Faces of Gaming: Steve Neely – Casino career lessons built on a frame of life

Saturday, August 30, 2025 12:26 PM
  • Commercial Casinos
  • Tom Osiecki — CDC Gaming and Raving Partner

Steve Neely is a casino influencer who has had real jobs at real casinos.

He has an innate ability to explain complex casino marketing and operational issues that has earned him a regular spot on casino podcasts and blogs, and speaking gigs at casino conventions.

He is a familiar face explaining how things work in a way that makes him a well-known figure in the industry. Neely worked his way up in marketing from small to large casinos, and motivated himself to become a general manager at several properties.

Resilience
He credits his difficult upbringing with instilling him with a resilience that he carries today.

“When I grew up, my base was the Four Corners Southwest Colorado, and  my grandparents on both sides were farmers in that area.

“My mom and dad divorced when I was very young. My mom made many sacrifices for my two brothers and that really taught me to be resilient. She epitomized not giving up; if anyone ever had an excuse too it was her.  Pregnant with me at 15, my dad was a very abusive husband, and then she divorced him and became a single mom with no support from my dad. It would have been easy for her to become a ward of the state, but she chose not to. Instead, she worked two full-time jobs most of my youth. She did remarry a couple of times, and our stepdads would move us to other places looking for work constantly. It was a lot, but it prepared me for pretty much anything. I don’t get bothered by a whole lot at this point in my life because I’ve been through so much.

“But ultimately, the base that I always had to go back to was Colorado, because my grandparents were a very calming force in my life. I was extremely close to both sets of my grandparents, and they showed me another side of what my life could be if I stayed focused and worked hard.  There is not a group of people who work harder than farmers, so the example was always in front of me.

“I also think that something within me is basic determination. Growing up, I had two younger brothers I was responsible for. My mom was working. There was no safety net. So, either I figured out how to make scrambled eggs, or we didn’t eat. I figured out how to use a microwave to make a microwave burrito, or a pizza, or we went hungry,” Neely stated.

From Marketing to General Manager
Steve Neely has been a casino General Manager for the better part of a decade. Following his tenure as COO at Casino Del Sol, where he oversaw the company’s operational and marketing divisions, Neely joined Rolling Hills Casino in April of 2018 and was only the second General Manager in the company’s nearly 16-year history when he joined them.

Neely was also the Vice President of Marketing at Pechanga Casino Resort in Temecula, California; Rivers Casino in Chicago; the CMO for Acres 4.0; as well as the senior marketing person and executive team member for Isleta Resort and Sandia Casino in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Corporate Director of Marketing for Cherokee Nation; and the Director of Marketing for the Isle of Capri Casino, Blackhawk, Colorado.

He has an MBA from Arizona State University and is also an army veteran with service in Operation Desert Storm.

Stabilizing force
Neely moved in with his grandparents and was able to get into sports where he was all conference in three sports in his senior year and earned all-state honors. He enrolled in the military only to find out he was awarded scholarships after signing up.

“The crazy thing was the week after I enlisted, my grandma calls me and told me I had two certified letters that she had received the Monday after I   enlisted, and one was a baseball scholarship, and one was a wrestling scholarship. I didn’t want to be that guy just sitting in my hometown going to the high school football games thinking, ‘Hey, look at me. Remember me?’ I wanted to do something with my life, so it worked out,” Neely recalled. “At the time I would have much rather gone to college and played baseball, but I had committed to the military, so my life took a different direction.”

His years in the military allowed him to pay for college through the GI Bill and later his National Guard unit was activated for Desert Storm.

“I was in a ground ambulance company, and most of the ground ambulance companies in the military are National Guard units who use civilian doctors because they wanted to use civilian doctors and nurses when stuff gets bad; they wanted the best possible doctors’ treating soldiers.

So, the team I was with, most of them worked in the medical field in their regular civilian jobs,” Neely said.

“Yeah, we would go up to a battalion aid station and bring wounded people back to a MASH, basically a mobile hospital. So, a lot of transport from the front lines to the rear,” Neely said. Following the end of the short conflict our mission shifted to treating the huge number of captured enemy soldiers, but also civilian casualties, the latter being the most difficult to process mentally,” Neely recalled.

Career lessons from radio
Neely eventually found employment in radio and ended up as general manager of an alternative rock station in Farmington, New Mexico.

Little did he know he was about to get the business education of a lifetime from two famous media moguls, Bob Pittman and Bob Sherman.

Now you probably don’t know it, but Bob Pittman was famous as the founder of MTV and iHeart Media. He started Roberts Radio with radio superstar businessman Bob Sherman.

Newly-minted radio station manager Steve Neely found himself in the direct line of fire of these two powerhouses when his station was purchased as station No. 1 of what would eventually become 65 stations and iHeart radio.

“It was Bob Pittman and Bob Sherman. Bob Sherman used to run WNBC, and he was one of the guys that brought Howard Stern to New York and put Dr. Ruth on the air. I mean, Bob Sherman is a Hall of Famer in his own right.

“But the problem was these guys were hardcore aggressive New York business guys and were trying to sell alternative rock in Farmington, New Mexico. We had no ratings, and so he would call me every day at 3 o’clock my time as he was wrapping up his day in New York. He would call me, and he asked me, ‘All right, Stevie boy, how did you do today?’

“There were days we did not sell anything. And I would tell him, like, well, unfortunately, Bob, we got shut out today, and I’d get about a 10-minute profanity laced tirade.

“I’d let him get it out of his system, and then we would have a really good talk, and I learned more about sales and management in that year and a half from Bob Sherman than I probably would have from anyone else in my career,” Neely said.

Neely went on to say that running a radio station under extreme pressure gave him a foundation of resourcefulness for running a business.

“I got to a point where I had to choose between paying the electric bill or making payroll. I had to figure out, okay, how am I going to make this  work? So, I went to the electric company with an idea. They traded electricity with me, in exchange for advertising, so I ran a campaign for them, and I didn’t have to pay the electric bill.

“It was pure desperation, right? I traded for toilet paper, I traded for power, you name it, I traded advertising for it; but I kept it alive. And we just kept going. About that time, I’d had enough. You can only imagine what it was like working for Pittman and Sherman,” Neely recalled.

From TV to cars
Neely had a short stint in local television when he decided to join a local car dealership as a marketing director who could also sell cars for extra cash. He sold a car to the general manager of the Ute Mountain Casino, which led to a job interview for Marketing Director, which started his career in gaming. But not before a very strange interview experience.

“Literally, part of the audition for the job was I had to do a marketing plan for them. I had never really written a marketing plan. They handed me blank pieces of paper and a pencil, and said, ‘You have two hours.’  I started writing. And after two hours I was still writing, I guess it must have worked because I got the job,” Neely stated.

“I kind of worked my way through the ‘minor leagues’. I went from a really small 400-machine property to a 600-machine property to a 1,200-machine property with an expansion. I just slowly worked my way up through the marketing ranks,” Neely said.

Neely eventually moved to large casino resorts like Pechanga Casino Resort, Rivers Casino, and Isleta Resort and Sandia Casino.

I asked Neely what lessons he learned from working his way up in smaller properties.

“I actually, learned the job because you don’t have anyone else to do it for you. Back in the day, I learned how to fill coin into slot machines because that’s what it required.

“A lot of what I learned was out of necessity, and I didn’t know there was technology that would actually do it for you; because we couldn’t afford any of that. But I had a better understanding of how to use those reports when I finally got them because for years I had “sort of” figured out what I needed and had designed them myself. It wasn’t automated. It was just something that we had to do,” Neely related.

The Apprentice
Neely worked for the SMP communications agency leading the division that did on-site consulting, which broadened his experience base even more.

“We had contracts that called for an acting director of marketing. So, I spent a year at Ho Chunk up in Wisconsin and essentially directed the marketing team. I was Executive Director of Marketing over all their marketing programs, and they had multiple casinos, so I would work with them to help develop marketing strategies for all of their properties.

“Then I did the same thing at the Hollywood Hard Rock, where they brought me in as an onsite consultant. Unfortunately, the VP of marketing was fired while I was there, so I kind of held it together until they brought in a new VP. That’s how I actually got to Pachanga. A former GM of mine was the GM there, and he was not happy with his marketing program, so he brought us in, and it was like a season of “The Apprentice.” I was auditioning for the VP of Marketing job. I acted in that capacity for six months before I actually got the job,” Neely said.

A PhD in Casino Marketing
I asked Neely which job in his vast experiences taught him the most about marketing in casinos?

“The position that really brought it together for me was working as CMO with John Acres. He taught me so much about the mind of a gambler. One of the first questions he asked me was, ‘What do you charge your customers an hour to play your slot machines?’ I had never thought of it that way, but it made perfect sense, and it was an easy calculation to get to. And it’s like, okay, so if you’re charging them that much, what are you willing to give them back to get them to stay the second hour? And the third?

“Interacting with John was like earning a PhD in casino marketing and casino operations. John was about solving problems and finding technology that would solve that problem and produce solutions that you could scale. John tied it all together for me. For years I had been toiling in the execution side of things, and John really taught me the why and pulled it all together and put a bow on it,” Neely recalled.

Stepping up
Neely decided that in order to advance to the next step of his career as a general manager he needed to change what he was doing.

“For the most part, marketing people interview great, but they don’t necessarily have some of the qualifications that the leadership is looking for in a GM, specifically the financial side. Because when you move into that level, you’ve got to have a good understanding of the finances.

“I was starting to get a lot of phone interviews, but I wasn’t making it to the face-to-face side. So, I went to Arizona State University for the two-year program to earn my MBA while still working.

Neely rejoined Casino Del Sol after he realized he would help the CEO operate the company as COO while also acting as Chief Marketing Officer. “I guided them in the direction they needed to go to optimize their divisional performance. It ended up being a really good experience for me. I spent almost four years in that capacity, and then I got my first full GM job at Rolling Hills in Northern California,

Dead ends and arcade
“When I arrived at Rolling Hills and talked to the staff, I asked them, ‘What is Rolling Hills?’ The answer that I got over and over was, ‘We’re a truck stop with slot machines.’ I’m like, that’s it, I think we can do better. The property had not been updated in 16 years.

“Half the floor was nonsmoking, and they had this arcade that they had just built right off the gaming floor, and it was doing $11 a day. I went to the tribal council and said, ‘If I could have that room, I would move nonsmoking into that space and it would open up more room for slots.’

“They had 850 slots in a room that was built for 550, so you had rows and rows of machines, many that would run into the wall and a dead end. You couldn’t get around.

“It took me almost six months, but the tribe finally relented and let me have the game room. And that was a game changer. They were reluctant, because they view themselves as a fabric of the community and it was popular among locals. They liked having a place to take their kids.

“In a six-month time period, we were up 10% and next year, we were up 100% because they had a full year of marketing and a full year of getting the machines configured,” Neely said.

Amphitheater
Along with updating technology across the entire property, Neely added a brewery and a distillery and created an amphitheater out of a parking lot and a hill.

“One of the visions the tribe had was they wanted real entertainment. I was outside one day, near our equestrian center, and just behind it we had this huge parking lot that was never used. There was a hill that went up towards a golf course on the other side. And so, I stood there, and I was like, ‘If they want outdoor entertainment, we have an amphitheater right here. We just have to create it. We have to take the space and finish it out.’ So that’s what we did,” Neely said.

Primm
“I was contacted and went to work at Primm, which was on a good highway location, right at the state line between California and Nevada just south of Las Vegas, and just like what I had just been through for six years. A huge part of the revenue came from gas, which is also something else that we had at Rolling Hills. At the time, it sounded like they were eager to put some investment into those properties and so I went ahead and took the position.

“Every day going into those legendary properties and seeing what they used to be was exciting, but also very depressing because the tribal properties in California, with their location and world-class facilities, just devastated the Primm market.

“We were looking for ways to revitalize that space, but we realized early on, the cost of operating all three of those casinos was just unsustainable. So, we closed Whiskey Pete’s and then we started the process of closing Buffalo Bills, which they have now done,” Neely stated.

Since leaving Primm, Neely has been consulting.

“One of the nice things about having been in the business as long as I have is once people found out I was available to help them, several people reached out to me to help with projects. The one that I have become very active with is Quechan in Yuma. They have two properties, a resort property in California, and a local’s property in Arizona; great people, and they need help and it’s fun,” Neely said.

Learning from mistakes
I asked Neely about his advice to young people in the casino business.

“A  few years ago, I was honored when Deanna Scott of Raving invited me to be the keynote at the Marketing and Technology Conference and the title that we came up with was “Learning from Mistakes.” I tell my teams all the time, if we’re not making some mistakes, we’re not trying hard enough, we’re playing it too safe. Now I’ve probably taken that to an extreme, but when you make a mistake, don’t dwell on it. Have a short memory. Learn why it was a mistake.

“Always learn, listen to people, read to understand, and read to expand. Becoming an avid reader has been the most beneficial thing for me post MBA. Lots happened in the last 30 years in casino marketing and in leadership. So, stay current. Don’t be scared to try things. I’ve been around so many talented people who were just afraid to take that chance. You’re never going to get that next job if you never apply for it, if you don’t make people aware of the fact that you’re ready, that you’re hungry, that you want to do something more,” Neely related.

Practice, practice, practice
I asked Neely what contributed to his success. His answer makes me smile since he was the first person interviewed for Faces of Gaming that mentioned his spouse.

“I couldn’t do it without my wife of 38 years, and her patience and willingness to indulge my gaming employment habit. It started there and  there were great mentors along the way, and people who allowed me to do what I do. And just determination.

“I wrestled in high school, and you know, I was a good wrestler. I think nothing prepares you for sacrifice like wrestling at a high level, between cutting weight and being in shape and practice, practice, practice,” Neely declared.

Neely lists among his mentors Dennis Conrad and the late John Romero. He talks about listening to Romero and Conrad years ago at a conference. “I couldn’t tell you to this day anything in the sessions that they talked about. What I can tell you, though, is they reinforced for me that I was thinking about things the right way, and so that gave me the confidence to stick with it.

“When the two of them were talking about the different ways to market a casino, and I realized, okay, I may not know everything, but at least I am going about it the right way. I know how to do it, I know what I’m supposed to be doing, and it really just lit a fire in me. And from that day forward, I was an unstoppable force.

“And, you know, I tell Dennis Conrad all the time that he was one of my mentors and then he makes me buy him drinks. And, you know, it always works out,” Neely remarked.

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