Attended a Surrey Chamber of Commerce lunch yesterday at the Surrey Golf Club.  Anthony Martin, President and Chief Operating Officer of Great Canadian Casinos gave a talk about their recently aquired Fraser Downs site in Cloverdale. He’s a pretty good speaker and has a humorous story about how he came to work with the company – if you get a chance, ask him about it ( sorry, no link on that). Suffice it to say, it was one of those “out of the blue” episodes. And it gave a bit of a picture of him as a person – nice.

 

Seems the Company has grown from about 1800 employees in 2003, to 5100 in 2005, and attained a TSX return of 14,814% (yikes!). I don’t gamble, but I wish I had back in ’03. Local properties now include those in Richmond, Coquitlam, Vancouver, and Surrey. They’re still looking forward….so stay tuned.

 

Tidbit: Surrey Central is not the center of Surrey – Cloverdale is.

 

I enjoy Chamber lunches. In my past life, most of my business contacts were spread around the province. That was great and I really enjoyed it, but now I’m getting a chance to meet some local folks. Yesterday I lunched with people in banking, advertising, web-design, and car insurance loss prevention. I also talked with local politicians, a realestate person and a newspaper publisher. Cool. I like learning about what other people do.