Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016 | 2 a.m.
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Brian Greenspun is taking some time off and is turning over his Where I Stand column to others. Today’s guest columnist is Greg Lee, chairman and CEO of the Eureka Casino Resort in Mesquite. Lee serves on the boards of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce, the Problem Gambling Center and the UNLV Foundation Board of Trustees, of which he is chairman.
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During presidential election cycles we hear candidates share their beliefs about how jobs are created and how they will bring back lost jobs from areas that have been in decline for decades. Their constant harping causes me to contemplate my own experiences as a business owner and what is really possible.
For almost 20 years my family and I have owned and operated the Eureka Casino Resort in the small town of Mesquite. Over those years we’ve experienced a casino and real estate boom that made Mesquite the fastest-growing city in America, then experienced a brutal real estate crash that caused the largest and oldest casino to close, and now, like much of Southern Nevada, Mesquite has struggled to regain lost jobs.
This experience tells me there is nothing a president can do to stop a business or industry from failing and to protect those jobs. Protecting and growing a community’s workforce is the job of local business owners and leaders who are committed to taking actions years earlier to ensure stability during downturns. It also requires business leaders to have the courage to innovate and change their businesses to respond to changing economic forces, when the outcome is usually uncertain.
To prevent a company or industry from closing, it must be nurtured and protected by committed and long-term investors, who will value the long-term success in terms of sustainable employment in the community and quality of the business operation, just as much as the short-term profits.
This is much easier said than done, because competition and our free-market system work against a business remaining stable in a community. Once a business stops growing, it is worth more to a buyer who can reduce costs by cutting labor to make the business more profitable or by consolidating it with another operation to create efficiencies. The company becomes more profitable, even when the community loses by having fewer jobs. There are few owners and even fewer buyers who will be satisfied with a business that is not growing and who will value a business for the jobs it creates in the community as much as the profits it creates for the owners.
Our family business has been around for three generations and tries to keep a long-term perspective on business success and market returns. To continue these goals, I chose to transition our Eureka Casino Resort to a company that is owned by its employees, known as an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP. The belief is that through employee ownership I can ensure there will be a long-term investor with our family, who cares both about the long-term success of our company and their jobs. Our employees each year now earn a retirement benefit based on a stock interest in the company. We believe that this retirement benefit, which employees earn in addition to their normal salary and bonus, has the ability to keep our company stable and successful, and preserve Eureka’s role in making the community more prosperous and more stable at the same time.
While we hope the ESOP can help preserve a community’s employment, we have found another way to bring jobs to Mesquite and continue to drive new visitation to our resort town.
On Oct. 1, our family will open the Rising Star Sports Ranch, a resort designed to host sports tournaments, camps and golf travelers. After studying the growth of athletic tourism into Southern Nevada and Southern Utah and across the nation, we developed a plan to leverage the city’s existing investment in athletic fields and facilities to bring additional visitors to Mesquite. Our resort will offer rooms with multiple bunk-bed formats and food and beverage programing designed for groups and teams. We will also add sports fields, courts and a 30,000-square-foot field house. While the sports-tourism industry is growing nationwide, this business model is largely untested and something we could not do entirely by ourselves.
With the help of Mesquite’s Economic Development entity and the city of Mesquite, our family secured state New Market Tax Credits that we have used to augment our own investment. This public/private investment allowed the scope and scale of the project to increase, and thus create more jobs and solidify Mesquite as a regional destination for sports tournaments and camps.
Presidents hold office for four or eight years, while successful family businesses can lead for generations. Our economy’s current focus on mergers and acquisitions to create short-term profits may be contributing to job losses and wage stagnation that have hurt the middle class — the people who often have middle-management jobs that are reduced in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Growing jobs in a community takes a commitment to growing a business. Government actions can spawn business development and job creation, but what must come first are business leaders and owners committed to the long-term health and growth of their businesses, and the men and women who work there.
