Let me tell you about a dinner that changed the direction of our company. I didn’t even realize it at the time.
Here’s how it happened.
We were at Connect. So much is going on. Usually, we didn’t see many people from Las Vegas at these things. But this time, a VP of Cage from the Venetian was there. Her name was Cynthia Bolden.
We ended up setting up a dinner. So, at the table: me, Cynthia, and Christian Fenner, VP of Operations at Choctaw Casinos in Oklahoma, one of our largest clients with 23 properties. I am a huge fan of Christian. She’s the best. Somewhere in that dinner, Christian reached over and grabbed food off my plate.
Cynthia looked at me like, what was that?
And I just smiled real big and said, “Welcome to CCT. We’re truly friends here.”
That little moment showed Cynthia something about CCT that would have been difficult to communicate in a sales meeting. Christian wasn’t just one of our biggest clients. We had known each other long enough, and worked closely enough, that there was real friendship at that table.
Cynthia picked up on this immediately. The relationships we talked about building with our clients weren’t a sales pitch. She was sitting there watching one in real time.
That dinner is where the Venetian relationship started.
I’m not going lie to you, what followed was one of the toughest contract negotiations we’d ever been part of. We were working with a corporate procurement process for the first time, tied to two of the biggest names on the Strip, the Venetian and the Palazzo. We had to build new functionality just for them, around markers and credit, an entire side of the business we hadn’t worked in before. It was a big swing for us, and everyone knew it.
We got the deal done. Everything was building toward go-live.
Then COVID hit.
The entire casino industry shut down. No one knew what was coming next or for how long. And we had a major Las Vegas install sitting right in the middle of it.
We could have gone quiet and waited it out. Instead, without our clients even asking, we made the call ourselves to waive their license fees while they were closed. We spent that time figuring out how to keep showing up for the people counting on us.
When casinos started reopening, the Venetian was one of the first in Vegas to open its doors. And we were there with them, going live in the middle of it: masks everywhere, staff shortages, people calling in, brand-new CCT employees standing shoulder to shoulder with Kurt Williams working around the clock to get it done.
It should have been one of our hardest installs. In some ways, it became one of our best.
Because the property was short-staffed, the time and efficiency our software gave back to their cage and revenue audit teams mattered more than it ever had.
The ROI was some of the most powerful we’d ever seen. The Venetian actually became a client who hosts other prospects for us in Vegas to this day, telling anyone who’ll listen that this is one of the best solutions they’ve used.
But the part of this story I think about the most happened after all of that.
During the sales process, Cynthia and the Venetian’s controller needed to visit a live property. So we flew them to Dallas, and they drove out to Durant, Oklahoma, to see Choctaw. To meet Christian, the same person from that first dinner.
I’ll never forget hearing how they came up on Highway 75 and just stopped: oh my goodness, look at this incredible casino.
Here was a team from one of the largest casino companies in the world, genuinely stunned by what they found in Oklahoma. And then saying, half-joking, half-serious: maybe we should be doing some of this in Vegas too.
Take CCT completely out of it for a second. What was left was two VPs of Operations, one from Choctaw and one from the Venetian, who became friends. As Oklahoma properties started moving into player credit programs, those two were on the phone with each other, learning from one another, sharing what worked.
I think it would have been easy for this to turn competitive: my market, my expertise, not yours.
Instead, it turned into two operators helping each other figure things out, so neither of them had to feel like they were figuring it out alone.
We didn’t just close a deal with Venetian. We built a relationship that outgrew us, one that connected two properties a thousand miles apart and made them better partners to each other.
That’s the piece I keep coming back to. Every casino has a story. Sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way and let two of them start telling each other theirs.
— Wanor, Partner of Growth and Strategic Revenue at CCT
