Economic Review - Second Quarter
Cedar City Chamber holds quarterly Economic Review Breakfast meetings and the April meeting featured two local businesses.
Our first presenter was from Casino Game Makers here in Cedar City. They create games for Casino Slots and shared their journey over the past few years.
They, too, were hard hit by the pandemic when all Casinos in the US were closed. The largest of the Casino Corporations, Las Vegas Sands, put all their projects on hold. That resulted in Game Maker scaling back their operation from 25 employees to 5. And keeping them busy was a challenge.
As any good business does, you look for other opportunities based on current circumstances and look for problems you can solve. The CDC indicated that when Casinos reopened, they would need Plexiglass dividers between machines for customers protection. Game Makers went into the Plexiglass divider business, shaping them to fit the machines, have custom LED edge lighting to bring attention to the edges and engraved the Casino’s name into the face of it.
They also developed mass temperature check machines and have continued to work on some other projects. But as of their presentation, all gaming equipment projects were still on hold. Partly because ever component of gaming equipment needs review by an independent testing lab. The labs had also scaled back their businesses to minimum staffing and projects could not be reviewed.
Thanks to Game Maker for the info and education. A great presentation by their CEO.
Our second presenter was Tania Wallace of Decorworx. Her presentation on “Evolving Your Business” was also informative and she shared how Decorworx used their own small business success templates to refocus their business and in turn help other small businesses refocus.
Their new goal is to become an “Experience Company”, by offering their templates and consultants to other companies struggling to go forward in difficult times. They do that by helping owners through their 6-step plan:
- Believe in Evolving Your Business
- Know Your Customers
- Where Do You Want to Be In Three Years?
- Understand Market Changes
- Create A Plan
- Get To Work
Each Step has its own set of goals and objectives and the sooner you start working towards who you want to be in three years, the sooner it will happen.