My wife Deanna, our two young children and I have just spent seven days visiting family and friends in Wichita, Kansas, which is my hometown. I swore when we moved to Colorado in 1998 that I would only make the eight-hour drive between Kansas and Boulder twice. Once on the way out, and once on the way back. All trips in between would be by air. I'm not a fan of long drives through desolate territories. I'm just not a fan of driving at all really. That's why airplanes were invented. That was a fine plan until I started pricing four tickets roundtrip to Wichita from Denver - all of the sudden that eight hour drive didn't seem so bad. We made it twice this summer and survived both trips with minor disruptions.
What a drive like this does is give you lots of time to think about what to write in articles such as this. People often ask how you find something to write every month. I could write this column as a daily if I made this trek more frequently.
The timing of the first driving trip when I moved to Colorado with my wife (our children are Colorado natives, all having been born since we moved here) was pretty well defined. It was immediately after the sale of our business to Sugarloaf. The trip back to Kansas is becoming more uncertain the longer we live in Colorado. Although not all the variables are within my control as to how long we will stay, we have grown to appreciate the Colorado environment, the scenic mountains, the big city activities, and my employment at Sugarloaf.
Our company has just announced that a New York investment firm, Wellspring Capital (for more info on our new owners, see wellspringcapital.com) is buying our company. We'll no longer be a publicly traded company. Early on, when Sugarloaf went public and raised the capital that was then used to develop the service infrastructure that is in place today, the public environment was great. Five years later, during some tough times when the stock price dropped below $2 per share (from a high of near $22), being a public company is of far less importance. That is, unless you like having your balance sheet and income statement being read by all of your customers and competitors on a monthly basis. Your competitors pick every statement apart and focus on whatever negative they can find. Then they send it to your major customers. I've a rule that unless a competitor allows me to look at his statements as well (which almost never happens), I spend very little time discussing our statements that they're reading on the Internet.
The move to a private company is one that is very exciting for all of us, and will be good for the industry at large. When large companies are healthy, it bodes well for the valuations and leveraging abilities for the medium and smaller companies in the same industry. Sugarloaf has weathered the tough times in the industry and survived, just as some other companies have. We will be a healthier company and industry as a result of this transaction.
We go back to Wichita a couple of times per year. Most of my lifelong friends live in Wichita. I'm from the school that in life you really only have six or seven friends outside of your family and business relationships that you maintain throughout your life. Oh sure, you had 70 people show up for your surprise birthday party you say, but many of them were just there for the food and free drinks. During our trips we try to see each of these close friends. It's very different for me, seeing your friends two or three times per year vs. once a week or so. In many ways, it's more rewarding. You spend much less time with small talk since you don't have much time together in the first place. We've found that during these get-togethers our friendships almost seem to be stronger than when we lived there. I haven't figured that one out yet but it probably has something to do with appreciating them more. We've made some terrific friends in Colorado, but the challenge there is that they met me at 40 years old. I don't know about you but most of my life has been lived prior to being 40, and it's difficult to bring people up to snuff for all those years they missed out knowing you, and you them. Worse, if you try to, you'll notice that they begin having prior commitments more frequently when you call.
So just like this industry and the people in it, the lives of my circle of friends in Wichita continues to change. One has hit the big time with his business. Another just got a divorce. Others are having children that we're seeing for the first time, and they're seeing our children for the first time. The new church we attended in Wichita isn't so new anymore. It has grown into the real deal. As I drive by the Hays, Kansas Wal-Mart (Hays, Kansas is on the way to Denver from Wichita), I feel a need to stop and go see our games and our fun center inside the store. It strikes me as odd that at this mid-point in my working life this is what I'm doing. Basically the same thing I was doing 20 years ago when I started in this industry. I'm going to Wal-Marts to look at amusement games. Only now, before I go in the store I'm changing a couple of diapers and needing to buy a new sippy cup as my son threw his out the window at 60 miles per hour. I hope I've gotten better at it, evaluating amusement game installations that is. There are witnesses that will vouch that we've seen some beautiful Wal-Mart installations and some equally horrible installations all in a given day. I still get a twitch walking into a Wal-Mart vestibule. You just never know what's in there.
As we head to our annual convention in Las Vegas, the industry looks very different than it did a year ago, but also very much the same. We are selling plush and entertainment one play at a time. The sellers sometime change; the sales vehicle (equipment) is changing all the time, and the customer has more options than ever for their disposable income dollars. There will always be sellers and buyers of entertainment through coin-operated machines. The key is in searching out the future growth trends of our industry and chasing it with a passion.
This is what happens when you're driving for hours and hours, and the
only excitement is that you are only 220 miles from viewing the world's
largest ball of twine located somewhere in western Kansas. You think, you
ramble, and you reflect. Then, for several thousand dues paying subscribers
to Replay Magazine, you write about it.