Pegasus selling latest players club system
By Paul F. Vang
“Lots of potential customers kind of assume we’re from out of state,” Aaron Briceno says with a smile. “They light up when we say, ‘No, we’re from Butte.’” 
“I’ve spent my time out of Montana. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure I can stay,” is Jim McCarthy’s working philosophy.
There’s an old saying, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” As a team of entrepreneurs, Aaron Briceno and Jim McCarthy have worked to come up with a better mousetrap for casino operators.
Under the business name of Pegasus Information Systems Management, these two computer experts have developed a players club system for casino operators to better identify their best customers and offer rewards, and at the same time improve the management of their business.
Aaron Briceno is originally from Belize, in Central America. He served a hitch in the Army, and then came to Butte to earn a degree from Montana Tech, followed by a master’s degree in information systems technology from the University of Phoenix.
Jim McCarthy is an Anaconda native who went to college at Carroll College in Helena, followed by additional course work at Montana State University as well as other schools.
Aaron got a job in information systems management with a Butte firm, and that’s where he met Jim, who was already employed there. They immediately struck up a friendship, and a recurring theme in their spare time conversations was talking about coming up with something new to make some extra money.
“We were always looking for new angles,” Aaron recalls, “and Jim always had lots of ideas.”
Jim chimes in with, “We had different ideas in information technology. And together, we’ve got 25 years of experience in the field.”
In talking to them, it’s kind of like watching a table tennis game. They continually bounce ideas off each other, finish each other’s sentences, and follow with one new point after another.
In 2008, their ongoing conversations about coming up with new business ideas continued, and they came up with the idea of developing a player’s club system for Montana casinos. Jim says, “Aaron asked me, ‘Can you write software for a players club program?’”
Aaron relates, “We spent three months putting our ideas and concepts together.” He adds, “Most programmers just program. Jim looks at things from an end-users perspective. Then we started talking to some casino operators to get their feedback.”
Jim says, “We spent a lot of time trying to figure what kind of features to put into our programming and how it would all function. My philosophy in developing software is: simpler is better. If you, the customer, can’t sit down and use it, it’s not good software.”
“One of the things we wanted to include,” Aaron points out, “was to make it possible for a casino operator to check, through the internet, what was going on, and to do it from anywhere.”
“But,” Jim adds, “it also has to work when the internet is down. We’ve done well on that point, as we’ve had no real downtime to speak of.”
They finally came up with a Windows Vista-based program, and they admit to liking that sometimes controversial operating platform, pointing out, with some amazement, that some existing players club software on the market is still DOS-based.
The basic concept of their players club program is to log all player’s activity on the machines they play and how long they play them. Through this, customers can earn rewards (determined by the local operator, of course).
The program also generates management reports that track machine use on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis, so that operators have documentation on which machines are being played, what are slow days, and so on.
In addition, all actions are tracked by which employees are on duty, so that there is a continual audit trail of everything that happens.
“It’s a tool,” Jim and Aaron agree, “a players management tool. It tracks how they gamble and what they gamble on.”
The program self-generates daily operational reports—up to nine separate reports—and automatically sends the reports by e-mail to a selected list of recipients.
After coming up with their concepts and designing operating software, Jim and Aaron’s first challenge was to sell it to potential customers. And it was a challenge, Jim admits. “We had to make some concessions to get that first sale.”
As both of them have full-time day jobs, they also found themselves doing a lot of traveling on evenings and weekends to contact potential customers.
Just half a year after that first sale, they’ve made significant progress. They now have customers scattered across Montana, from Glendive to Billings to Missoula and Kalispell, some 24 casinos in all, and they add that it would be 25 if not for last month’s disastrous fire that virtually destroyed an entire city block of downtown Miles City.
Making the sale to a potential customer is just the first step of the process. Jim says, “We’ll configure the computer with the physical layout of the facility, the serial numbers of all gaming machines, and the casino’s rewards plan. We deliver, set up, and then train the staff. Plus they get two weeks of free support. If we do upgrades to the program, we upgrade everybody.”
Jim and Aaron say that their customers report positive results. There are immediate paybacks, in that employees get to know their customers better as they log them in for the player reward system, and when employees address their customers by name, customers respond with loyalty.
Some gaming operators report that their business volume has doubled, the men say. They also report that some owners with multiple sites first tried the system on one site, quickly recognized the benefits, and put the system in their other gaming locations.
They recognize that their player’s club system involves a little more work for employees, in that they’re doing frequent reads of the machine meters and the computer tracking of players. On the other hand, it’s easy to use and requires little training (“about 30 seconds,” they say), they get to know their customers, and, the clincher as far as employees are concerned, they get better tips.
Jim and Aaron sum up their player’s club program as a tool for “better management of rewards,” or as Aaron says, “It’s for the serious owner who is committed to a better operation.”
Jim adds, “It’s a tool to provide better customer service.”
As a further service, they send regular newsletters to their customers telling them what kinds of trends they’re seeing from the perspective of serving multiple gaming sights. As Jim puts it, “We have a lot of experience in handling and interpreting data. That’s what we’ve always done; we analyze data.”
Aaron says, “That’s a competitive edge we offer. We help keep them in business. We do better if they do better.”
Now that the founders of Pegasus have gotten their business off the ground, they are establishing goals for further growth, planning to double the number of customers to around 50 by early summer and 100 by the end of 2009, by which time they might consider quitting their day jobs.
Their goals are defined by an important value. As Jim puts it, “We both have families, and we want to start putting money away for our kids’ education.”
They’ve established ongoing roles in operating the business. Jim says, “Aaron does most of the day to day sales and management, while I do ongoing software development, as well as do demonstrations. We’re also coming up with ideas for new features, including more interactive features and a possible web interface for our customers.”
Both Jim and Aaron find the experience of developing their new business satisfying. They say, almost in unison, “We put something together and people find it useful.”
Jim says, “It’s a nice ego boost to think up something, plan and develop it, and find that it works. It’s almost surprising to us. We didn’t know anything about it, previously.”
Aaron adds with pride, “We know we have a good product, and we stand by it.”
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, May 2009, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W Granite, Suite 102, Butte MT. 59701