Carlos Tolosa
President, Eastern Division

J. Carlos Tolosa is President of the Eastern Division of Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. In that capacity, he is responsible for the company’s casino operations in New Jersey, North Carolina, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas and Missouri.

Tolosa began his career with the company in 1971 and held various management positions with Holiday Inns, Inc., a former parent company of Harrah’s Entertainment. In 1993, Tolosa rose to the position of Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Operations for Embassy Suites Hotels, a division of Promus Hotels, also a former parent company of Harrah’s Entertainment. A year later, he assumed the role of Division President for Harrah’s Indian Gaming, overseeing properties in several U.S. states. And prior to his current role, he was President of the company’s Western Division.

Tolosa graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1973 and the Advanced Management for the Hospitality Industry (ALPHI) program at the University of Guelph-Ontario, Canada in 1984.

INTERVIEW with Carlos Tolosa:

While most corporate partnerships have limited benefits…Harrah’s casino president, Carlos Tolosa says, partnering with the Cherokee Easternband continues to be one of Harrah’s crowning achievements.

In a recent phone interview Candice Felice, he spoke candidly about what it means to him to be a part of bringing new life and healthy growth to the Cherokee Easternband.

Candice:  From the standpoint of the corporation, why was Harrah’s interested in partnering with the Cherokee Eastern Band?

Tolosa:  Well this goes back probably to 1995 or even earlier, but that’s what I recollect.  We as a company made the decision to get involved in the Indian gaming.  Even that with the National Labor Relations Act, we saw a tremendous opportunity for expansion of gaming.  So not only did we do it with the Cherokee, but we dealt with other tribes around the Nation as well.

Candice:  How did you come together?

Tolosa:  Most of the Tribes do not have the amount of money that was required to build a first class casino.  So what we did is we guaranteed the loan.  And by guaranteeing the loan we also had a management agreement, which under the law at the time could only be five years.

Candice:  At the end of five years are the Native Tribes able to buy back ownership completely of the casinos?

Tolosa:  Well what is happening is historically now in various casinos, is that either you’ve extended the management agreement for an increment of five years, in some cases, the National Labor Relations will give you up to seven years.  And I believe with this particular tribe, the Cherokee, we are in our third extension.

Candice:  And why is that?

Tolosa: You know I think that the best thing to do is bring the brand, bring the training, bring the systems and process to operate the facility that is successful that provides for the Tribes means and the needs to provide for their people in terms of jobs, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of hospital and healthcare and so on.  And it keeps this is my view, it keeps the politics away from running a casino.

Candice:  Do you see this as a long term relationship with the Eastern Band?

Tolosa:We’ve been with them now, I believe we open in 1997, so we’ve been with them for ten years and we have enjoyed a tremendous relationship with the various Chief we work with.  And we have a contract to date until 2011.  And it is always my hope to not only continue helping them grow…it would be my hope that at the right time we are able to negotiate another extension.

At one time, Tolosa says, the Cherokee Easternband considered building another casino in Georgia, but the idea was reconsidered.  

Tolosa:The Cherokee Nation was very smart in the way they negotiated it.   Primarily, they wanted for their people to be exposed to jobs.  So they created a Tribal preference on all hiring. Not only for the work to be done on the casino but also all the construction work.  So on everything that you did at the reservation related to the casino, you had a process to go through that would provide always preferential treatment to a Cherokee and second other Native Americans and third the world at large.  So from the beginning, not only through the design and construction of the actual construction itself our main interest there has been to employ people of the Nation.  And, in fact, when we first went in there the entire management team was a Harrah’s employee.  Today, at the reservation only the general manager is a Harrah’s employee.  Everybody else is an employee of the Tribe.  That’s something that from the beginning we had agreed, committed to them that we would be training their people to become self-sufficient at some point to operate the casino.  And that has proven very successful.

But not all of the early working relationships between the Cherokee Easternband and Harrah’s were uneventful. Each say compromises had to be made from both the corporate culture and the Cherokee culture. Tolosa says…

Tolosa: It was a learning process for both. A lot of these folks many of them that applied for jobs had never applied for a job before.  When you come with a large company like ours and you have all kind of structures and disciplines about hiring and attendance and things like that it became a challenge for us for awhile.  Things have somewhat normalized over the years, but we learned a lot and they learned a lot no question about that.

Candice: How did you go about rectifying this and helping them understand that this is nothing against their heritage or way of life, this is just business?

Tolosa:  First of all we have created a tremendous amount of training programs for people at the property.  We have exposed them to a lot of training. Over time we started promoting people that we saw that had the potential to become supervisors, directors and managers from within the Tribe themselves, which helped us a lot.  The great majority of the human resources team at the time was people from the Easternband of the Cherokee, so they would provide you the prospective from their side as well before we stuck a foot in our mouth.  And that was an eye opener and a big learning for us.  Do we agree on everything still?  No. But we have mutual respect for each other.  And it’s been such a tremendous relationship we’ve had with them.

Candice: Has this been easier with the Cherokee as oppose to others or has it just been pretty much level across the board?

Tolosa:  The difference that I see mostly in the Cherokee is they are a very large Tribe, so it allows them to have significantly more opportunities for employees that were already there work for us.  And there were Cherokee that reside elsewhere that wanted to come home now that there was a job opportunity.  Many of the other Tribes are very small and they cannot accomplish that.  So in terms of employment, the Cherokee probably has the largest amount of employees of Cherokee descent, than other Tribes around the country have that at least we are involved in managing.

But Tolosa says for him working with the Cherokee Easternband is not all business.  He says he takes personal pride in seeing the accomplishments of the Cherokee people thrive and become self-sufficient.

Tolosa::  That is the most satisfying feeling for me as a guy who has been involved in Indian gaming fro along time is the fact that we’ve been able to provide a business  a) that they can be proud of, b) they can enjoy employee benefits, vacations, healthcare, and so many other things that we’ve been able to provide.  We’ve been able to provide training and opportunity for them to go up the ladder and the pride of ownership is incredible.  You know the Cherokee proper has the best customer service course of any of our properties in the company and it’s that sense of pride that the employees play there because they know that it is part of theirs.  It’s their casino.  It is not Harrah’s.  It is their casino.  And you can sense that when you talk to them.  It’s been terrific. It’s been very gratifying  for us to be able to you know, provide the financial incentives they realize the result of their own wisdom and their own investment.  One of the things I think Cherokee has done better perhaps than most is they insist, they have high goals in education for their members.  They provide scholarships if kids want to go to college.  They really provide an environment for them to continue to self-educate themselves.  The large number of their employees who started in lower position that today, they are directors, and vice presidents, have gone back to school and many of them have received master degrees.  It’s a great story!

Tolosa says the Cherokee Easternband proves that the stereotypes surrounding casinos have no merit. He says,

Tolosa:  A lot of people try to give you a myth about gaming with prostitution and traffic and the fact of the matter is that they’ve created a terrific attraction and own a beautiful setting in the Smokey Mountains and it has really helped them. Their shops stay open year round. Visitation to the Smokey Mountain Park continues to grow and it is because they have created a destination there.

As the achievements of the Cherokee Easternband continues to multiply … the heart of its people remains focused on being rooted and grounded in their cultural heritage.

For the Cherokee this means educating the younger generation in knowing the language and the traditions of their forefathers and leaving a legacy of hope and health for future generations to come.