What’s the first thing Mark Shapiro, CEO of Six Flags, does when he wants to get the company out of billions of dollars of debt? Jumps on a roller-coaster, of course
Mark Shapiro boards the Pandemonium, the spinning rollercoaster built in 2005 at the Six Flags New England amusement park. In seconds he is lifted up forty-two feet, then careens down at thirty-one miles per hour, his custom-made Armani suit a swirl of brown in twirling yellow circles. The Pandemonium isn’t the fastest ride at the park (that would be Superman at seventy-seven mph), nor the tallest (again, Superman at 208 feet), nor the most nausea-inducing (that title is up for grabs). Pandemonium is a bit of them all.
Kind of like Mark’s new job.
Shapiro, who lives in Westport, is the CEO and president of New York–based Six Flags Inc., the largest regional amusement park company in the world. Second in attendance only to Disney, Six Flags conveys thrills, chills — and ills — to shareholders and parkgoers alike. Mark swept in a year ago after a nasty proxy fight and spent 2006 cheering and rallying, cutting and slashing, learning and teaching, and trying out lots and lots of rides.
The Pandemonium is among his favorites, he says on this cool, crisp day at the 150-year-old park in Agawam, Massachusetts, about ninety minutes from Westport.
“That was so much fun!” he says, showing his dimples. Trim and chipper, he skips out of the cart and runs his fingers through his thick black hair, which remains surprisingly orderly considering all the twirling. A cadre of big shots meets him at the ride exit, the manager of this and the director of that, but they’re not riding, deferring the daredevilry to Mark and his two sons.
“Do you know you can make your car spin faster?” Mark asks. He seems ready to launch into a quick physics lesson when Jack, his five-and-a-half-year-old son and Pandemonium partner, tugs on his father’s hand and petitions to board again.
Raise the Flag
Shapiro was a TV wunderkind at ESPN who turned down top jobs at the other networks before the Six Flags job came along. He is a master of programming, a mentor to colleagues his father’s age, a husband who melts at his wife’s beauty, a fierce and relentless competitor, and a father who never seems to tire of his sons’ energy.
The Pandemonium is also Jack’s favorite ride. In fact, it appeals to the largest cross-section of guests at Six Flags: It’s not too wild for the likes of Jack or his parents and it’s still fun enough for teens. If only a theme park could be built around so many Pandemoniums. Instead, $20 million supercoasters, nectar to thrill-seeking teenagers, rule today’s parks. Mark loves coasters, wooden ones especially, but the big, new ones are money-sucking monsters, each machine bigger and badder and more expensive than the ones before it. Over the years they have guzzled dry the resources of Six Flags — they never pay for themselves and just leave a pile of debt. “They’re like drugs,” Mark says, “and people in this industry are addicted to them.”
When Mark was hired at the tail end of 2005 to lead Six Flags, the company was suffocating under $2.4 billion in debt. Attendance had been falling annually for five years prior to 2005. Guest satisfaction levels had fallen off dramatically since Time Warner last owned the park in the 1990s. His charge was to infuse Six Flags with life. One way he plans to slow the bleeding is to stop spending all that money building new gargantuan coasters and, instead, clean up the parks, making them more appealing to families. Another is to keep visiting the parks and riding the rides. It keeps him connected to the employees and the guests — and he can see firsthand that his strategy is being executed properly. When he can bring along his wife, Kim, and sons Jack and Jeffrey (two-and-a-half years old), as he has on this day, all the better — a free focus group. He sees firsthand how the boys react to things like a hug from Tweety Bird. (Jeffrey squeals with delight.) Last year Mark issued a mandate for more characters to cozy up to the customers, sign autographs and pose for pictures and, like most Six Flags parks, this one responded by tripling its entertainment staff. Guest satisfaction scores after just the first year are at five-year highs.
During this Sunday afternoon visit, Kim is exploring the park with the boys when Mark walks by the Scrambler and stops in his tracks. “Is that smoke I smell?” he says, staring right and left. The only noticeable scent seems to come from French fries nearby, but Mark spies the culprit, a young woman about fifteen feet away taking a deep drag from a cigarette. Mark has banned smoking at the parks, except in designated areas, and he directs a worker to convey this message to the offender.
“Families don’t like smoking,” Mark explains, or dirty bathrooms, trash on the sidewalk, inappropriate clothing, cursing … . There’s a long line of things people don’t like about Six Flags (including long lines) and Mark has vowed to banish them all. What he plans to replace them with will make for a Disneyesque escape from the real world, if only for a day or two. Characters and concerts, fireworks and parades, local foods and merchandise — an entertainment hub filled with attractions that lure people away from their troubles and keep them spending their time and money at the park. Disney draws guests without adding megamillions of dollars in thrill rides each year, Mark points out. Why not Six Flags?
Mark is a self-proclaimed “massive Disney fan.” In twelve years at Disney-owned ESPN in Bristol, Mark vaulted from production assistant to executive vice president of programming and production, winning seventeen Emmy Awards and two Peabodys in the process. He and Kim always made time for a trip to Disneyworld, though, and in 2004 Mark visited the park six times. The draw? The characters, the safe, clean environments, the way his kids light up — everything he would like to see at Six Flags.
Team Building
Mark and Kim met right after college when Mark was working as a stringer for NBC Sports. Kim’s father had composed the music for a basketball game Mark had produced and he introduced the pair.
“Mark was this completely dynamic man from Chicago. He was such a contrast to what I had been experiencing,” says Kim, a sweet southerner from Louisville who was working in communications for her alma mater, the University of Alabama.
“I was fascinated by him. He was so passionate and dynamic. I thought what a great person and a great talent.”She’s relaying the story from the Shapiros’s home on a cul-de-sac in a family-filled neighborhood. Mark and Kim are talking in the formal sitting room, its walls the color of chocolate malt. But the formality doesn’t hamper their coziness. They sit next to each other on the couch, their knees touching. A photo album on the coffee table bulges with candid images of the boys. Jack is in school and every now and again Jeffrey runs in and tosses a spongy football to one of his parents, who remind him not to throw the ball in the room, then toss the ball back.
Mark recalls meeting Kim: “I thought she was hot and very sexy. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.” She smiles and takes her husband’s hand in hers.
Alas, shortly after they met, work called Mark to Los Angeles. NBC offered him steady freelance jobs producing games on the West Coast. That might seem like a big leap for a new grad, but Mark had already had a head start. He would been broadcasting since high school, since the day he left his tight-end position on the football team to cover the team instead for the local cable access channel. Also, Mark’s mother, Judith, lived in New York and headed up administration for the nation section of Time magazine. On Fridays he and his siblings flew in for visits while their mother helped put the magazine to bed. Here, his passion for journalism and storytelling developed. He has even been called a news junkie. He lived on the outskirts of Chicago with his father, Harold, and stepmother, Susan, and enrolled at the University of Iowa, where, naturally, he majored in political science and communications and hosted his own sports show. While at school, he flew to New York and talked his way into an internship with Bob Costas at NBC Sports. He beat out 500 other applicants. That experience, which he knew would be important, led him to Los Angeles. The NBC producer he had been working with hired him after college to work for him in LA.
Most big games happened on the weekends, leaving Mark free to work elsewhere during the week. He was a hustler, working by day as a waiter at Bennigan’s and by night as a video clerk at Blockbuster. In the meantime, “Kim visited for a weekend and we really hit it off,” Mark remembers. Kim moved to Los Angeles, but not for long. Mark’s skills as a producer had not gone unnoticed. NBC offered him a full-time job in New York. But so did sports upstart ESPN. Only its offer was for much less money and in one of the lowest jobs on the television totem pole — production assistant at a call-in show. It was at a station no one had ever heard of: ESPN2.
“It was a gamble,” Mark says, “but in business half is research and half is gut.” He bet on ESPN.
Mark and Kim moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Stamford and commuted to New York. The couple barely earned enough money to make ends meet but Kim was not dismayed. “I have such confidence in his instincts,” Kim says, giving his hand a squeeze. “I knew we would find a way to make it work.” While Mark was lining up guests and collecting freebie certificates for lunch at the Stage Deli, Kim worked at Disney Publishing in New York, and saved their pennies. Six months into the job, Mark was promoted to producer, and, two years later, in 1996, the couple married.
ESPN was growing larger and larger. The network decided to undertake a massive production, SportsCentury, a massive multimedia project chronicling and defining the twentieth century in sports. Television programming, a book, magazine inserts, a mall tour and radio programs — it was the company’s single biggest project to this day, and it was looking for someone to lead it. Mark wanted the job. He was twenty-six years old. Many colleagues thought he didn’t stand a chance, but Mark was a believer. “I always felt that if I could get into the interview, I’d get the job,” he says. “I convinced them to take age out of the equation.”
Mark Quenzel, a former ESPN colleague who is now executive vice president of Park Strategy and Management at Six Flags, remembers the process. “It was an incredible risk. It was the equivalent of taking a good college quarterback and saying, ‘Congratulations, next month you’re going to start in the Super Bowl.’ But it was obviously a threshold moment for the network and for everything that came after that.”
Once Mark Shapiro landed the job, he and Kim looked for a place to open an office that was convenient to both New York, where the action and the athletes were, and Bristol, where the network is based.
“We wandered into Westport one day when we were driving from Bristol to New York. We found Main Street and said, ‘This is so cute, so New England,’ ” Kim recalls. Mark opened an office on the Post Road. He and Kim couldn’t afford a house in town, so they moved into a two-bedroom condo and spent their free time driving around looking at neighborhoods. Their dream was to live on a street filled with families and kids playing outside.
In the meantime, Mark assembled SportsCentury piece by piece. “Mark has an incredible talent, like Wayne Gretzky at hockey or Michael Jordan in basketball,” Quenzel says. “Mark has the ability to absorb enormous amounts of information. I had conversations with him six months ago and I don’t remember the conversation. He remembers the words.”
The company won its first Peabody Award for SportsCentury and the show has made millions of dollars for the company. Mark rose to lead programming and production. Entertainment Weekly labeled him a rising star among the “101 Most Powerful People in Show Business.” The Hollywood Reporter called him one of “Thirty-five Promising Executives on the Rise.”
Mark and Kim bought a six-bedroom Colonial in the very neighborhood they had dreamed about, on a street that the police close for Halloween because so many children are outside trick-or-treating. Mark built an office in the basement, next to the playroom. “I don’t want to live where there’s three acres of lawn before I see my neighbors,” he says.
New Thrills
Two years ago, Mark and Kim and a few couples went cruising through the Italian and French Riviera aboard their friend Dan Snyder’s yacht. Snyder bought the Washington Redskins in 1999 for a whopping $800 million, and he’s the youngest owner in football. Like Mark, he is a straight-talking, goal-chasing, no-nonsense, high-energy, family-loving guy who knows how he wants things done. In Monte Carlo he popped what seemed like an absurd question: Would Mark consider leaving his dream job to lead struggling, limping Six Flags?
The company had posted a loss since 1998 and Snyder didn’t even control management, so he would have to wrest control of the company first. In other words, Mark could be leaving a secure and lucrative job to sign on with something that might never materialize. Kim didn’t take the offer seriously. “I dismissed it as a novel idea,” she says.
But Mark was intrigued. “I have an entrepreneurial mind. Start-ups, fix-its, that’s what I do,” he says. “I thought it had tremendous potential.” The $5 million signing bonus that Dan promised and the options for hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock, also added to the attraction. Mark was also impressed with Snyder’s marketing. In the end, Mark accepted the offer, and shareholders ousted the old board and voted in Dan and his team, a group of entertainment superstars, including movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, former quarterback and vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and sports superstar agent Perry Rogers.
Mark has since partnered with Dan and Dwight Schar (chair of NVR Inc. and a Six Flags director) to create an investment group that will provide financing to Hollywood heavyweight Tom Cruise — Snyder has always been open about his interest in entertainment, and Shapiro had a proven programming track record at ESPN. Shapiro will supervise the investment but, in an LA Times interview, said it would not involve Six Flags: “I’ve got a company to turn around here.”
In little more than a year, Shapiro has built a Six Flags team experienced in marketing, entertainment and brand building, including fourteen former ESPN staffers. Their goal is no less than to reorient the culture at the park around confidence, risk taking, communication skills, teamwork, a strong work ethic, and loyalty.
“Mark has a great knack for managing people and motivating people,” Mark Quenzel says. “He’s one of the best salesmen I’ve ever met. Whether he’s selling a project or selling himself, he exudes confidence and has the courage of his convictions. And he’s like a kid. He’s a theme park nut. He loves to ride the rides. He loves everything about it.”
Well, not quite everything.
“We’re going to rip this thing apart so we can build it back,” Mark says of the business. He wants to slash debt by $1 billion and has started selling theme parks and real estate. He’s giving all twenty-nine parks a makeover to appeal to families without alienating teens. Lines should be shorter this season. Mark and crew are working on high-tech bracelets that allow patrons to pay with a wave of the wrist, like the pay-and-go technology at gas stations. Mark promises more shade for parents and grandparents, better landscaping and benches for the tired and weary.
“Mark’s vision is for guests to be able to walk through the gates and leave whatever was nagging at them behind,” Quenzel says. “You want them to have a sensory experience that just strips everything away. He calls it ‘emotional transportation’ — take families to a place that just sort of lets them enjoy life together.”
Back at the park, Mark spies two empty drink cups on the pavement and tosses them in the trash over by the fried-dough stand. Then he wonders aloud why Six Flags New England doesn’t have his favorite amusement park treat: funnel cakes with extra sugar. Then he and Jeffrey and Jack pile into the Scrambler and, after Mark notes the long load time, they’re all spinning around on a maroon metal seat.