While I still feel young, I got my start in the experience industry working at Lagoon Amusement Park & Pioneer Village in Utah. That means that while I do believe in working fast, I’ve been doing this for a very long time–over 40 years! My career began in June 1982 as a 14-year-old “clean-up boy.” And yes, that was the actual title of the job. Over ten seasons at Lagoon, I worked as a lifeguard, train engineer, manager in the Rides Department, stage manager, construction worker, DeeJay and even substitute stuntman in the park’s Wild West Shootout. I worked at Lagoon all the way through both high school and college. In fact, after graduating with a journalism degree, Lagoon offered me a salaried position. However, I declined and went to work in the newsrooms of The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News. After moving to Ohio, I realized journalists are, by and large, not happy people. As I was used to working with happy people at a theme park, I got my lucky break when I decided to work on a story about the merger of a production company called Jack Rouse Associates with a theme park and museum design firm called Wyatt Design. I interviewed its President Keith James and asked him a standard question when covering mergers, “Are you planning on laying anyone off?” His answer surprised me, “No. In fact, we are hiring and looking for a writer. Do you know anyone?” This encounter quickly led to an interview after I published the story and my first job as a creative writer for the experience design firm that is now called JRA. .

AND WHERE DID YOU GO FROM THERE?

After seven years at JRA working on projects like the CNN Studio Tour, Atlantis Submarines Hawaii, the Battleship Missouri Memorial, Green Bay Packer’s Hall of Fame and even a few roller coasters for Six Flags, While I had been promoted, I felt stuck. With three small children, I also wanted to make more money. So, I start freelancing and this quickly led to a gig helping the CEO of the Tom Peters Company research and write a book on leadership communication called “The Leader’s Voice.” He called my “bluntness a whetstone of refinement” and eventually hired me full-time in February 2002 to help him finish and get the book published and transformed into a leadership workshop. However, the post 9/11 economy was struggling and so I ended up taking on more roles as others around me where let go. The company went from 60 employees down to 15. As they couldn’t pay me more as they added more responsibilities, I just kept asking for more flexibility to freelance back into the experience industry. This, in time, led me back to working with one of the partners at JRA at his new firm called The Brand Experience. I was there for the better part of 15 years working on everything from the world’s largest video dome in Dubai for Nakheel to brand experiences like the Lockheed Martin Space Experience Center, Our clients included Fortune 500 icons such as Honeywell and Procter & Gamble along with institutions and non-profits such as Kaiser Permanente. We event had one gig back in the theme park industry at the Polynesian Cultural Center.

DID YOU EVER HAVE A PROJECT THAT COMPLETELY CHANGED YOUR CAREER?

In the middle of my tenure as the Executive Creative Director at The Brand Experience, I took a detour to work for FiveCurrents as a video producer on the opening ceremonies of the Rio 2007 Pan American Games in Maracanā Stadium. It had always been a dream of mine to work on an event–and experience–at this scale so just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. While the work itself wasn’t fun or as enjoyable as I hoped, it was still an experience I’ll never forget. More importantly, it helped everyone at The Brand Experience realize how much they missed me and so after three months living in Rio, I returned to Cincinnati to work again with my colleagues at The Brand Experience.

DID YOU HAVE ANY SETBACKS ON THIS JOURNEY?

And then in June 2017, I was fired by The Brand Experience. This wasn’t a surprise as the owner and I had been growing apart over the last two years at the firm as we had argued about everything from creative priorities to the culture within the firm. Nevertheless, we did great work together. In fact, our final projects were for a traveling exhibition for the King Abdullah Foundation in Saudi Arabia, the Qasr Al Watan Presidential Palace attraction in Abu Dhabi and the American Airlines Museum in Texas. Fortunately, a few of these clients wanted to continue working with me when I was fired so we launched Creative Principals on July 10, 2017.

CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT STARTING YOUR OWN COMPANY THEN?

The name of the company describes perfectly was we strive to deliver: creative leadership. It’s not enough just to have great ideas. No, you must also have the leadership skills to persuade others that they are great ideas. In other words, it’s not enough to have a vision. You must inspire others to share the vision! While 2017 was mostly spent wrapping up projects that I had been working on, 2018 saw several big projects hit, including the Summit on the Future of Entertainment in Saudi Arabia in April 2018, the grand opening of Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi in July 2018 and our branding of the Quest indoor theme park in Doha. In 2019, we got a call from Miral to help develop the vision for a new attraction and since then we have worked on 18 projects in Abu Dhabi. While almost all of these are early bluesky projects that we can’t talk about, we can say that we helped on some of the new attractions guests are experiencing on Samaliyah Island and at the Al Ain Zoo. Recent and current projects include the College Football Hall of Fame, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, Delta Flight Museum, FM Global Centre in Singapore, the Ozark Mill at Finley Farms near Branson, Missouri and the Speed Experience Center at Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya giga project.

IS THERE A SECRET TO KEEPING YOUR BUSINESS HEALTHY?

We strive to keep a third of a business focused on theme parks and entertainment, a third on museums or educational and cultural attractions and a third on brand experiences with corporate clients. However, our long-term goal is to ensure that a fourth revenue source comes from our own IP. This means we need to generate other passion projects like our book “The CEO’s Time Machine” and web site Ask.Buzz. Our interns launched a YouTube show called “Park Pals.” We have ideas for more books and stories.

AND WHAT IT IS LIKE WORKING WITH FAMILY?

From the very beginning, it was my wife Tanya’s decision to launch our own company. She is our biggest supporter behind-the-scenes and can often be seen in our initial site visits and charrettes as she offers a perspective on experiences that none of us can share. She is a mother and the research shows that mothers make most important decisions about experiences their families will visit.

Our daughter Zoe joined Creative Principals as a designer and illustrator in August 2019. She is also the illustrator of “The CEO’s Time Machine.” In June 2023, our son Joel joined us as a creative writer. And our youngest daughter Mia is a senior in sequential art at the Savannah College of Art & Design. She has interned with us and worked on projects like the Delta Flight Museum. She will be joining us full time when she graduates in June 2024.

AND IS THERE SOMETHING YOU CARE ABOUT IN THE INDUSTRY. 

As we believe in speed, one of the topics we address most often is how AI design and writing tools like Midjouney, ChatGTP and Jasper are changing how we work. In fact, if we can go back to the theme of creative speed, we are using these tools to work even faster.

We strive to be leaders in the industry and all us recently spoke at the 7Experiences Summit in Auckland, New Zealand and EntertainTech in Abu Dhabi in December 2024 about AI. Zoe and I have also spoken numerous times both together and separate at both IAAPA and the Themed Entertainment Association’s SATE Conference in both Europe and the United States.