Can you briefly share your professional journey?
To continue the above outline of my early career, from Caesars World’s corporate offices, I moved to Lake Tahoe as Chief Financial Officer of Caesars Tahoe. While Caesars Tahoe was a small operation, the company would ship high rollers who were on a losing or winning streak at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas up to us to change their or our luck. At that time, Caesars did not have a lot of competition in the high roller business. In seven years at this operation, I learned in detail about all aspects of the business; casino, hotel, food and beverage, entertainment and retail. We even opened a nightclub in the early ‘90s before it became a hot trend in Las Vegas.
After Caesars was acquired by ITT, I transitioned to a corporate role in Las Vegas where my job was to create a shared services center for the casinos owned by ITT. This was in the very early days of the Internet. We had just adopted email and The Cloud was only discussed in very vague terms. Shortly after I moved to Las Vegas, ITT’s hospitality operation was the target of a corporate takeover. One morning, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that in response, ITT was going to cut significant corporate overhead. That afternoon, I was notified that I was part of said corporate overhead! New house in Las Vegas, four kids, eleven years of service. No problem.
I spent time consulting and searching for a job and pretty quickly landed at Primadonna Resorts working for Gary Primm as Chief Financial Officer of this family controlled public company. Much of my time there was spent dealing with selling the company to MGM, where I worked across the table from Jim Murren who was the new CFO at MGM at the time. When the acquisition was complete, I worked for a year with John Redmond (now president of Allegiant) on his transition team.
About a year after the sale, I was recruited to go back to Caesars Palace, by then owned by Park Place under Arthur Goldberg, in a senior operational role as Executive Vice President. I also was able to work with the great George Markantonis (now with Las Vegas Sands). Park Place made significant capital expenditures at Caesars Palace to bring it back to its former glory. During that time, I worked to bring in the Celine Dion show and several other significant partnerships. Unfortunately, Mr. Goldberg passed away and his successor was not fond of me, so I ended up being terminated from Caesars for the second time. This happened the weekend before 9/11. Bad timing.
I quickly got back to work at MGM as Executive Vice President of New York-New York overseeing casino marketing, finance and human resources. There I worked with the team who brought in Zumanity and made several other significant enhancements to the property. This team was effective at significantly improving the performance of NY NY.
When MGM completed its acquisition of Mandalay Resorts, I moved over the MGM Grand, Las Vegas as chief financial officer and after three years moved into the role of Executive Vice President of Operations, overseeing all the operations of the 5,000 room hotel casino.
In 2010, I was approached by senior MGM management and asked to take a senior role in the company’s new development in Macau. When MGM Cotai was delayed, I was re-deployed to work on a project in Vietnam. In Vietnam, MGM had a management contract with a Canadian company to develop a beach front casino outside of Ho Chi Minh City. I lived in Ho Chi Minh City for two years and we built and trained the team to be ready to open the resort. Unfortunately, the owner was unable to get the appropriate licenses to open. So MGM and I left the project in early 2013. The owner did eventually get a license, and I am very proud to say that the team we assembled opened the property in the summer of 2013.
In 2013 I moved on to Macau where I worked with the team there to run the existing property and plan the new MGM Cotai which opened in February, 2018. Shortly after the opening, I decided it was time to go home and spend more time with my growing family, so I retired.