The Way I Work: Howard Lefkowitz

Lunch at Spago. Party for Céline Dion. Nightcap at Caesars Palace. Roll home at dawn. Take a dip in the scuba pool. For Howard Lefkowitz, CEO of Vegas.com, it's just another day at the office.

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As told to Hannah Clark Steiman

If you've been to Las Vegas in the past five years, chances are you've done business with Howard Lefkowitz. He's CEO of Vegas.com, a website that lets visitors book flights, reserve hotel rooms, buy show tickets, make spa appointments, and coordinate every aspect of a trip to Las Vegas. Some three million people visit Sin City each month, and more than a third of them stop at Vegas.com before they do. The company also runs brick-and-mortar box offices and concierge desks at some of the city's top hotels--Harrah's, Excalibur--and at attractions like Hoover Dam. For Lefkowitz, 49, a day at the office often means eating lunch at Spago, catching Billy Joel at the MGM Grand, sometimes staying out until dawn. During daytime hours, he finds time to manage about 500 employees. Here, Lefkowitz describes how he blends work and play in one of the world's craziest cities.

I'm not a very big morning person. But I have some rituals, some have-to-dos, which I do every morning. I'm up about 6-something. I go downstairs, push the coffee button, go outside and get the paper. I take my 16-year-old daughter to school around 7. I go home right after that and start calling East Coast people. I yell at Pam, my PR person in New York. At 8:30, the East Coast people start to drift off to lunch, most of them drunk. That's when I'll get in the shower. I listen to the same five Anita Baker songs every morning in the shower, and I have a giant showerhead with 82 different nozzles that rain all over me. Then I head to work. I live about six minutes from the office, unless I catch that red light--then it's seven and a half minutes. My routine is calming. You make so many decisions during the day; it's nice not to have to make a decision in the morning.

I go in my scuba pool as often as possible--sometimes in the really early morning, sometimes in the middle of the day when I'm looking for more energy, sometimes at night when I just want to sink after a long day. The pool is 14 feet deep. The water is hot, so it's like scuba diving in a bathtub. I just put on my scuba gear and my weight belt and drop down to the bottom. I'll listen to the Beatles on the underwater speakers, or I'll listen to an audio book.

Before I had the pool, I tried to get into every tank in Las Vegas--I even applied for a job at the Mirage to clean the tank behind the front desk. I finally just built my own pool. In the summer, when my daughter isn't in school, I wait until she gets up and we'll play poker, blackjack, or gin down there. Sure, you could play poker on the side of the pool. But then you're not in the pool. Scuba diving is my joy, because I can't e-mail down there.

The first thing I do when I get to the office is turn on my computer and log in. I check my calendar and begin the process of setting priorities. A year ago, we hired a COO. Before that, I was more involved in day-to-day operations. Now, he makes the trains run. I mostly just party on. I try to provide the vision, the culture, the motivation; my job is to create an environment where my team can excel. I'm also the custodian of the brand. Shows and restaurants open and close daily in Las Vegas, and we have to be in the know. Our call center representatives have to know what's going on, so they can tell callers; our writers need to know, so they can create content for the website. Everything here moves at the speed of Vegas.

I believe in MBWA--management by walking around. In practice, that means I spend about 45 minutes a day at my desk. At least twice a day, I make the rounds of the office. I just walk around and observe, tell people what I think and learn what they think. If I can't count on the fact that everyone who works for me is willing to come up to me and say, "That is the dumbest idea I've ever heard," then we have no integrity as a business.

I will drop in on anybody all the time. It could be the chief operating officer or any of the senior staff. I'll go sit in the contact center--we have 108 employees who work there, and our agents are there 24/7 helping customers find the best deals on show tickets or hotel rooms. Our team of writers produces the Vegas sections of some newspapers and magazines. They also produce a TV program called The Vegas Minute, which runs in newscasts around the country. I'll drop in on story meetings, analytics meetings, finance meetings. More stuff gets done in the hallway in an impromptu meeting than in a formal process. We do have a formal process--it's not anarchy here. But if you do things in real time, you get them done more quickly. And it keeps me in touch with the individual pieces of the business and the people themselves. A lot of times they appreciate it. A lot of times they try to lock the door before I can get in.

céline dion left recently after five years of doing a show at Caesars Palace--that was a big deal around here. We talked about that in our meetings a lot. We needed all of this stuff for Bette Midler, who moved into the theater in February--new artwork, new content, new showtimes. We had to decide how to market Bette on the website--do we market her similarly to Céline or differently from Céline? It's significant for business reasons when someone like Céline leaves town, and it's significant for personal reasons as well. It's always hard to see your friends leave the city. I think Céline brought the magic of the headliner back to Vegas. The days of Frankie and Sammy and Dean--she brought all that back. At Céline's going-away party, I said to her, "It doesn't seem like you've been here five years." And she started to cry.

I have a lot of lunch meetings. All the people in the tourism industry--the folks who run the hotels, the shows, the stores--go to the same 25 restaurants, and we run into each other all the time. It's the same as MBWA, except it's out on the town. I'm constantly doing deals for Vegas.com. I might be trying to persuade a hotel president to let us run his box office or concierge desk, or I might be thinking about brand extensions. For example, we recently collaborated with Bell Transportation to launch a shuttle service. It goes from hotel to hotel, and there are touchscreens inside the vehicles where riders can buy tickets for shows, make reservations, book tours. We've also partnered with the department store Marshalls to sell all kinds of Vegas.com-branded merchandise. A lot of those deals are conceived and discussed while I'm out on the town.

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