By Taylor McGill, Operations Manager, CCT
There’s a moment during an implementation when you can explain something ten different ways, but eventually, people just need to see it work.
I learned that with Delaware North.
Our first two properties together were card rooms in Daytona Beach, Florida. They were also among the first true card rooms CCT had implemented, with no slot machines and operational processes that looked different from what our team typically encountered.
One of those differences was sitting inside a drawer.
The properties had a process for held jackpots where the actual cash for each unpaid jackpot was placed into an individual envelope and stored in a drawer. The money was physically separated because that was how the team kept track of what was still owed.
With Casino Insight, it didn’t need to be. The software could maintain the unpaid jackpot record while the cash remained with the rest of the property’s funds, where it could be counted and reconciled every day.
It sounds like a small change.
But when you’ve spent years doing something one way, small changes can require a lot of trust, which became one of the biggest lessons of the project for me. We had come into an operation with processes we hadn’t encountered in quite the same way before, and we realized our initial configuration needed to better reflect how these properties actually worked.
So we made the decision to reassess. Stevie and our team took what we’d learned on-site back to CCT, worked through the operation in detail and adjusted the configuration and implementation plan before we returned.
Throughout that process, we had an important partner in Mike Halter.
Mike believed in what CCT could do, but what stood out most to me was how involved he was in understanding how it would work. He came into the operation. He went into the vault. He watched the processes himself and listened to the people responsible for doing the work every day.
This is critical because when you’re changing an operational process, the people doing that job need to know the leaders above them understand what’s changing and why. Mike could speak to what his teams were experiencing because he’d taken the time to see it himself. From there, our job was to prove what was possible.
So we started small.
The held jackpots were one example. Cashier imprests were another. Instead of requiring cashiers to move money and paperwork simply to return their drawers to a predetermined amount at the end of a shift, Casino Insight could track the transactions and reconcile what was actually there.
Once people saw that happen in their own operation, something changed. Processes they had performed one way for years could suddenly have fewer steps. The system could provide the controls and visibility they needed while allowing the operation itself to become simpler.
That’s when I started seeing the trust build. Not all at once. Piece by piece. That’s something I’ve carried into implementations ever since.
When you’re working with experienced casino operators, you have to respect that their processes exist for a reason. These are people responsible for moving and protecting enormous amounts of money every day. They should ask questions. They should understand what is changing.
Our responsibility is to understand their operation well enough to show them how another approach can work.
It also means finding the right champions.
At CCT, we try to identify champions across the departments involved in an implementation. We spend time with those people because they’re the ones who understand the work and can help their teams understand what a new process looks like in practice.
Mike showed me how powerful that can be when leadership is part of it, too.
His understanding of what his teams were doing today and what we were asking them to do tomorrow was a key component to a successful partnership. His confidence gave us room to demonstrate the changes process by process, earning critical trust along the way.
Those first two properties ultimately became the beginning of a much larger relationship with Delaware North. Once we found the right approach for the card rooms, we were able to carry what we’d learned into the Delaware North implementations that followed.
I think about that whenever we walk into a new casino today. Every property has processes that make sense once you understand the history behind them. Every team has people who know that operation better than anyone walking in from the outside ever could.
Our job is to listen closely enough to understand both.
Then we can start showing what’s possible.
One process. One proof point. One bit of trust at a time.
— Taylor McGill, Operations Manager, CCT
