So the locals began acting like visitors, and the visitors--well, some of the more entrepreneurial among them saw the hubbub as reason enough to stay. When Cynthia Coletti paid a visit to Las Vegas, she was well aware that she and her son, Daniel, needed to move from Colorado Springs, where they ran a home-building business. "We had a real bad downturn there" in the late 1980s, says Coletti, who originally started the business in Florida, leaving when interest rates skyrocketed. Seeing all the activity in Las Vegas, she decided that "the climate looked great both ways. I'm not analytical. It just looked like we could do well here."
Sales at their re-start-up, Sun West, have now topped $6 million. Daniel, 34, who serves as vice-president, attributes Sun West's growth to its targeted marketing. "We know how to reach those people most likely to move here," he says.
Coletti, defying her proven inability to stay put, isn't leaving anytime soon. "I have no intention of leaving here like I've left before," says the 59-year-old. "I never go down to the strip, but just to look out and know that it's humming away is a security blanket for me."
What she's hearing is the sound of America's fastest-growing metro area (the U.S. Census Bureau says so), where nobody's getting hung up on all those spirit-suffocating subtleties, like market segmentation and pricing strategy. If you're starting up, only one number matters: 4,500. That's the current count of refugees (40% from California) settling in this job-rich desert every month, lured by higher temperatures (the average is 69 degrees when El Niño's in check) and lower taxes (no personal or corporate state income taxes). And what jobs await those newcomers. No, you can't earn $75,000 as a parking valet at one of the casinos on the strip. At least not right away. And by century's end, almost 18,000 new hotel rooms will come on line--and every room creates about three jobs. For entrepreneurs, that influx of customers is as real a jackpot as the payout that follows a 7 or 11 "come-out" roll at the craps table.
All those newcomers are enabling Steve Mack to reimagine his shops as "financial centers." Anywhere else, they'd be referred to as--and maybe scorned as--pawnshops. Mack, a fourth-generation pawnbroker, migrated to Las Vegas from Reno in 1991, launching SuperPawn. He's now got 13 units in Las Vegas, many of them situated in residential nongaming areas, alongside such suburban stalwarts as Home Depot, Circuit City, and Costco. Beyond offering quick cash--for those who pawn jewelry, musical instruments, and the occasional motorized surfboard--he's offering check cashing and life insurance; next he may get into renters' insurance. Half of SuperPawn's customers don't have any formal banking relationship. "They've taken all of their money out of a bank account at home," says Mack, 39. "And they are coming to Las Vegas to start something new."
Not everyone comes to start businesses, of course. But sometimes, in the process of remaking themselves, the newcomers end up in business for themselves. Being around so much opportunity--and in the presence of so many people taking big chances--makes entrepreneurship look less daunting.
It hasn't even been three years since Joseph J. Palladino turned in his badge as a New York City cop after getting "banged up pretty bad" when a stairwell collapsed as he was pursuing church robbers in the South Bronx. Inspired by a 10-day stay at the MGM Grand, he decided to remain in Las Vegas, figuring he could parlay his brief stint as a maître d' and dining-room manager at Yonkers Raceway into further restaurant work. Three months into his job search, he hadn't gotten a nibble.
These days he's fending off "all kinds of crazy job offers" as he scouts out the next location for Portobella, the Italian eatery he opened with three partners last December.
Summerlin, where the restaurant is located, is a suburb in the northwestern foothills. It's a master-planned community (America's fastest growing, as if you couldn't guess) that's home to 30,000. Eight years ago it was sand. Green Valley, the southeastern community where Palladino lives, is barely 20 years old. It's an upscale section of Henderson, ranked by the U.S. Census Bureau as--ready for this?--the country's fastest-growing city. These ready-made neighborhoods, with their tree-lined streets and lavish landscaping, are so new they look like movie sets.
Even so, Palladino shuns special effects. In a city where the high-end prime-rib buffet runs to a whopping $14.95, the former cop's strategy boils down to lots of bells and whistles--removing them, that is. He's opened a restaurant that's actually for eating, with nary a video-poker machine in sight. "I want people to have a place where they can get away from all the bells going off and all the gambling," says the 35-year-old general manager, who projects sales of $2 million this year at the 164-seat restaurant. "We've created a warm, romantic ambience; people will know who you are here, not like at the MGM Grand. There's a market for this here, I know that," he says.
Rodney Taylor's initial market analysis was just a tad less customer oriented. Last fall he was thinking mainly about how the gyms where he trained his customers wanted him to either join their staffs or stop using their facilities. The former alternative was hardly an option: joining the staff of a gym would cut his pay from at least $50 an hour to as low as $8 an hour, and that prospect held roughly as much appeal to him as returning to his previous sales positions at PepsiCo and USA Today.
