Most CEOs spend their careers preparing for events they can’t put on a calendar. A downturn. A competitor’s move. A supply shock. My organization has all of those, and adds the opposite problem, and I have come to appreciate that it is just as hard.
We know precisely when our biggest moment arrives. The Olympic and Paralympic Games open in Los Angeles in the summer of 2028. For a sport like fencing, that fortnight is the whole ballgame. American interest spikes, our athletes are briefly famous and emails blow up at fencing clubs in towns across the country. Then, historically, the interest recedes and we go back to being a sport people remember fondly and never try.
Budgeting toward a known catalyst sounds easier than budgeting toward an unknown one. In practice it introduces a specific temptation: to spend the money when the moment arrives, because that is when you can see the return. That instinct is wrong, and resisting it has shaped four decisions in our current plan.
Spend before the demand, not during it
We put $2.8 million into marketing and communications this year, roughly 16 percent of a $17.6 million operating budget. For an organization our size, that is a conspicuous number, and it is deliberate. The audience shows up in 2028. The capacity to serve that audience has to exist well before then. Clubs need to be open, coaches need to be trained and a family in a new market needs somewhere to go in the same week they get curious. Build that in 2028 and you have spent real money manufacturing a bad first experience.
Protect the floor before you protect the margin
Our plan calls for net income of about $299,000 on $17.6 million, a margin of 1.7 percent. On its own that number looks alarming. It is defensible only because a second number sits underneath it: a reserve equal to three months of operating expenses, which we treat as untouchable. Thin margins and fragility are not the same condition. They become the same condition the moment the floor is negotiable, and the pressure to negotiate it always arrives disguised as an opportunity.
Write the stopping condition when you approve the spend
The hardest growth investments to kill are the ones approved without a definition of failure. We now try to attach one at the point of approval. A grant program that puts $5,000 into a club to run introductory programming has a stated expectation attached to it: 30 to 50 young people reached per club. That gives a future version of me something to hold the program against, at a moment when the program will have its own advocates and its own momentum. The exit ramp has to be poured before you need it.
Choose a metric that outlives the event
This is the one I find myself repeating most. It would be easy to build a plan that peaks in August 2028, declare victory on a set of numbers taken during the Games and move on. So I have started asking our team a question that’s more challenging: What does the sport look like in Brisbane 2032, four years after Los Angeles?
That question changes what we fund. It moves money away from things that spike and toward things that compound, which for us means clubs, coaches and school programs rather than a heavier media buy in the weeks when the audience is already paying attention. It also makes the 2028 numbers less interesting to me than the 2032 numbers, which is an uncomfortable thing to say to a board that would reasonably like to celebrate something sooner.
The transferable version
Very few companies have an Olympics. Plenty have the structural equivalent: a patent cliff, a regulatory deadline, a product cycle, a demographic wave, a contract renewal that will reshape the business on a date already known. If you have one, the finance question is not whether to invest ahead of it. It is whether you have built the three things that let you invest ahead of it responsibly. A floor you will not breach. A stopping condition you wrote down while you were still objective. And a measure of success dated well after the moment everyone else is looking at.
We will find out in 2032 whether we got it right. That is a long time to hold a position, which is exactly the point.
