MGM Resorts Names Four New General Managers for Five Las Vegas Resorts
We got our hands on an internal MGM Resorts communication revealing the company has named four General Managers for five of its Las Vegas Resorts.
All of the new resort leaders came from inside the organization. Tellingly, these aren’t resort presidents. Some resorts are going without. This restructuring is set to save MGM Resorts infinity dollars.
We have all the details about who’s doing what, but only after this A.I. image of a lion performing his duties as a roulette dealer.
First, Mark Czerniak has been selected to serve as General Manager of Bellagio. Annoyingly, our friend @LasVegasLocally shared that scoop before we did. His insolence has been duly noted and we have encouraged him to stay in his wheelhouse in the future.
According to the memo, Czerniak has served as CFO for Bellagio and Park MGM for the last two years. Also, “Previously, he was CFO for MGM Grand Las Vegas/The Signature and New York-New York. He first joined the company in 2016 as Vice President of Finance for Park MGM.”
Up next, Doug Sandoval will serve as General Manager of Aria/Vdara. Sandoval has more than “two decades of financial leadership across premier Las Vegas resorts,” and previously served as SVP and CFO for Aria/Vdara, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and Monte Carlo (now Park MGM).
Yes, Aria and Vdara are two different places, but they’re treated as one in the MGM Resorts organizational structure.
In our personal organizational structure, we do not acknowledge the existence of Vdara because it doesn’t have a casino.
MGM Resorts has picked Mark Lefever to be the General Manager of Cosmopolitan.
Lefever was most recently CFO of Cosmo, and first joined MGM Resorts in 2015 as CFO at MGM Grand Detroit. Since then, he has served as CFO at Luxor, Aria/Vdara, MGM Grand/Signature, New York-New York and Excalibur. Lefever has more than 30 years of experience in the gaming and hospitality industry.
Rounding out the four appointments, Andy Meese has been selected to serve as General Manager of Park MGM.
Meese most recently served as SVP of Hospitality Strategy for MGM Resorts. The memo states, “For more than 25 years, he has served the company in several key leadership roles across operations and corporate, including VP of Hospitality at Mandalay Bay, Delano (now W Las Vegas) and Luxor; VP of Hotel Operations at CityCenter, Bellagio and Luxor; and VP of Hotel Strategy.”
The internal memo had more Oxford commas, but they mess with our vibe, so we took the liberty of removing them.
If you really want to get into the inside suitball: Mark Czerniak reports to Ayesha Molino, President & COO of Aria/Vdara. Doug Sandoval, Mark Lefever and Andy Meese report to Sean Lanni, President and COO of The Cosmopolitan. Bellagio and Park MGM are winging it without presidents.
Fun fact: Sean Lanni is the son of Las Vegas legend and former MGM Mirage chairman, Terry Lanni. Sean Lanni’s father-in-law is Bill Hornbuckle, CEO of MGM Resorts.
Anyway, there’s a metric ass-ton of institutional knowledge represented by this line-up.
MGM Resorts has been streamlining, sometimes quietly, sometimes not, over the past few months.
As a layperson, the decisions make a lot of sense because corporate bloat in the casino industry results from just doing things the way they’ve always been done.
There’s an ongoing analysis inside MGM Resorts that questions everything. Do guests of Excalibur really need doormen or baggage handlers or valets? If not, why pay for them? Hint: They aren’t, so MGM Resorts isn’t.
We’re sure some will claim the reorganization happening inside MGM Resorts is the result of a decline in tourism, but we don’t get that impression.
The process began before the slump. We’ve been told the mandate is to perpetually on the lookout for ways to streamline and reduce redundancies.
It remains to be seen what impact these changes have on the guest experience.
Will the typical visitor notice if a resort is headed up by a GM rather than a president? Will such changes trickle down to how operations work inside each operation? Are GMs and those they answer to being asked to take on a bigger workload? Will that dilute how nimble the company is, or cut out red tape?
How the hell would we know? We are a layperson! We said that earlier in our story.
Congrats to all the folks named to these GM positions. Promoting from within may not lead to lots of fresh ideas, but it does mean smooth transitions and known quantities and not having to spend a year getting to known everyone’s names and job duties.
You’ll hear more when we do, and you’ll hear it again from the Las Vegas Review-Journal a week later.
Someone should name us GM of Snark. It’s already on our business cards.
Leave your thoughts on “MGM Resorts Names Four New General Managers for Five Las Vegas Resorts”