Story 6: Lies, Damn Lies, and Made Up Statistics
sorry for the lack of stories lately, have been racking my brain trying to think of stories of fail (and there were many), but fortunately for myself I must be doing a good job of blocking out my time there...
this story involves the evil empire and their use of bullshit stats to make themselves feel better about the absolute fail that was going on...no need to concentrate on EBITDA when you can make up financial metrics that make you look good...my favorite made up stat was something they called "marketing efficiency"...if memory serves this stat was basically just marketing cost divided by gaming revenue (that's the basic jist of the stat...it might have had a few other things in it, but that was the main computation)...
so you may ask, why is this bullshit...good question...
let's say my casino is running a $10K marketing budget and getting $100K of gaming revenue from it...so our marketing efficiency would be 10%...now let's say I'm a cheap ass company like the evil empire and want to slash expenses and now have a $5K marketing budget and make $60K in gaming revenue for it...now my marketing efficiency has improved to 8.3%...NOW THAT'S SOME GOOD STUFF THERE! oh wait you mean I lost $40K in gaming revenue (not to mention ancillary revenue like hotel/F&B/and fee revenue, don't forget the evil empire is a fee revenue company not a casino) by becoming more marketing efficient? oh well, our bullshit made up stat shows that we are cutting costs which while in bankruptcy is all we need to show...cut costs with no regard for what it's doing to the top line...
the region I worked in was dogshit (pretty sure you can figure out where I worked from all these stories), but that's how it was treated...cut, cut, cut expenses by all means necessary just so you could show the 'C' level and PE shitheads that you were cutting expenses...and if cutting those expenses didn't make business sense and were actually a net negative to the top line, just make up some bullshit stat to make it sound good...
I actually had to tell the marketing people and finance people in the company this stat every month...drove me batshit fucking crazy that they were so fixated on this number that they had just made up to make themselves feel better about the sinking ship that was our region...