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 Did you see that movie “Up in the Air”? The one from last year where George Clooney spends almost his entire life on a plane, flying from one meeting to another? That was Bob Rippy, circa 1994. And he’d grown to hate every waking second of it.
So one night he landed in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, at 11 p.m. and drove his Porsche to a house near the beach that felt more like a vacation spot than a permanent residence. The jaunt was about all the action that sports car saw; it was 10 years old and only had 30,000 miles on it. He thought, “I don’t want to be on another big jet … unless it’s for vacation.” When he arrived he told his wife, Jenny, he was calling his firm in the morning to quit.
After nearly 15 years on Wall Street, Bob Rippy came home to stay. He turned his full attention to Jungle Rapids, his sprawling family entertainment center (FEC) in Wilmington that was about to add a waterpark out back. His success with that facility made him a luminary in the attractions industry, and now he approaches yet another career milestone: At IAAPA Attractions Expo 2010 in November, Rippy will become chairman of the IAAPA Board of Directors, the first FEC sole proprietor to hold the position.
So what makes a man go from jet-setter to token-taker? Is he still satisfied with his decision? And what does his wide range of experiences tell him about the current state of the attractions industry? To know Bob Rippy for an hour is to know this: He’ll tell it to you straight.
Life ‘Up in the Air’ Is Grand … for A While
Rippy calls them “zombies,” those guys like Clooney’s character: Armed with tailored suits, wingtip shoes, and rolling bags that fit perfectly into an overhead bin, they drop into their first-class seats and immediately zone out. He knew how to identify them because he was one.
“You really have no life,” he reflects now from his glass-walled office, which overlooks the mini-magic kingdom of Jungle Rapids. “You’re a slave to the next airplane, the next rental car, the next hotel room, the next meeting room, the next dinner … you just become a slave to the job, and it’s all for the money. I got paid well—don’t get me wrong—but I was never home.”
 Rippy’s path to zombieland went right down Wall Street, starting as a stockbroker at E.F. Hutton & Co. in 1981. He worked his way into marketing and finance within a few years, where he sought out investment opportunities. “You name it, we did it,” he says. “It was like doing a Harvard case study on every different business.”
In a typical week Rippy flew into Wilmington on a Friday night, spent two days at home, and then flew back out of town either Sunday night or Monday morning to start it all over again. Sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time, so Jenny had to fly to Chicago, L.A., or wherever if the couple wanted to spend time together. He could relate to the scene in “Up in the Air” where Clooney displays his horde of membership reward cards (Rippy had 1.5 million frequent flyer miles with Eastern Air Lines when it went out of business in 1991). “I was gold, double platinum … you name it. I was sitting in the front seat of every airplane, eating in the finest restaurants, but that’s not important to my life,” he says. Like Clooney, his “friends” were people he met in passing as part of the “30,000-foot community.” At one hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Rippy knew the manager so well they’d eat dinner together when he was in town. He was in town a lot.
“It’s glamorous for five years. Then it’s OK for five years. Then it’s torturous for the last five years. I didn’t go to New York for three years after I quit. I had to rebuild my life. People didn’t know me. Since then, I’ve made a concerted effort,” says the man on more boards of directors in Wilmington than you can count on all your fingers and toes. “I know everybody in town, and it’s wonderful.”
A ‘King of Fun’
Don’t think for a second, though, he regrets the Wall Street experience.
“I’m glad I did it—it was 10 MBAs in 10 years,” says Rippy, who never actually attended business school. “I got to see the whole country and part of the world. There’s nowhere in the United States I haven’t been.”
 On one such trip in the mid-’80s Rippy met a man who changed the course of his life: Frank Wells, then the president and chief operating officer of The Walt Disney Company. Rippy was part of the marketing team of Silver Screen Partners, a New York firm that financed Disney’s Hollywood resurgence later in the decade; he’s been on many a film set, and a poster of “Good Morning, Vietnam”—one of the movies from the Silver Screen partnership—still hangs on his office wall. Wells invited Rippy to Walt Disney World in Orlando, and while touring the parks Rippy marveled at the COO’s passion for the business. Wells responded with an indelible remark.
“I have the best job in the world: I’m King of Fun,” Rippy recalls Wells saying. “Look at these people: They’re here on a lifetime vacation, and we do such a good job of running our park they’ll tell their friends, and they’ll tell their friends.”
Becoming a “King of Fun” was another reason Rippy left Wall Street and remains a driving force in his personal motivation for Jungle Rapids.
“Do I make as much money as I did on Wall Street? No. But I’m not at 30,000 feet every day, either,” he says. “I have stress in this business just like anybody, but when I go home at night I sleep well. I get up in the morning and I never come in here with a frown on my face because when I walk in the door it makes me smile.
“That’s what we’re doing: delivering smiles and fun to people. I don’t know of any other industry like that. Probably the closest one is the movie industry if you made the movie and you got to go to the theater and watch the people laugh and scream. But the directors don’t do that; the actors don’t do that; I get to do that here every day.”
His passion for the amusement industry isn’t all giggles, though. Rippy likes that it’s a “cash-flow intensive business” because whether you’re talking Disney, Six Flags, or an FEC, the basic principle is still the same: There’s a cost of operation to open the doors and run the facility correctly, no matter how many people are in the park. Thus it takes a certain number of guests to break even against those operating costs, and once a facility hits that magic number, any more visitors that come through the gates are almost pure profit.
That’s why in the mid-’90s Rippy decided to build a rather significant waterpark at Jungle Rapids. He’d seen success with every addition he’d made to that point—minigolf, go-karts, an arcade, laser tag, climbing wall, kids’ play area (yes, the place is huge)—but none of those ventures offered near the capacity of a waterpark. For example, if it takes a thousand people to break even and his waterpark can hold 2,000 people … well, that’s the kind of scenario an entrepreneur like Bob Rippy wants.
The Blessing, Curse, and Freedom of an Entrepreneur
Rippy has a bit of a love/hate relationship with being an entrepreneur. Depending on the context, he calls the ability to create and run a business either a “gift” or a “sickness.” Regardless, it’s what he was born to do.
“You’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not. I am an entrepreneur,” he says in his matter-of-fact Southern tone. “You can’t train somebody to be an entrepreneur. I call it ‘the sickness,’ actually, because it means you’re willing to take a risk. It’s just you against the world, and the world today is coming after you.
“I also think entrepreneurs are unemployable—you have to create your own job,” he goes on. “No one wants you to work for them because you’re always thinking about the next deal, the next place, the next thing you can do. Wall Street was great for that. You get paid for what you do; there is no salary. I woke up every day with zero in the bank, in a way. I had to create my wealth, my knowledge.”
 Rippy didn’t go to business school—he started a business instead. In 1978, at just 22 years old, he and a partner opened a self-serve car wash that was so successful, they opened a few more. Everything was sudsy until interest rates spiraled out of control and almost put him under. Through the good and the bad, though, he believes those car washes taught him more about business than going to school, because he ran his own place: Payroll, financing, development … he was responsible for it all.
Rippy’s degree is actually a bachelor of science in biology from East Carolina University (he was a middle-school science teacher for one year and planned to become a doctor before he succumbed to the “business bug”). “Science teaches you to think analytically—there’s no gray area. So I look at business from an analytical point of view,” he says.
At the same time, he trusts his gut implicitly. Three years ago he joined with some business partners to open what he thought were the best coffee shops in Wilmington, but he shut them down within a year because he felt they’d never turn a profit. “You can do all the spreadsheets you want, but you know very quickly whether or not it’s working,” Rippy says, thinking back on times he sat with movie producers who knew within the first 30 minutes of a film’s first screening whether or not a picture would be a hit.
The freedom of entrepreneurship appeals to Rippy as much as anything. Sure he gave up the glitz and glamour of Wall Street, but he’s more comfortable now in the “smaller world” of running a top-flight FEC. “If I’m going to run a business, I want to be able to run the business in the way I feel is best,” he says. And he loves being King of Fun: If he wants to bring local children’s clubs in for a free run of the park, he can; if he wants to give a mom and her four kids a pizza on the house, he can; if he wants to invite U.S. Marines in for an afternoon of fun when they return home from the battlefields of Afghanistan, he can; if he wants NASCAR superstar Jeff Gordon to race go-karts on his track for charity, yep, he can do that, too (three years in a row, actually).
More than anything, that freedom allows Rippy to run Jungle Rapids like a family business. He takes care of his employees (they received bonuses—as scheduled—in 2009, despite the recession), but demands the same commitment in return. As a result, many of the full-timers working at Jungle Rapids have been there for a decade or more.
“One thing that’s great about our industry is I can’t export Jungle Rapids,” he says. “These jobs can’t move to China; you can build a facility like this in China and probably do well with it but it’s not going to take away from Jungle Rapids. We are truly a community-oriented business.”
The Year Ahead as Chairman
These days Rippy only goes up in the air on his own terms. A licensed pilot, he plans on taking his plane around the country in 2011 to visit as many FECs, parks, and other attractions as possible. “Being chairman this year as an FEC guy is as big a deal to the FEC community as it is to me,” he says. “FECs will get a big part of my focus, and they should.”
Rippy will work to retain the members who joined IAAPA as a result of its merger last year with the International Association for the Leisure and Entertainment Industry (IALEI). He’s focused on increasing educational opportunities for FEC members and spurring the manufacturers and suppliers (M&S) in the industry to create the next big idea … a new “juicer.”
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, video games, go-karts, kids’ play jungles, and laser tag all took off back-to-back leading to an FEC boom that reshaped IAAPA and the amusement industry as a whole. There hasn’t been a “gotta have this” FEC element in a while, though, he says. “What can we do to grow our business? We’re stagnant in our income, except when we raise our prices.
“We’re so fortunate in that we have a symbiotic relationship between the manufacturers and the operators. We have to have both sides of the fence doing well for IAAPA to succeed,” he continues. “Our challenge for the upcoming year is to continue to work with our M&S community and help them where we can to be more successful.”
Rippy also wants to take this opportunity to meet with operators from other segments and regions of the industry. He’ll be back on those big jets this year, traveling around the globe to visit them.
“I’m chairman of all IAAPA, not just FECs,” he says. “You have to put on the big hat, and I surely want to wear that.”
Bob Rippy On …
Customer Service: Rippy adheres to a philosophy he learned from former Walt Disney Company President Frank Wells: “No one cares about what it looked like yesterday, and they’re not going to care what it looks like tomorrow, because they’re here today. We use that philosophy in running Jungle Rapids.”
Rippy also has a steadfast rule when it comes to birthday parties: During every party, a manager has to ask the parent how everything is going within the first 15 minutes of the event. “It’s a word-of-mouth business,” he says. He can fix a problem after just 15 minutes; if he waits until the end of the party to try and respond to a complaint, “I’m done.”
IAAPA Attractions Expo: “I never leave IAAPA Attractions Expo without 10 great ideas,” Rippy says. “The show pays for itself every time I go.” He sends staff out on the floor first to “root out some ideas … find me something that’s going to make us an extra $5,000 next year.” The employees then return to him with notes and he walks the floor. Sometimes he spots things they don’t, and vice versa.
“Moving to Orlando will be a great plus for IAAPA,” Rippy says of the Expo’s 10-year run in Orlando. “People know what to expect, know what they’re going to do, and members can plan ahead now. It positions us truly at the center of the universe in our industry. We should be there.”
Management Style: “I get bored real quick. I don’t have tolerance for a lot of babble about something. I want the facts,” he says. “This is one of my weaknesses I never tried to fix.”
If there’s a problem at Jungle Rapids, Rippy doesn’t run around querying all his employees one at a time. The staffers come into his office and they have “a fiveminute conversation,” where all the facts are laid out and a decision is made.
Managing a Crisis: “I can’t operate with 99 percent of the facts, because that 1 percent will kill you,” he says. “Good news and bad news, you have to have it all. ”
Rippy’s cell phone lies on his bedside table every night. If one of his businesses dials 911, their second call is his number. He will be the one—the only one—speaking to the press during a crisis.
“I’m going to tell them the truth, top to bottom, no matter how bad it is,” he says. “It will go away if they have the story; they won’t be coming back trying to dig through half truths and half lies.”
Pricing: “The biggest complaint about us in this town is we’re expensive … and that’s true. I’m not running a low-end deal. I expect people to come to Jungle Rapids and have a quality experience.
“If I cut my price and have twice as many people here, you’ll wait twice as long to ride the ride, the pool will be twice as crowded, and your experience level goes down. I’d rather charge twice as much and have an experience where people say, ‘You know, that was a nice park.’ There’s an experience level people are willing to pay for, and I’m not willing to compromise that just to have more people in the park.” |
Contact Senior Editor Jeremy Schoolfield at jschoolfield@IAAPA.org.
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