The CEO X factor by KC Rottok Chesaina

Author:KC Rottok Chesaina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Ball
Published: 2023-04-11T11:14:17+00:00

Highs and lows

In 2017, Nigel was involved in restructuring Peermont’s equity and refinancing its debt, a first in his career. There were also plans to list the business, so it was a very busy period. From a revenue perspective, 2019 was the best annual financial period in the company’s history, although Nigel points out that for any growing company each new year should potentially be your best. However, he remains proud of their performance in 2019, because today’s hospitality and entertainment customers have a wide variety of options, and it requires hard work to remain their preferred choice.

The group has also signed a number of hotel management contracts, but has had mixed success. In a contract like this, the owner of a hotel appoints a management company to run the property on their behalf. In 2014 the group entered into a hotel management agreement in Malawi, and even though ‘it was a good learning curve for Peermont’, it walked away from the contract after five years.

‘Hotel management might sound easy, but it has its challenges. Once you fix the problems, the owners think they can now manage the business themselves and then they cancel the contract after the initial period. If you don’t fix the issues, then the hotel doesn’t do well and so they fire you anyway. It is a lose-lose situation,’ Nigel explains.

Since Peermont opened its casino doors in the 1990s, they’ve never had to close them or retrench any employees. Having to do both these things in 2020 was one of the worst experiences of Nigel’s career.

What was expected to be a two-week interruption turned out to be an exceptionally challenging two years. From having up to 20 000 people on the property each day and about 900 staff, Emperors Palace went to having only a few maintenance and security personnel on site. ‘Walking through Emperors Palace was like a scene from one of those movies where a shopping centre is abandoned and there are just a couple of kids on skateboards criss-crossing the yard. It was surreal.’

At the same time, management couldn’t give up, but had to keep talking to customers to keep them interested in future entertainment options. Months later, when Peermont was allowed to reopen their venues, they had to keep modifying their operations as the government’s COVID-19 directives kept changing. Nigel found the regulations ‘challenging and often illogical’. He also had to support employees who dealt with heartbreaking personal tragedies. He recalls asking a staff member once how they were doing, and the person responding by sharing that they had just lost their seventh family member to the pandemic.

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