ATTRACTIONS MANAGEMENT
EDITOR’S LETTER GREAT LEADERSHIP
ON THE COVER: Turning around Six Flags, p22
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“Once people see you’re real and truthful, even if you’re telling them something they don’t want to hear, they begin to support and believe in the company again. It’s about building trust.” Jim Reid-Anderson
At the time Reid-Anderson joined Six Flags, the company had US$1bn worth of debt and in his words, needed to “adjust its thinking and priorities”. A fi rm believer in the power of people, he says a major focus has been “rebuilding employee and investor pride in the company.” There’s also been a review of all areas of operation. Signifi cant change has already been made and Six Flags has announced an
increase in revenue of US$4m (7 per cent) in Q1 of 2011, with a 1 per cent increase in attendance, an 11 per cent increase in ticket revenue and a 10 per cent increase in in-park sales of merchandise and food and beverage. Reid-Anderson has taken a robust view on investment, believing it vital to success. He plans to spend US$90m a year – or 9 per cent of revenue – on new attractions, saying: “this is a complete change of direction for the company – I believe guests like new things and we’ll have something new, every year, in every park.” Having people of this calibre coming into the attractions industry is vital for our
future success. Reid-Anderson – an executive with a career in international busi- ness – had previously turned around a medical technology company, taking it from Chapter 11 to a US$7bn disposal to Siemens, so his cv was pretty iron cast. Six Flags did well to attract him to the business, because hiring and keeping great manage- ment talent at this level is the most important challenge currently facing our industry.
Liz Terry, editor, twitter: @elizterry THE LEISURE MEDIA COMPANY PUBLISHES
The Leisure Media Company Ltd, Portmill House, Portmill Lane, Hitchin, Hertfordshire SG5 1DJ UK Tel: +44 (0)1462 431385 Fax: +44 (0)1462 433909 e-mail:
attractions@leisuremedia.com www.attractionsmanagement.com
AM 3 2011 ©cybertrek 2011 B
uilding international-scale attractions is a com- plex business and we’ve seen repeatedly that when things go wrong, they can go very wrong.
The Hard Rock Theme Park, which has had such a trou- bled history, is an unfortunate example of how a US$400m investment can fail in a very short time if the business model’s wrong – even with a great brand behind it. We’re hearing that this park could reopen soon under new
management, so it’s a question of whether they’ll be third time lucky, or whether there’s something too fundamentally wrong with the location or the actual attraction for it to be fi xed. Sound management can make a massive and critical difference to businesses of
this type, so the owners of the park – in Myrtle Beach, US – are rightly focusing on fi nding a new management company to relaunch it and haul it into profi t. In this issue (page 22) we take a look at Six Flags which operates 19 theme parks
in the US, Mexico and Canada and is in the process of reinventing itself through great management after a diffi cult few years. We talk to Jim Reid-Anderson, the Brit brought in by the board as CEO, following its emergence from Chapter 11 in April 2010.
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