What is it about the folk in our industry which drives them, even beyond the securing of the necessities of life?
The history of the business is littered with tales of people who made a fortune, lost it, and then made it again – or didn’t. But the overriding principle is that they couldn’t leave it alone.
To me, if you make a few million you go find an island and sit on it and indulge in high-powered inertia. But then, I am not really in the industry, but rather tagging along on its coat-tails for the past 46 years and while the games and gaming industry might have forced itself into my blood, it doesn’t inspire me with a desperate longing to "do it again".
It is a reflection born from the kind invitation of Simon Thomas to attend a little soiree at his Hippodrome Casino to celebrate its first birthday. After a perfectly correct circulation among his guests, Simon had time for a brief reflection on teh question of "why", while sipping a glass of celebratory bubbly.
He confessed he would have worried less about the project had he known that it would be so successful but that in hindsight, the workload in setting up the Hippodrome exercise was one he’d woefully underestimated.
“I swore after opening Cricklewood [Beacon Bingo] that I’d never again tackle a project of those dimensions,” but he did, with father Jimmy – and there’s an even better example of someone who can’t or won’t "leave it alone". So why do it? The challenge and the satisfaction, it seems are the rewards.
Among the guests, a very fit looking Brian and Sonia Meaden. Same passion, it seems. They sold out their holiday parks business and, amid a little of what I term "high-powered inertia" (boat, Mediterranean), decided to dabble. Result, the NoBody Inn at Doddiscombsleigh, Devon, a project now so successful that they confess that if they forget to book they can’t get into their own restaurant. And beyond that, .taking on a run-down country house hotel just outside of Plymouth, which they have now successfully turned around.
They are all typical products of the gaming machine industry – not just in the UK, but internationally. For some reason the industry seems to breed into its adherents a need, perhaps a necessity, to prove that the first time it wasn’t just luck.
No-one would doubt that, of course, but for me the appeal would be that lonely atoll somewhere balmy.
