I’ll make it easy on you. I’ve been thinking about retiring, I’ll retire. And he sat on that for a while. Nick back says, no, I don’t know that you need to do that. I said, no, Mike, I am, I’m retiring, I’m tired, you know, I wanna, I wanna… Read More
And he said, well, would you consider doing special projects?… Read More
You know, I said, I, I don’t have a problem with the relationship, but he, he kind of hesitated a little bit, which I understand that’s kind of a tough position to be in. And he was getting a lot of pressure from the board about changes that they wanted… Read More
And I finally said, you know what, Mike?… Read More
And so they brought Mike in and I kind of went in one day and I said, well, you know, congratulations, this is really great. Read More
What are you gonna do with me now?… Read More
It’s like, why do I have two bird buildings?… Read More
You don’t have a reptile building because Ray Polly and his reptile building had been closed and became an education center, which was great. They needed that. So I revamped that and, but I could tell that it, as far as that master plan that was there, it wasn’t gonna… Read More
Because I knew the challenges involved at the time changing culture at the zoo, substantial changing culture things we’d talked about then. No one believed in an ambassador program. No one put hands on animals, you know, and they, and unfortunately they’d not been mentored, and a lot of ’em… Read More
One, I was tired. I was, I was 71 years old at the time. And it’s like, you know, I think I’ve been at this long enough and we were having a lot of maintenance issues because these big old buildings been historical and trying to keep ’em up. I… Read More
And I, I told him, I said, well, can I think about it?… Read More
And I came in and to his office one day and said, well, here’s what I would do, and it, it’s gonna create a lot of changes if I do this. Oh, okay, okay. We’re still searching, but that’s good to know. And about six months later, he calls me… Read More
And I said, well, yeah, I’m not traveling. Okay. So I went in and worked with Kim for about a month before she left and then was acting GC of the zoo. Read More
And of course during that time, Stewart was going, what’s your assessment?… Read More
But he called me up after that and said, I can’t do it right now. The fact that I even mentioned bringing someone in overall, the curators created a real row, I guess. But he called me and, and we moved up. We had to move up to Chicago. So… Read More
I need someone to come in and temporarily fill in while we create a position or hire somebody in, can you do it?… Read More
No, actually they had a, a young lady who had been their general curator and she left the zoo or was going to leave and announced that she was going to leave. And Stuart had talked to me when Stuart stall, the CEO had talked to me when he was… Read More
You know, we built a shell in this area to let you guys have. So they had to eat the contracts, but they still closed it down. And they let the Ontario facility operate for maybe another 10 months. But what they did was they let myself, they let Billy… Read More
It really knocked their socks off. And we told ’em that the cost associated with this, we can’t do a 25 or 30% profit margin. And it, this went on for a year and we were pulling 10% and I mean, we were making money, but it wasn’t what they… Read More
You know, they, they wanted to see a 25, 30% turnaround profit wise. And we told them from the very beginning, a, a guy named a Billy War, what came on as, as my boss, CEO, who had worked a bunch of venues for entertainment stuff, outdoor entertainment. And, you… Read More