Faces of Gaming: Jeff Connor, owner of Lockdogs – A better mousetrap

Saturday, March 29, 2025 12:03 PM
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While driving with a friend, Jeff Connor discovered a better mousetrap in the form of a lock that made traditional casino locks look like the proverbial Timex watch in a digital age.

At times in his life, Connor has been a movie theater projectionist, magician, a joke writer for Tim Allen, a regional manager for a roller rink company, morning drive time radio broadcaster, ring announcer for Sugar Ray Leonard and announcer for the boxing reality show “The Contender”.

Not to mention his three decades of casino experience.

And not one of these jobs had anything to do with locks.

You could say that Jeff Connor had a career path with more twists than a politician in a corn maze.

Ten years ago, this discovery led Connor to form Lockdogs, a company selling better mousetraps with new kinds of locks. Today, Lockdogs  is North America’s fastest growing provider of Key-Changeable Locks for the gaming industry.

A veteran of over 30 years in the casino industry, Connor has worked in every aspect of gaming, from brick and mortar and online casinos to EGM and systems sales.

Gamblers, cheats and grifters
“I was born in Saginaw, Michigan. We moved to Rochester, New York and  my father, who was a Lutheran minister, we ended up moving to Minot, North Dakota, and that’s where I spent my formative years,” Connor said.

Connor’s mother bought him a Box of Magic that eventually led to his interest in gaming.

“Something not a lot of people know is that all moves in magic  have their source in gambling. Most magic moves started out as a gambling cheat. So, everything that a magician is doing, a closeup magician in particular, had its derivation as a slight used by gamblers, cheats and grifters,” said Connor.

While selling toys at FAO Schwartz in Cincinnati, Connor began teaching magic tricks to a nine-year-old Homer Liwag, who had striking talent for sleight of hand and went on to become creative director for David Copperfield.

Writing jokes
“At the same time, a comedy club opened up in the 1980s, and Tim Allen was taking his mother’s car and driving down and doing open mic and emceeing at a club called Giggles Comedy Club. At that point in time, Tim Allen would come down to the toy store in the basement of the mall, and I’d write jokes for him.

“Around that time, Jimmy JJ Walker from “Good Times”, was headlining at the club, and he became a lifelong friend of mine,” Connor related.

Connor became the regional manager for a chain of roller-skating rinks during the roller disco craze. “It was guerrilla marketing at its most aggressive. We were dumping out direct mail campaigns like you could not believe, with huge coupon redemptions. It was just a wild, wild time, and it was the best education you could have, relative to marketing, customer service, and managing staff of a hundred at each venue,” Connor said.

From radio to casinos to boxing
While working as a morning drive time DJ in Yakima, Washington, a casino opened, and Connor was hired as the director of marketing for Yakama Nation Legends Casino.

“There were no slot machines at that time because they had not finished the compact with the state. So, we are living off table games revenue, which is somewhat volatile. There were these oddball kind of pull tab machines and that type of thing. But, luckily for me, I had had this background in direct mail, direct marketing, aggressive promotion, and so we were able to kind of turn that around. Today the property is one of the largest in Central Washington,” Connor recalled.

While putting on a boxing show promoted by Sugar Ray Leonard, Connor was recruited to do the announcing duties, which he did for years while working in the casino industry. Sugar Ray Leonard acquired a deal with ESPN, which took Connor across the county as the fight announcer. “Ray  just signed a deal with ESPN to do the first Friday of every month on ESPN for Friday Night Fights. ESPN had brought it back. It was kind of the namesake of the Old Gillette Friday Night Fights.”

He left his marketing director’s job in Yakima to take a position with Multimedia Games. “I went to work for Multimedia Games at the beginning of class II gaming. That was an exciting time because we had the central determinant slots in Washington State as well.”

“But I was still working for Sugar Ray Leonard, so I would take the clients to meet Sugar Ray. It was the perfect schmooze for sales and marketing because, as you know, boxing and gaming go hand in hand.”

Mark Burnett, Steven Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg and Sylvester Stallone
Years later, while working as a consultant in Alabama and Oklahoma, Connor received a call to audition for “The Contender,” a boxing reality show produced by Mark Burnett, Steven Spielberg and Jeff Katzenberg, featuring Sylvester Stallone. “I flew out there to L.A. and they met me, and they hated me. They said I was no Michael Buffer.

“Later, Sugar Ray’s assistant, Steve Rivera, went into Ray’s storage unit and grabbed tapes of me and forced them to watch. They called back and said, ‘We want you to do the show.’ We did the show on NBC for one year. It was the most expensive reality show at that particular time. And then, regretfully, we went against a little show, “American Idol”, and we were crushed. We did one season on NBC and two more on ESPN,” Connor recalled.

Which brings us back to locks
Connor was driving with a friend, who was the manufacturer’s rep for Japanese company MIWA that sold locks for vending machines in Tokyo’s Electric City. According to a recent article on Lockdogs, more than 300,000 of the high security locks are in Asian and Australian gaming venues.

“I see this lock while driving my good friend, Darren Wong, who is the manufacturer’s rep for this company. And he found a way that works perfectly for EGMs, and it had efficiencies with payroll dollars that make life easier and are compliant with the myriads of gaming regulations.

“I discover this lock, and my whole life I’ve been in the marketing side, so I didn’t even know that we had locks on slot machines, let alone how many there were.

“I am holding on to this lock and I’m going, what the hell is this? I am at G2E and showing it to another friend of mine. All of a sudden, all these people are around us watching, and people are going, this is genius,” Connor stated.

The light bulb moment
I asked Connor when the moment was that he saw the light bulb go off.

“I was at that restaurant between the Venetian and the G2E floor where everybody congregates at the bar. I am sitting there, and I’m showing it, and it’s like a magic trick. All these people are interested in it and turning their heads like that old EF Hutton commercial.

“I reach across, and I say, ‘This is what I want to sell in North and South America, from my side of the world, then anyplace else that I can.’ I said, ‘This is genius’,” Connor declared.

“Then, I am in Washington state visiting a friend of mine while consulting for an EGM manufacturer. Her name is Angie Huang, and she was a slot director at Clearwater Suquamish and kind of a thought leader in the Pacific Northwest. I showed her slot machines and she is a very blunt lady. She says to me ‘Jeff, the slot machines that you’re showing me are not good.” But then she said, ‘This lock is the key.’ And she was so right,” Connor said.

“Now in Washington state, we have 95% of the market. We just did Muckleshoot last year. We also brought about the concept of customer service that you learn in casinos. I wanted to have the customer service for Lockdogs at the same level we always provided to our customers,” Connor stated.

Ten years
Connor formed Lockdogs in 2015 and is currently celebrating 10 years as a company.

The key to Lockdogs is that every lock is key changeable 13,650 times. Unlike old school pinned and dimple-locks that require new keys, Lockdog locks can be rekeyed and repurposed for use in new machines, tables games, the cage, etc.

“We went immediately to the manufacturers. We went to IGT, we went to Light & Wonder, we went to all the major manufacturers. We said, ‘With this lock, you don’t have to sort by application.’ The big difference with our lock is that I could install it in the main door, the CPU, the belly door, whatever, on the assembly line, ship it to a new property, and they could key it to their specific codes.

“They do not need a shipping core that they would replace and put in the locks as they’ve done in the past. Eliminating the need to remove shipping cores and install locks at the property means that the machine is making more money faster for the property. The manufacturer is doing a huge favor to the property by reducing payroll. We have one publicly traded company where we have won a lot of business based on the fact that they don’t have to have a team in there to install locks and take out shipping cores because they’re installed on the assembly line,” Connor said.

Tweezers and broken keys
“All the old school locks of the 20th century are pinned by hand, which means they take tweezers, and then they set the pins by hand to a specific code. That also means that you have to wait for your locks to be set and sent to you.

“If you call me tomorrow and say, “I’ve got a casino opening up and I need 500 locks,’ I just ship them and you are ready to go immediately because nobody is waiting for locks to be pinned by hand.”

Lockdogs offers a two-year warranty on locks and a lifetime warranty on keys. “If a key breaks and if a key wears out, you send us a picture of your code and we send you the keys back,” Connor confirmed.

Two-person company
Connor does all of this as a two-person company.

“Lockdogs is two people. Because of the efficiency of the locks, we don’t need a huge staff, or huge overhead. The other person is Rachel Loudon, who is an accounting, compliance and licensing genius. She and I manage absolutely everything, and there is no setup for the locks. If we have to field the team, we have a team of technicians that go out with us, and we install the locks. But the majority of the time we do not have to,” Connor confided.

Connor predicts that Lockdogs locks are a better choice when cashless gaming becomes the standard.

“You can reuse those locks, which goes back to no planned obsolescence. It could be used over and over again and repurposed. They could move to the base, they could move to the cage, they can move to the tables. They can move any place because they can be recoded,” Connor said.

Success secrets
When asked about the secret to his success, Connor says he keeps on moving and uses sports as an analogy.

“I am convinced that you are never as successful as you should be. Satchel Paige said, ‘Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.’ I learned from boxing that as I have been knocked down, when the bell rings, I get off the stool and I go back at it,” he said.

This year Connor is introducing a RouteMaster lock specifically designed for the challenges of slot and amusement routes. “I know that if it is created by man it can be defeated by man, that is why we always need to be innovating for the marketplace,” Connor said.

Mascots
In 2015, Connor decided to go a step above and name his company in honor of his bulldog Neville and create a mascot. Neville has since passed, and Connor has his new bulldog Nigel on the company logo.

“I could not think of anything, and I looked down at the dog and saw, you know, Neville sleeping. And I said, ‘Okay, Lockdogs it is.”

Off to the races
Through his years as a magician, joke writer, radio jock, professional boxing announcer, and over 30 years in gaming, nothing prepared Jeff Connor to run a high-tech lock company. “I waited for a long time, traveled with the lock in my pocket because I did not understand it. Then all of a sudden, when I understood it, boom, we’re off to the races,” Connor declared.

Entries in the Faces of Gaming series:

Tom Osiecki is a casino consultant who writes an occasional column for CDC Gaming called Faces of Gaming, about interesting and engaging people in the gaming industry.

Tom Osiecki is a marketing and management consultant for Raving Consulting and can be reached for consulting engagements at 775-329-7864.

If you know of a fascinating personality in the gaming industry you would like to see profiled, please send Tom Osiecki an email at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com