Damn. There are folks whose opinions need to be taken with a grain of salt, and there’s Dennis Speigel. For those unfamiliar, Dennis Speigel is perhaps the foremost expert on the amusement industry. Not only is he the nation’s premier amusement industry consultant, but he also has a personal connection to the current Six Flags because he was KD’s founding general manager and later became the head of the original Kings Entertainment parks. His experience and his connections run deep.
For what it’s worth, I actually think it would be wise for Six Flags to consider shedding virtually every fringe park in their portfolio. They consistently refer to the top 15 parks in the portfolio as being the ones that show the greatest returns on investment, and thus the ones that’ll be the subject of most of their upcoming investment. (Ideally, for me as an enthusiast, all of the smaller parks that aren’t in a competitive market would just get spun off as independent parks or get purchased by a low-threat competitor. But what happens to the sold-off parks is a separate discussion.)
Six Flags right now is (predictably) in an impossible position of having to manage and improve some 40 properties. If the top 15 are the real money makers, it might be worth stripping Six Flags down to just those parks. Today’s Six Flags, juggling random small parks from La Ronde to Frontier City, can’t properly focus on winning with their major parks.
But imagine a Six Flags with about 15 parks, where the smallest park is something like Dorney Park and the rest are your Cedar Points, Great Adventures, Kings Islands, and Magic Mountains of the world. Then, suddenly they have a world-class portfolio of parks, the best of the Cedar Fair parks and the best of the Six Flags parks. Then they can focus on actually growing them and operating them like world-class parks.
With a stacked roster and more consistent scale of parks, that gives them the freedom and focus to have one coherent mission for the parks — for example, to make every park the “Disney World” of their respective market. No time or money wasted trying to figure out what random flat ride ends up at Great Escape and Michigan’s Adventure; every waking minute and every dollar is spent building the core parks into the premier theme parks for their market.
It seems to me that in the corporate world, “focus” almost always translates to a better strategy and better execution. Focused strategy, focused attention, focused investments. For better or for worse, I think focus is exactly what Six Flags needs right now.
