SeatGeek is renowned as one of the world’s most innovative companies. They’ve revolutionized live event ticketing, achieved unicorn status, and quickly become a household name amongst sports fans and concertgoers.
Part of SeakGeek’s success is no doubt due to how quickly they have identified and leveraged cutting-edge technology to support their business operations. After all, game recognizes game. And it’s no secret that Teddy Collins, VP of Finance at SeatGeek, has changed the finance game, leading financial transformation and becoming an early adopter of other unicorn tech like Brex.
Now, we’re proud to share that Teddy and his team are leveraging TeamOhana to achieve their goal of infinite scalability when it comes to headcount management.
SeatGeek was poised for considerable growth in 2023 and 2024 as live concert and major sports league attendance soared to all-time-highs. And while this growth posed an exciting challenge, SeatGeek only had a small tiger team to run point on the daily finance and HR operations. The small but mighty team consisted of:
SeatGeek needed to be agile enough to hire and manage people operations, with finance, talent, and HR working together and Teddy set his sights on a lofty goal — infinite scale, without infinite resources.
At the time, SeatGeek’s headcount management process was a mix of manual workflows, fragmented tools, and Herculean effort. SeatGeek Finance Manager Shira Gavriel held together a complex system of spreadsheets, tools, and datasets that consumed 20 hours per week to create and maintain. And without someone of her skill level, the task could have doubled in time and complexity.
First, the team would work closely together to build detailed headcount budgets, which required heavy collaboration across teams and leaders to ensure accuracy and approvals. Once the plan was ready, it was off to the races. In a high-growth environment, nothing stays static.
Shira handled ongoing changes like backfills for departed employees, adjustments for future terminations, and tweaks to hiring plans based on evolving business priorities.
“The growth phase was stressful but inspiring,” recalled Frank Cebek, Sr. Director, People at SeatGeek. “Every hire was a priority for the business, and we had to ensure we were working with accurate data and clear priorities to meet expectations.”
Every Friday, Shira refreshed the personnel forecast in Adaptive Planning. With Workday HCM, Greenhouse ATS, and Google Sheets operating in silos, ensuring all systems reflected the same data was a constant challenge. "We needed these systems to talk to each other," Shira reflected. "It wasn’t enough to just pull data; we had to make sense of it in real-time." To do this, she relied heavily on Google Sheets, combining her knowledge of Workday and hiring funnels with intricate manual calculations.
In other words, Shira’s process was intense, requiring a meticulous focus on detail. “Shira’s a total A-player. She kept everything together in spreadsheets and adapted as we figured out exactly what we wanted in a process,” boasted Teddy. “But the manual effort meant we were always one misstep away from errors or inefficiencies.”
SeatGeek managed to make their manual, spreadsheet-driven process work through hypergrowth. But as a growing company now, the sheer volume of headcount updates — new hires, backfills, transfers, terminations — stretched their process to its breaking point.
Even small mistakes had outsized consequences. “We lost track of a backfill once,” admitted Teddy. “It was one out of hundreds of roles, but it took three days to untangle a series of role swaps, up/down-levels, and internal transfers across a number of spreadsheets. That’s time we can’t afford to lose.”
In addition, the company’s strategic goals were evolving. The company evaluated a SPAC merger in 2022, but ultimately raised private financing. Preparing to be public requires an additional level of operational rigor — ” infinite scale” — that spreadsheets alone couldn’t deliver.
They needed a purpose-built solution to centralize data, automate workflows, and bring real-time clarity to their operations. Teddy, who describes enterprise software as one of his “great joys in life (not joking),” led the charge.
As he explains it:
“We’ve implemented best-of-breed software: Workday, Greenhouse, Adaptive Planning. But we have headcount data in a lot of different systems. Nothing in the market could triangulate between budget forecasts, communication workflows, and having the right licensing model. Some of the bigger financial tools are great, but the UX and pricing models aren’t designed for collaboration. Meanwhile, spreadsheets fall short when you’re trying to run a highly transparent process, creating a lot of mental and administrative overhead to try and merge all of the information together to keep a single source of truth.”
Teddy had been keeping up with TeamOhana since 2021, even before we launched from stealth mode. He knew that TeamOhana was a headcount management platform, purpose-built to eliminate the manual work that plagued most growing companies so they could attain visibility and control of their largest expense. But he still did his due diligence to see what other tools were available in the market.
He looked at another leading HR ops focused platform, but quickly realized that headcount planning was not a primary use case — it was merely an afterthought.
He also took a demo of more headcount focused tools, but felt they left out the key needs of the finance role. Teddy determined that, “the competition was TeamOhana versus spreadsheets — not the other companies.”
One of Teddy's principles was that they needed a solution that would fit their process, not the other way around. Where many legacy platforms force companies to adapt their process to the solution, TeamOhana worked seamlessly into the process that SeatGeek had sharpened.
“It adapted to how we already worked while making everything faster and more accurate,” said Teddy.
There are 3 key TeamOhana features SeatGeek uses to support their mission to scale — the Approval Desk, Scenarios, and Automated Hiring Tracker.
Previously, tracking down an approval for a single headcount could take an hour or more, as the team had to check email, Slack, and have individual conversations. Now, decisions are documented and accessible instantly, saving hours on every update.
What once required days of bespoke spreadsheet modeling and multiple stakeholder meetings can now be done in hours with a standardized process. With TeamOhana’s sandbox for ‘what-if’ scenarios, Teddy and his team quickly assess trade-offs — like reallocating roles or pushing out start dates — and confidently make faster decisions.
Tracking headcount changes manually — whether backfills, confidential roles, or terminations — was a constant battle. Shira often spent hours reconciling discrepancies across systems. TeamOhana’s automated tracking eliminates this burden, providing real-time updates and ensuring everyone is aligned.
“If there was a confidential future term or a private role, I had to manually track it. At a company like ours, changes happen constantly. Having answers for discrepancies — like higher attrition or budget variances — was tedious without audit trails to back me up." -Shira Gavriel, Finance Manager
When SeatGeek started using TeamOhana, the benefits were immediate and measurable. Manual updates and silos were replaced with real-time integrations, automated workflows, and centralized dashboards. “Now, instead of chasing data, we’re focused on decision-making,” said Shira.
With TeamOhana in their tech stack, SeatGeek has been able to lay the groundwork for operational rigor and scalability. “We’ve not only solved today’s challenges but built a scalable foundation for tomorrow. Infinite scale is no longer a vision — it’s within reach,” said Teddy.
As SeatGeek continues to evolve, their focus remains on empowering their people, refining their processes, and preparing for the next big milestone. This is just the beginning of their story.
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