For those who don’t know me, I’ve been ATSA’s Treasurer for the past year and a half. For those of you who attended the conference in LA, I was the tall, awkward-looking gentleman who repeatedly went on stage and did extremely mediocre shtick. For those of you who attended the virtual 2023 Membership Meeting, I was the seated, yet still awkward-looking gentleman who had the unenviable task of relaying what ATSA’s financials looked like at the beginning of 2023.

Given how things were back then, leadership wanted to give a mid-year update. To recap, at the beginning of 2023, things looked bad. And I mean BAD. In a previous life, I worked for a while in investment banking, so I’ve looked at the financials of a lot of organizations. Not that direct experience in financial services was needed to see that ATSA was very unhealthy. Our expenses in 2022 vastly exceeded our revenue, wiping out all the gains we’d made from our two successful virtual conferences. The organization still had its reserves, but if the cash burn rate from 2022 continued, then the organization was just 3 years away from bankruptcy. While that fact alone would be worrisome, it becomes even more so when you realize that a big driver of the 2022 deficit was legacy expenses such as pre-COVID conference hotel contracts…and we still had two more of those to get through (last year’s in Aurora and this year’s in San Antonio). Couple that with continued significant declines in membership and the organization was in a very precarious position.

A year and a half later, the outlook is vastly different. Through a campaign of renegotiating contracts, cutting costs (stop me at the conference if you’d like to be regaled with epic tales of laser printers and vendor fees), and opening new revenue streams (e.g., virtual trainings, conference sponsorships, increasing our 2022 interest income by 29,765%...and, no, that’s not a typo), the organization ended 2023 almost revenue neutral. We then budgeted 2024 for only a small loss, given some expenses we knew we needed to take on (e.g., replacing staff who had left, website redesign). We’re only halfway through the year and conference registration just opened a few weeks ago, but so far things are looking good. Revenue to this point is tracking well with projections. In just a year and a half, we’ve gone from a place of extreme concern to one of stability.

Our next step is to move the organization from a place of stability to one of sustainability. Our biggest headwinds for that are (a) general increases in expense (they go up…they always go up), (b) declines in membership, and (c) impending declines in interest income once interest rates start falling. There’s not much we can do about the latter. Our two options there are either to just accept reduced income generated by our cash reserves or to take on some level of risk in the way that money is invested. That’s something the Board will have to decide, likely in consultation with a financial planner. There’s also very little we can do about general increases in expenses. Those can’t be avoided and we’ve already saved about all we can through cuts to existing expenses (I keep coming up with whacky schemes to address credit card fees, but none so far have been viable in practice).

The consistent and significant decline in membership over the past 4 years is a different issue than the other two, seeing as (a) it’s something we can stop, and (b) it’s something that if reversed could actually compensate for the other two issues. The good news here is that we’re hoping to end 2024 with the same number of members with which we ended 2023, which itself would be a win and a great first step. Ideally, we’d like to then return to a place of growth in membership. Leadership has been trying to come up with way to do this by both extending our outreach to current nonmembers and making membership more rewarding for both current nonmembers and current members (I’ve heard and used the phrase “value proposition” more in the past year and a half than anyone ever should). The latter has included expanding member benefits, such as the Visionary Voices series (free to members!) and ATSA’s digital offerings.

So, to sum up in a much clearer version…and to finally give the financial update I thought I’d be giving when I accepted the position of Treasurer a year and a half ago: The organization is financially stable. And, as always, we’re continuing to look for ways to both expand current revenue streams and establish new ones.

Jeffrey Sandler
ATSA Treasurer