Name: Jason Sondag
Position: Cubs Dir of Strategy & Development
Age: 33
Where I’m from: Glenview, Ill.
Where I call home: Chicago
Focusing on right now: Big-picture content strategy to reach the largest audience possible.
Best advice: I started my career as an investment banking analyst, and when you start your career, it’s a lot of work, a lot of hours. I got a piece of advice from one of my mentors, and that was to do the work that others are not willing to do. That’s something that really stuck with me.
A must for a new hire: We talk a lot about attention to detail. It’s something that we look for in our screening, and in our group in particular. Attention to detail is really important because we’re running all the financial modeling and the long-term forecasting for the business. I don’t think you can be expected to handle the bigger projects if you don’t have a handle on the smaller things.
Exec I admire most: ELON MUSK’s career really stands out to me. The guy has started a number of companies from PayPal to Zip2, and now he’s on SpaceX and Tesla and Solar City. A lot of people told him he was nuts along the way, and he took a lot of risks in his career by rolling the money he made in other ventures into Tesla and Solar City and SpaceX. I think that his vision is something to admire, thinking really big.
Best book I’ve read this year: One that I’m reading right now is called “GOOD STRATEGY BAD STRATEGY” by RICHARD RUMELT. For people that are in a senior-level planning role, it highlights a lot of good tidbits about how to develop a strategy.
First thing in the morning: I’m usually up by five, and I’ll work out. I do CrossFit, and I find that’s the only time I can get that in. I’ve got two kids at home, so I take my kids in before work, and then I usually start my day by looking at my calendar and planning out what I have to get ready for the meetings for the day. I’ll try to clear through as much of the email as I can, and then my days are normally filled with a fair amount of meetings.
Talking tech: A lot of people are trying to figure out how to do VR right within sports. It’s developing quickly and there’s a lot of money going into it. We’re trying to evaluate it, figure out if it’s something that belongs in the ballpark only, or if it’s something we can reach fans with in the home, as well.
Must have music: U2 and PEARL JAM are my two favorite bands, but as a genre, country music is something I’ve gotten into recently. With Wrigley being an outdoor music venue, we’ve been able to bring in a lot of exciting bands, including Pearl Jam coming in a couple of weeks. I’m really excited about that.
Food for thought: I like to stay pretty healthy, so I do a fair amount of cooking for my family. Right now it’s grilling season, so I’m doing a lot of that outdoors when I can. I’ve just gotten into doing a pork tenderloin, so I’m perfecting that right now.
How I unwind: My priorities right now are my work and my wife and my kids, and if I get any time outside of that, I’ll either be doing CrossFit or on the golf course.
Day in the life: On a day-to-day basis, we have several big, key strategic initiatives, obviously the big one being the Wrigley Field restoration. We’re really focused on financing and bringing that to life. From my group’s perspective, we’ve been partnering with (Cubs Senior VP & CFO JON GREIFENKAMP) in particular to manage our balance sheet and raise the capital to be able to finance the restoration project. I’d put our group’s responsibility in a couple of key buckets. One is the strategy development side, for which we’ve got several key strategic aims. Two would be corporate development. So that’s the capital raising, the long-term forecasting, the financial model, the benchmarking. Three is the strategy execution piece. Our group is really a service center in the organization, so we’ll help other functions evaluate alternatives, do the financial modeling, help them assess risk. We actually own several of the key pieces of our strategy, the biggest one being media rights. We have an opportunity in 2020 where we get all of our games back -- right now our games are on WGN, CSN and a local ABC affiliate. We’re very focused on that opportunity that we have in 2020 to make sure that we’re well positioned to not only maximize the opportunity, but get our games in front of our fans in the best way.
