Vol. 4, No. 10, October 2007
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Boardwalk to Bayou and Beyond
AC experience makes Excalibur exec complete
The Newark native and day-one Atlantic City dealer employs his craft as a shift manager at the Excalibur in Las Vegas. Giaimo has also served several properties as vice president of table games. He witnessed the birth of Atlantic City, riverboats in New Orleans and a tour of Las Vegas properties. Giaimo built teams, developed customer appreciation units and helped a multibillion-dollar industry spread its tentacles.
Budgeting, training, staffing, planning… he’s done it all. Giaimo closes in on three full decades.
“I never envisioned a career that could go on this long,” Giaimo says. “What keeps this fresh is that you never get stagnant. You are always meeting new people. This is a unique business. You can’t just go from running a 7-Eleven to running another store to running a casino. This is an industry in which you have to know what everybody’s job is, and it helps that you do those jobs while you are on the way up. You can’t start in this business from the top. For me, it’s hard to imagine not having an exciting place to go to every day.”
Giaimo began his career with clairvoyance. The Seton Hall graduate viewed casinos as the future, even while calling races at a horse track in the mid-1970s to earn summer income.
He enjoyed the one-on-one nature of calling the trotters and accepting sole responsibility for his performance. But the high calling had a projected low ceiling. He correctly predicted that casinos would adversely affect racing and wagered his career on gaming, at Resorts.
Describing horses gave way to calling “seven,” “yo,” “horn-high 12” and “center-field 9.” Yet, the action was much faster.
“The first days of Atlantic City were madness, but it was a good kind of madness,” Giaimo recalls. “The industry was a baby. We were doing something that had not been attempted in 47 years, ever since Nevada had legalized gambling. Out West you could deal years and years in order to become real good. In Atlantic City, there was not a lot of time, because it was so busy. You got good fast or you left.”
Giaimo thrived, and advanced. He gained promotions at the Sands and became a casino manager. He opened the Taj Mahal, moved to Showboat and gained a wealth of seasoning. Before leaving in 1993, Giaimo had risen from dealer, box, floor and pit boss to shift manager and table-games executive.
When stagnation gripped this market, Giaimo again embraced the future. He headed to New Orleans with technical and emotional maturity. Internal relationships remained a key element for success.
“This whole business is how you treat employees,” Giaimo says. “If you treat the people right, the job gets done right. People who are not happy, who feel that they are being picked on, or harassed, will not do the job the way it’s supposed to be done. It’s really true about treating people the way you want to be treated.
“You always want to learn from good people, but you can also pick up a lot from watching a bad boss. You tell yourself that you will never do this or that a certain way.
“I like to consider how something I’m going to say is going to be received. Whether it is praise or discipline, you always want to think about how that person is going to handle what you say before you say it. I’m proud of what we accomplished at the different properties in Atlantic City.”
Giaimo has supervised up to 500 employees. He has also anticipated the needs of thousands of customers. “In the early days of gaming, you opened the door and people showed up,” Giaimo says. “Now it’s all about customer service. You have to be better than everybody else. You have to anticipate what your customers want, prepare for their visit and exceed their expectations.
“If somebody is coming in and likes a certain kind of liquor, you have that waiting for them in the limo. If a customer likes a certain game with a certain table minimum, you set that up for them. When you know the person is coming to your property, you remember what you did last time and go ahead to get that done for them.”
Giaimo has reached a satisfied level of his career, but the crystal ball offers another unique glimpse. With more casinos becoming attached to hotels, he views another new trend, teaching.
“I think it would be good for the hotel people to learn about the casinos,” he says. Once more, Giaimo sees the future. Perhaps he will bet on it.
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