AICPA

Presto, Majesco

By Karen Cheney, Start Here Magazine

As the suit behind the success of Majesco Games, Jan Chason is the CPA who keeps blood-red ink off the ledger.

To call Jan Chason a desk-bound accountant would be like calling the sexy, red-headed vampire in the BloodRayne videogame a basic Barbie. As the chief financial officer of Majesco Games, the company that created BloodRayne, Chason is the man who keeps blood flowing in this vampire's—and her fellow electronic play pals'—veins. Chason makes things happen in the executive suite and, by extension, in the dark worlds his company conjures up on your Xbox or Game Boy.

Consider a few highlights of the fewer than two years that Chason, a CPA, has been with the gaming company: He raised $26 million in financing, took Majesco—a formerly family-owned, private company—public, and found financing for new technology that lets us use our Game Boy to play SpongeBob videos, send instant messages, or play wireless games with friends. Whew, this man must be spent.

But wait, there's more: the routine but still monumental work of "getting our numbers done in a timely fashion," Chason says. More specifically, he's responsible for reporting income to investors, monitoring short- and long-term corporate goals, and keeping squeaky clean records for the IRS. He's also helped propel the company from roughly $49.7 million in annual revenues in 2002 to more than $121 million in 2004. So it should come as no shock that an afternoon of kicking back to vamp it up with BloodRayne doesn't quite fit into his schedule.

Just who is Chason, and how did he come to spend his days running a company filled with a bunch of videoheads? He began his career in a typical way, working at a big firm, in his case, Ernst & Young, where he was an adviser to entrepreneurs. "I love business, and I thought that the best background for business was to learn the financial end," he says of why he became an accountant and a CPA. "I enjoyed understanding how the numbers got together and what they meant."

Later he joined SFX Entertainment, which is now the advertising and entertainment behemoth Clear Channel Communications. One of the skills he picked up at SFX is known in the biz as "roll-ups"—that is, buying private companies and putting them together to form a public company. "We did that for sports agents and the live entertainment, touring, promoting—they all ended up in SFX or Clear Channel," he says. Then Majesco came knocking.

Based in Edison, New Jersey, Majesco started in 1986 as a value seller, or a company that unloads overstock of another company's products. The company would make a deal with retailers like Target or Wal-Mart to provide them with merchandise, but Majesco wouldn't go out and buy the goods contracted until the ink dried on the contract. "First it would sell the product, and then it would buy it," says Chason. The process taught Majesco's management team an important lesson, says Chason: It's easy to forecast larger sales than you can get. "Today the company looks at what it could lose rather than what it could make," he says, explaining that understanding market risk is a sound business tactic.

In 2002, Majesco began developing and launching its own game titles, but to finance the development costs of high-end games like BloodRayne and the upcoming science-fiction action-adventure Advent Rising, it needed cash—lots of it. "Majesco needed to bring people in at a higher level with more varied experience," says Ken Gold, Majesco's vice president of marketing.

Enter Chason. With him as CFO, the company had someone who could make it a player on Wall Street. His first move was to look for capital. "We did a lot of pounding the sidewalk," he recalls. Chason and Jesse Sutton, Majesco's president, met with potential investors—hedge funds and investment bankers—making presentations until they could mutter them in their sleep. They decided the best strategy for Majesco was to merge with an already public corporation, rather than begin the process of selling shares to investors, or "taking the company public," anew. (The process of purchasing a dormant public company to take a private company public is known as a reverse merger.) Chason's role in structuring the merger deal was crucial. "I had to do due diligence to find out who we were dealing with," he says of the process that requires tireless poring over the accuracy of information provided in public documents. Once he completed the monster-size task of reviewing the potential partner company's financial and legal history and was sure there would be no surprises down the road, the deal went through.

Today, Majesco is preparing to issue another $100 million in common stock through a second public offering. If all goes as planned, the stock—which currently trades in a limited, speculative market known as "over the counter"—will be listed on the prestigious and tech-heavy NASDAQ National Market. In the meantime, Chason has plenty to keep him busy, from the fairly basic work of crafting contracts with game developers to the glamorous task of signing big-time deals with Hollywood agents. (A BloodRayne movie is coming to theaters this year.) He's quick to tell you, though, that at the end of the day, he gets that I-just-got-the-high-score rush by just "seeing the money come in."

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