2 + 2 = 57 And A Bonus!

Posted On 2023-02-21

My closeouts and scheduling tools created a framework of numerical accuracy and consistency around the day-to-day manager decisions that had immediate financial effects, but getting my boss fired for embezzling thousands of dollars would be my standout money moment with AMC.

The Ops Notes that I built out for Pacific laid a similar foundation, albeit on a broader scale. And as I’ve already mentioned, that reforecasting equation can be etched into my tombstone, I’m that proud of it. But by crowning money moment with Pacific came at their slowest building, the Sherman Oaks 5.

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I don’t have any pictures from the 5. I have a handful from the twin after we gutted it but before it was torn down, really those are just as representative of the place’s potential as images of the 5 open for business. That was the summer of ‘Hulk’ and the ‘Matrix’ sequels, but those months at Sherman Oaks was like a vacation. If you were to look at these transposed pictures and wonder how an empty shell of a building could swing thousands of dollars in payroll every week, you would be conceptually further ahead than anyone who thought the 5 could be so consequential.

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This one starts in my AMC days, when AMC bought out General Cinemas and acquired the two-building 2-and 5-plexes in Sherman Oaks. In 2003 I was AMC’s General Manager of those buildings. It was my first run at being a GM and a learning experience to be sure, but I didn’t get the job because I was an idiot. I got to know those buildings and we completely maxed out our incentive payouts during my tenure. That tenure ended when Pacific Theatres bought the complex that year. They already had the Sherman Oaks Galleria, so our 7 screens were encroaching on their territory.

Several years later I signed up with Pacific. The first few years were at the Grove, Pasadena, and Glendale, but I couldn’t avoid the Valley forever. I’ll set aside just how depressing a moment this was, but there were eventually a handful of shifts I had to work at the old 5-plex, covering things for the team there.

(Pacific only kept the 5-plex, the 2-plex was sold back to the shopping center and is now the parking lot for a Best Buy. More irony later.)

I’m having to cover their building because their GM was getting pulled out for meetings on a weekly basis. The GM of this little do-nothing theater was getting so much attention in the first place because her payroll was doing spectacular things. The corporate types wanted to pick her brain about what she was doing so well, and they wanted other GMs to get on board with whatever she was doing, and this process required a foolish amount of facetime. Plus this was near the end of the fiscal year, so everyone in leadership was feeling too proud of themselves to get any actual work done.

So here I am, kinda resenting being stuck in a backwards time loop, and at the same time just KNOWING that there simply wasn’t enough money flowing through that building to have any kind of impressive result one way or the other. And the amount of money this GM was getting credited for saving simply was not on the same scale as the rest of the building. Pacific’s staff schedules weren’t so removed from AMC’s, and we’d run that place as tight as it could go. I ended weeknight janitor service and closing managers cleaned the last shows, that’s how tight we ran that place. The Pacific GM wasn’t willing to go that far, but was somehow saving a few thousand dollars a week in payroll from a building that was only spending a few thousand in the first place? Something wasn’t right.

On one of those covering shifts I decided to find out what the deal was. Spent the afternoon digging back through weekly records and 13wk summaries and P&L reporting, and after a few hours of digging I found out that someone had screwed up. Somewhere around week 40, a new set a financial targets was rolled out to the theatres, and the new targets were incorporated into the accounting/reporting software’s budgeted figures. Only a sign had been flipped in the 5’s accounting, and the last quarter of the year was spent with some weird math being applied between their supposed goals and their actual targets. The paperwork that everyone was cheering for had correct figures for what had actually been spent, but a difference from budget that was completely imaginary, and compounding. And that “difference from budget” was the spectacular result that everyone was cheering for and promoting. Smoke and mirrors.

I sometimes wonder at the looks on their faces. They were all together over at corporate talking about this great achievement, the slowest building in the circuit was $80k better than budget on payroll, they had a genius in the management ranks and next year was gonna be SOOO good, then they get the email from the irritating jerk who’s never wrong and are left holding an EIGHTY-THOUSAND-DOLLAR empty bag.

And yes I’m spiteful at a cellular level, but this wasn’t that. This was simple critical thinking. The corporate beans should have seen the math shift at week 40 and taken a closer look. The site GM should have ABSOLUTELY known better. The only thing that made me irritating to the office crowd was the fact that I really was rarely wrong, but I only needed to be right so much in the first place because no one else was. Doing it every day was just – to them – gratuitous.

$10k here, $80k there. All in my day’s work. I am not other people.