M Resort Stumbles But Quickly Recovers

We’ve written about the highly-anticipated M Resort in advance of its opening, and talked with the resort’s Chairman and Chief Executive, Andrew Marnell III about what it was like opening a huge enterprise like the M in an economy with a bad case of the stutters. He showed a lot of confidence in replying that it was the same process as opening during a bull run on Wall Street. Maybe there’s a slight difference after all, since Marnell had to closely manage just how many employees he’d hire at the outset.

While the off-strip Vegas resort opened with a small army of 1,800 employees, it wasn’t nearly enough to handle the crowds thronging it when it opened Marnell had to scramble to hire 250 additional employees. But his heart is in the right place. He’s on record as saying he didn’t want to over hire and then lay people off when business hit the usual second-week slowdown after the mad hype of an opening week.