As the chief financial officer of NFL Films, Barry Wolper is responsible not only for ensuring a solid bottom line for the business, but must do it in a way that nurtures and encourages the creativity of the firm, which produces more than 1,500 projects annually for the NFL, as well as other customers during the off-season.

If this wasn’t enough pressure, he also has the distinction of reporting to 32 billionaires – the NFL team owners, Wolper told MBA students Oct. 1 at the first Leadership Luncheon series of the academic year.

NFL Films is a kind of “factory,” Wolper said, one that takes raw materials – footage of games and hundreds of interviews annually – and turns them into television programs, commercials, DVDs and videos. But rather than selling a consumer product, as do most factories, he noted that the company makes it money by charging television programs for the rights to use their footage.

While NFL Films is successful and no one is predicting that America’s love affair with football will end anytime soon, Wolper said his firm does face challenges, most significantly the possibility of a work stoppage in 2011 and the ability of amateurs with inexpensive equipment to bring cheaply-produced shows to market via new technologies. The competitive advantage that NFL Films has, he said, is its “artistic perfectionism,” the quality of its products, its talented staff and inside access to the NFL.

Wolper, who started his career as an accountant and went on to earn his M.B.A. in taxation, credited his career to “a lot of breaks” and being ‘in the right place at the right time.” The Mt. Laurel, N.J.-based firm employs about 250 full-time employees and several hundred seasonal workers during the football season.

Wolper is the first in the series of business executives to speak to One-Year MBA students this fall. Theodore Delgazio, a principal of MLEA Inc., a multi-disciplinary engineering and equipment systems firm that successfully reorganized after Chapter 11, will speak on campus Oct. 8; Karen Kulp, CEO of Home Care Associates, an employee-owned health care company, will speak on Oct. 22; David Brown, president of BrownPartners, a minority owned and controlled marketing firm, will speak on Nov. 5; and Karl Schellscheidt, CEO and co-founder of ePrep, Inc., an Internet-based exam preparation company, will speak on Nov. 12.

Lee Tabas, executive-in-residence for the School of Business Administration, has coordinated this dynamic speaker series for the past seven years.