of a deadline, which leads never leads to a good product. What needs to happen is someone in a leadership capacity needs to define what data is important, where does it lie, and hire a skillset that is, that can get the data, that data in front of you in a, in an comprehensive way, in an automated way. And then effectively you kind of define how that this data needs to be grouped. I mean, you may not need to see at level five, you may just wanna see at level three you define sort of the groupings and then basically have your analysts check the top level and be like, does that high level number make sense? And of course, this has to become muscle memory. The data, people are getting better and better at pulling information on a routine basis.
The analysts are getting better and better at checking the accuracy of data. And then once it’s there, then that, that’s it. And then of course you have a BI tool that basically can disseminate disinformation back to the organization in a very clean, uh, format. But I think where companies fail is they don’t subsegment the responsibility of getting information to people who are experts at just getting information and people who are experts at consuming this information. And what we’ve done is we’ve kind of segmented it a bit more, so more specialization, we have more information, it’s more coming in, more timely. Obviously it takes money and resources, but it is, the end result is usually worth it.
Glenn Hopper:
You just kind of outlined what we’re all dealing with right now. And I do think it’s more important than ever for us to get a handle on this data and really understand, uh, you know, all of our KPIs, our metrics, where the data’s coming from, what our source of truth is, because I think we’re about to be, if we’re not already there, you know, depending on the, where the company is with data maturity and where they are with their kind of their finance tech stack. But we’re gonna start seeing more and more, um, influence of AI and being able to use, I think it’s gonna be built into the tools that we’re already using. They’re gonna start incorporating more AI that makes it sort of more democratized. So you don’t have to be engineers. I don’t know, are you seeing that and what are you sort of, if you’re reading the tea leaves right now, what you know from the tech side that what you’re using or, or from the software, what do you see the next five, 10 years? Um, how do you see fp and a evolving
Bill Singh:
In a nutshell? I think artificial intelligence will help us get to the answer faster. Lemme give you an example. I have chefs, um, or executive chefs, people that are very good at running the kitchens at our restaurants. They’re not as good as I am in analyzing data because this is what I do. I don’t, I don’t, I’m not, I’m, I I I would suck at their job, but I might be better at, uh, sort of analyzing numbers. Sometimes there’s a gap between FP&A and the operators where the FP&A team has the skillset to, to, they’re more tech savvy, so they’re gonna build, if they, if they have to get their questions answered, which are very similar to the question that the operators are asking, they’re, they might have technological tools that they can relate to more just either by muscle memory or by training or whatever.
Then people that are in the field can, ’cause they’re actually running the business, they’re not in front of the computer all the time. What would be great is if our executive chef can just type into a chat bot, what was my sales for the month of you know, where in, uh, April, what were my sales last April for our high end steakhouse? What was the average cover? What was the last three months run rate of, uh, you know, how, what percentage of my business was food? Basically there’s data that’s available, he or she is out in the field battling it. And if they just have the ability to just go, what was I doing last month, uh, same month last year, and how my pacing this month, it gives them an idea. If they’re saying, what were my sales, you know, 24 days into April last year it was a hundred thousand.
This year it’s 80,000. The question really is, is is it food I’m selling less? Is it beverage I’m selling less, et cetera. So you could be actually in the field and be able to get these questions answered without having to sit down, download data, et cetera, that again, FP&A can do because that’s what they do all the time. But a lot of the times in our business, it’s the operators that are delivering the service that are trying to do the best they can, but at the same time, they don’t have the time to sit down in front of a computer and do this. So this, a lot of this will, I hope that migrates over to a phone and it is just a conversation with a chat bot, just like it would be a conversation between them and me. There’s that. Uh, the other thing I just wanna quickly add is that even at sort of our level, you know, at the end of the day, what we are looking for as business owners is cause and effect relationship.
We have certain, uh, independent variables we could have, you could have a resort in The Bahamas that gets 2000 people dumped onto the island because, uh, a ship just docked, right? What do these people really do? How do they affect your retail side of business? How do they affect your food and beverage side of business? Is there a certain aspect of your food and beverage that gets more hit by the traffic than than the other? Going back to our example of slot machines, you by the ones by the door are gonna be, odds are gonna be low. So we can’t, if we understood, and a lot of these correlations are pretty much pretty established theories and mathematics, you know, whether it’s regression analysis and things of that nature. But is there a tool that could sit between someone like me and the data and give me a starting point as opposed to me going column, independent variable, four columns, dependent variables, which one has the most sensitivity?
Maybe the one dependent variable affects the other dependent, you know what I’m saying? Like, if I sell more at bar one, which is affected by the number of people I have on the island, uh, what does that affect? Bar two, if I have intel into how my business is affected by macroeconomic forces, it gives me more tools to adjust tactically, adjust small things. Maybe I wanna charge more at a bar that is very close to the port. That sort of thing. It’s a time consuming process for us to be able to do that. And a lot of this knowledge of correlations is centered toward, around like PhDs effective people who do nothing but quant work. But a lot of that quant work that gets done is pre-established theories. You’re not reinventing regression analysis. It’s been, you know, somebody won the Nobel Prize on that 30 years ago. But a in, in an AI tool can take all of that information in, take your data and give you some, a good starting point. I think those are the two main areas of opportunity with AI that I can think
Glenn Hopper:
Of. Everything you just mentioned, we, of course, FP&A, we could do that for years. If you can write Python, if you can write a SQL query and if you, you know, so what, what AI is gonna do, generative AI in particular, because of the conversational nature of it, I see it as, so we’ve talked about democratization of data for years, but now we’re talking about democratization of data science.Because now if I don’t, you know, I think there’s still, there’s gonna be the requirement that, um, you know, you know, you, you understand what a correlation matrix is and that you understand dependent and independent variables and all that. But with that level, you know, you don’t have to then go become a half-ass coder where you are, you know, know a little bit like me, a little bit of python to be dangerous, but more, you know, enough to break things, probably more likely than not. So yeah,
I think we could talk about this all day, but, uh, we’re getting to the segment of the show. It’s, uh, I gotta, I’ve gotta come up with a, a catchy name for it, but it’s the kind of the getting to know you, uh, phase of the show because when we have guests on, uh, we always do like to remind our listeners that, hey, we might be FP&A geeks, but we’re also all humans here, <laugh>. So, um, one question we love to ask everybody is, what’s something that, uh, not many people know about you? Maybe, uh, you know, maybe it’s something we could, we could find out if we Googled you, or maybe it’s something that, uh, hasn’t made it to the internet. Any exciting stories or tales or, uh, tidbits of information?
Bill Singh:
I am always on a quest to learn. Learning is very exciting to me. Um, and recently I’ve been trying to think what is it that that is, that I can learn that is very different from analytics and science. Um, you know, and it’s funny, last, last year I went to do a little keynote speech on BI in Boston and the CFO of School of Rock was there to do the same thing. And I look at him and it kind of took me back to my middle school years and I would used to play drums when I was, was I was in middle school, so I talked to him after the, after the, the keynote speech and he’s like, you know what, bill? There’s a school of rock school in right by where you live. And, uh, I was like, that’s, that’s, that’s interesting. Um, I recently, about five or so months ago, I went in just to do a trial class and I was absolutely hooked on playing drums.
It is, I listen to a lot of music and I, the, the thing that is amazing is transcribing what you hear onto paper because in order for you to learn how to play drums, you have to listen to somebody already playing drums, write it down, and then practice it over and over again. And the art of writing the music down, transcribing it, you know, when does the snare drum hit? When does the kick drum hit? Is it, what kind of beat is it? Um, what is the difference between a hip hop beat and a soka beat? Four notes, eight notes, 32 notes. I feel that it is, so there are times that I’ll be like flying to Miami or something, and <laugh> I’m listening to, to the song, and I’m actually just counting one and two and three, and four. Like, I actually can do that just about anywhere.
And quite frankly, when you are, when you are tr learning how to play drums, you don’t even need a drum set to do that at the very beginning because it is all just, you know, it’s basically, you can do this on your, you can be sitting on an airplane seat and you could be doing a kick drum with your right foot. You can be doing a high hat with your left hand, and when you come, you could do that for an hour on an airplane, but when you come back, you’ll actually find that you’re playing drums better <laugh>. So it’s something that I, I, I love music. I, and, and, and transcribing music onto notes is something that is very different than making sense of numbers. I also think one thing that is very different compared to my day job is in my day job, the harder, I think the better I do in drums, the less you think the better you play.
And my coach always tells me, he’s like, when you are playing drums at your peak, you might as well be having a chat with a guy next to you or sit be sitting in the audience and your body will just play the drums that way it needs to be played. So it’s a very relaxing and happy and, you know, unifying kind of feeling. ’cause you’re playing, I, I haven’t gotten to a band level yet, but, uh, but that’s one thing that I’ve been doing for the last six or so months that I don’t think anybody knows about. I actually have a drum set. Right, right. Um, you probably can’t see it. It’s, uh, you can see it right there a little bit. It’s in <inaudible>, drum set <laugh>. So I, I work here and if I need five minute relaxation, I plan note there. There you go.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. You know, neural pathways are being created now that are using different parts of your brain and it’s a brain plasticity. And I think the more you can kind of expand and broaden the, those pathways, I mean, I, I’m sure it, it has, I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but there have to be ways that it’s impacting the way you think and how you do it.
Bill Singh:
Oh, a hundred percent. I, you know, when you think about a drum, a drummer, a drummer is effectively, they call it the metronome of the stage. Effectively, the drummer is setting the tempo of the song. If, if the drummer slows down, everybody else slows down. So you’re kind of the, uh, the leading force when it comes, comes to a song that is being played on the stage. And in some ways you are in a, in a, in the spotlight and you have the leading responsibility. You are the leader. And in some ways, in fp and a, there has to be a leader. There has to be somebody who is willing to lead the way, and it, it instills confidence. You’re on the stage, you can, you are performing against a group of people. I feel like life is a stage, even in running a business. You’ll be put in a spotlight, you’ll be given resources and you have to perform and deliver. And yes, it takes practice, it takes repetition, muscle memory. I see a lot of parallels except for the fact that I don’t have to use my brain when I’m playing drums. <laugh>, right. Turn it off. Yeah. Lot of factors, but not a lot of thinking <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. Um, one more note. I was at that event you were talking about, uh, Jack mchol and I have done quite a few events together. I think I actually spoke at that one too, and I did meet, was it John? I can’t remember the guy from, uh, school of Rock. Was he
Bill Singh:
With an A? Yes.
Glenn Hopper:
So, uh, yeah, great, great event though. So I, I’m surprised we didn’t, our paths didn’t cross there, but <laugh> other question we have to ask everybody and it’s, I think it, we’ll be asking this question in 50 years. I won’t, some, whoever, uh, takes over the show from me. Uh, hopefully I’m sipping a, a margarita at one of your resorts, uh, <laugh> full-time, uh, in, in 50 years. But this question we have to ask everyone or not not that we have to ask. We’re curious and I actually, I’m occasionally I will hear something and that I didn’t know before, so I’m, I’m still learning from it. Tell me, what is your favorite Excel function?
Bill Singh:
Uh, the one that I use a lot is Index Match. Um, and, and I’ll tell you the reasons why I really like it. And, and I’m a bit of an engineer too, just by, by, just by ’cause I get a kick out of engineering. So I try to simplify, uh, the programming aspect of app, you know, models as much as I can because if I can minimize the amount of programming or the processing power a model can take, I can actually add more wings of that model. I can do more scenarios because at the end of the day, you have, everything is limited, including the resources on your computer. What index match does is, as opposed to, let’s say a Sum IFs some ifs has to run through the entire table to find a number. So let’s say you have a, you have a, a table that’s a thousand rows long and the answer is in row 500.
And when you do a sum If it has to go through 500, it’ll find 500 and then it’ll memorize 500 and then 550, it’ll go through the entire table to find the answer. Even though it, it can just stop at 500. My argument would be, in most cases, the table that you’re using should never have one thing appearing more than once. ’cause in that case you have way too much detail than you actually need to answer the question, which is another great thing about modeling. You don’t have more data than you need because then that processing power. But if you have a certain level of detail, each number should be appearing once and then index match. Basically what it does is that once it finds that number, it stops thinking, it actually stops. It’ll find the first number and it’ll stop thinking. And if it, and there are some rare instances where it would, you would have to do standard, but that’s where you pay attention to all these little things. Index match could be index, match, match. So it’s a three dimensional workout <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
So I love that answer though because I, I love the engineering mindset with it. It’s how can we reduce compute? What is the most efficient here? It’s not just, so you really are, you’re, you’re thinking on a whole different dimension there, because normally it’s just, I’m hacking away at it. For most of us, it’s, I’m just hacking away at Excel. I know this works, I’ll just, you know, hit in, let it run into it. But with engineering mindset, yeah, you’re saying, and,
Bill Singh:
And also remember when you augment, say Microsoft Excel with other business intelligence tools, one of the beautiful things about these BI tools is you can get level five detail, level four, detail level 3, 2, 1. It’s all just a click. And you can be, you can be assured that you just want, you know, whatever detail you get, it has because we’re checking, we’ve checked the entire data set and it’s accurate. You can just pull level three detail, bring it into Excel, but don’t stop there. Keep going. Always think about how, again, this goes back to my quest for just always finding little bits and pieces to kind of improve my craft. So I’m always looking a way for a way to get to the answer with the least amount of resources, because then I can answer that same question. I can look at the same problem in many different ways. There comes a point where there’s a cap as to how many different ways you can look at it because the compute power runs out. But that’s not to say you can’t be smart about how you’re going through every single one of those steps.
Glenn Hopper:
This has been a fascinating conversation and I, I’m, I’m sure for our listeners as well. If, if any of our listeners wanted to, uh, connect with you and learn, learn more about you and your work, what’s the best way for, uh, people to get in touch with you?
Bill Singh:
I would say, I mean we’re all on LinkedIn. Um, I post a lot of the content just like this on LinkedIn and that is send me an invite. I will not refuse it.
Glenn Hopper:
Bill, thanks again for coming on. Really enjoyed the show.
Bill Singh:
Thank you very much, Glen. I appreciate the time and, um, looking forward to, um, talk to you more at some point in the future.