Vol. 3, No. 11, November 2007
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Bill Wortman
Co-Founder and Principal Cannery Resorts
Casino Connection: Do you find that as a smaller company you are able to react faster and more aggressively when you identify something you want to do?
Wortman: We can. We consider ourselves a PT boat, whereas some of the larger companies are more like battleships. Decisions are made very quickly, they’re made right here in these offices, and we don’t have a massive committee that has to make those decisions.
Explain how the company got started.
We started Millennium Gaming, which was the predecessor to Cannery Casinos, in 1996. Bill (Paulos) had recently left as president of Primadonna Resorts, I had my own company and I was operating small casinos in the state of Nevada. Bill and I had been friends for about 30 years at that time, so we decided that it would be a very good mix for he and I to team up and build a gaming company.
Our first project was the Greektown Casino in Detroit, and from there we went on to do the Cannery Casinos here, the Rampart Casino here, and some other things outside of Nevada.
The Detroit experience must have been very challenging. That was when the casinos were first legalized in Detroit; the Greektown area is considered a historic area, so you had to build the casino on the back of a block of historic storefronts. That must have been very difficult to put that into place.
The entire process in Detroit was a difficult process. The state had determined that there would be three licenses in the city of Detroit, and those would be bid-for licenses. We competed against 11 other applicants for those licenses—including Mirage Resorts, Mandalay Bay, MGM, Donald Trump, Isle of Capri—companies that were very large names in the gaming industry. Mandalay, MGM and ourselves were the three selected. We were proud of having that victory.
After doing that, we were building in a historic district in an area known as “Trapper’s Alley,” which was a historic place that trappers would go and sell their furs. It became a very difficult build with new construction added onto reconstruction at Trapper’s Alley. It’s a facility that had five or six stories. At the end of the day, it was voted by the people of Detroit and the Detroit Free Press as the best casino in the community, and it’s a very fun place to go because it mixes old and new.
Were people surprised when you—and you had partnered with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians—were picked as one of the three license winners?
I don’t think they were. The tribe is a very well known enterprise in the state which had operated several casinos in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and when we were in the process of the selection, there were other notable local individuals within the Detroit area that were part of the group. The tribe bought them out before the opening of the casino, but I don’t think it was a big upset.
At the same time, were you operating in Nevada?
At that time, myself and another partner had casinos in Nevada. We had Nevada Palace and I had two casinos in Northern Nevada, which I subsequently sold.
Give us some background of Cannery. When you were looking at that, that was pretty far a field. There wasn’t a lot of development up in the northern area of Las Vegas. What gave you the idea to build up there?
We call it pioneering. We had been contacted by a gentleman who had the land. In Nevada at the time, there was a sun-setting rule that limited local casinos within Clark County. The timeframe to be licensed to build on this piece of land was running out, and we had to move forward on it. If we didn’t get a gaming license on that site in time, then it would be lost forever. So it forced us to build out there and move forward more quickly than we may have liked. As you said, when we started, that entire area had planned to have significant development, but it wasn’t under construction at the time.
It was a risk, but a risk that paid off handsomely. We’re very proud of the Cannery, what it was, what it is and the fact that it has become a brand. To me it’s very interesting how a single casino in North Las Vegas has the aura about it that can drive others.
It’s kind of an unusual brand. What do you feel the brand conveys?
It’s a retro, kind of ‘50s feel. When we talked about it, because of the area in which the Cannery sits, it’s an industrial area, so we couldn’t build a facility like the Rampart Casino (which the company manages in Summerlin) in the Northwest area of town. So we looked at several themes that we thought would work well in the North Las Vegas marketplace and within that industrial area. We looked at the potential of an old factory, and that wasn’t too exciting. Then we thought about an old brewery, but that would have forced us to build an actual micro-brewery—you can’t call it Joe’s Brewery and not have a brewery there. So, we ultimately settled on the Cannery when our vice president of marketing, Tom Willer, came in and said, ‘Hey, what about the Cannery?’
The way that we came to that was we collectively were looking at different periods of art on the internet, and were looking specifically looking at the old Coca-cola art work, and we liked that art work. So we ultimately decided that we would do a cannery. In doing that, we came across the art that was used on vegetable crates at the time, and that art worked out perfectly. So that seemed to be the impetus for how we named it and kind of how we began the interior design of the facility.
Obviously a casino is more than design. It has to be comfortable to people who gamble, and you have to offer the right promotions. What did you do to blend all those things together to create a successful property?
We have a philosophical view at the Cannery: no one is more important than anyone else. I don’t care if you have a suit on or you don’t have a suit on. Bill and I come from different aspects of the gaming industry, but we are philosophically matched. The people we work with are extremely important to us as coworkers and individuals, and that creates an attitude throughout our facilities that I think is very apparent to our customers.
The second thing is we decided very early a marketing plan that gives back more to our customers than other properties do. When you look at our marketing plan, and you put it side-by-side with our competitors, you can see that we give back more. That has worked very well for us.
The other facility you run in Las Vegas, the Rampart casino, is very unlike the Cannery. When you took it over—the Resort at Summerlin it was called at the time—it was not drawing the local people. What did you see when you first got in there?
We saw pretty much a disaster. It had design flaws in terms of catering to the local community. It had marketing flaws in the philosophical view that then-current owners had implemented. The Resort at Summerlin had 541 rooms and suites, and decided they would build a facility on the scale that they built the Scottsdale facility. When we looked at it, we saw a substantial number of houses at that area, so we thought that if you properly marketed to the local community—which the original owners did not do—and fixed the design flaws and used the hotel as the ancillary market for the casino, that we would have a much better opportunity to succeed. When we started at the Rampart, they were on the basis of machine utilization, they were probably the least-utilized casino in the local market place. Now they’re number-one. So it’s gone from last to first.
You’ve operated Nevada Palace on the Boulder Highway for a long time, but you’ve recently broken ground at the site for the Cannery Eastside. Could you explain how that property will be different to similar to the North Las Vegas property?
Eastside Cannery is going to be an upgrade to the current Cannery. It will be a different paradigm because it will compete with different properties, being those on the Boulder Highway.
That facility will have 307 rooms. It’s going to be a high-rise facility. The rooms will have magnificent views of the Strip. We’re going to put a restaurant/lounge on top of that high-rise that will offer a fantastic view of the Strip. We believe that it’s going to be a complete paradigm change.
