Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
Visitors to Las Vegas have likely never heard of the Simmons Group. But after just one trip, there’s a chance an employee who helped them along the way was one of the 27,000 people in the gaming industry across the globe that the company has trained.
The Las Vegas firm, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in July, aids companies in anything “people-related,” founder and CEO Ann Simmons Nicholson said. That means human resource services and workforce development, especially for openings and ownership changes.
Nicholson also played an integral role in creating Global Gaming Women, first helping develop the organization’s mission and values before serving as a board member. The group, which has garnered thousands of members since its 2011 launch, provides education and mentorship to women in the industry.
“It was needed, I think, to give us a voice,” said Debi Nutton, a former Wynn executive involved with GGW. “Because I come from a time where we believed, at least I felt like we believed, if there was already a woman running the casino, we didn’t need another one because we were filling a quota.”
The Las Vegas Strip has felt Nicholson’s presence, working with “nearly every gaming company,” according to the American Gaming Association. On Tuesday, the AGA formally inducted her into the Gaming Hall of Fame during this year’s Global Gaming Expo.
Nicholson talked with the Sun about her induction, her career and the changing landscape of the hospitality industry. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Can you walk me through when you found out about your induction into the hall of fame?
I knew of someone that was being nominated, and when I started getting emails from the AGA about the 2025 Gaming Hall of Fame, I assumed it was about my colleague. And so I wasn’t really reading them. I was kind of — file, file, delete, delete.
The morning of June 25, I was checking email. I was going to London to do a Global Gaming Women’s conference and it said on the subject line, ‘Congratulations inductee 2025.’ I again assumed it was about my colleague, and I opened the email and I scanned it looking for my colleague’s name.
I read it once, and I had to read it again before I realized it was me being inducted — absolutely dumbfounded. I had no idea I had been nominated. I’m probably the smallest, size-wise, owner of a company that’s ever been inducted. I can’t validate that, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.
I wasn’t allowed to say anything for two weeks, so that was tricky.
How does it feel to receive that AGA Hall of Fame honor?
Indescribable gratitude. I was put on this Earth to do this training, and when you find your purpose and your passion, every day that you get to do it is a reward. And then this huge recognition comes in literally out of the blue? It’s gratitude. It’s gratitude for everyone that’s been there supporting me. For my customers and clients. For the AGA and the selection committee for recognizing that small businesses can have a big impact.
For Global Gaming Women, this culture of helping each other and connectivity, how has that changed since the start of the program? Is it more relevant or prominent?
I think it’s more relevant now because there’s a lot of different feelings about focusing on one group or another.
All of the funding comes from sponsorships, so everybody who attends the training attends on scholarship. It’s free to join. My favorite four-letter F-word is free. You can not participate in anything or you can participate in everything. So the culture of helping still is being funded by the gaming manufacturers, the support services in gaming — legal firms and food suppliers — and certainly operators.
Have we had the question, “Will that continue?” Yeah, we’ve had that question. But so far through this year, I don’t think we’ve had anybody say, “Can’t do this anymore.” So, hopefully that continues.
You mentioned training over 27,000 people. What’s one takeaway about how the industry interacts with guests and customers?
Most of the industry — certainly operators and the manufacturers and the larger companies — they say, “We want you to treat our customers as though they’re guests in your home.”
There are some companies that will say that, but team members might not feel like they’re being supported. For the most part, when team members feel like they’re being treated that way, they will then provide that treatment to their guests.
I know that, just through a lot of the changes that have happened in the industry, team members are facing a lot of backlash. I’ll use a good example: paying for parking. I’m sure it was a good business decision for the operators that are doing that, but the team members are the ones that have to deal with the unexpected.
Most of the companies, at least when we interact with their team members, say, “We’ve gotten training on how to handle that. We’ve been given language, and we understand people are upset. Being able to handle that is something that we’ve been given tools for, and we’ve got supervisors that can step in.”
The message of hospitality and the definition of hospitality hasn’t changed. They’re dealing with different stuff now, like everybody in the world.
Your work has a lot to do with good interpersonal skills. What’s the first step in training someone to develop those?
It’s making sure that the organization from the top supports it. It’s not sustainable, scalable or duplicable unless that message is delivered at the highest levels of the organization.
We interact with a lot of HR executives, and almost always we ask that they bring in the CEO, COO or whoever the operational people are. We also ask that all of those people go through a pilot, so an abbreviated version of the training we’re going to give to their leaders. The best thing you can do for a frontline employee is to give them a good supervisor or manager.
To leave off, anything you’d like to share?
In the past nine years, Global Gaming Women has impacted the industry in ways that are almost impossible to calculate. What I see happening is, in the next several decades, the women that are going through the foundational, management and senior director-level training are going to be the leaders of the industry.
The impact will be felt for decades, and for all of those companies that are sponsoring Global Gaming Women, they’re going to see the return on their investment over a long term. I see it as people walk out the door from the training, and I know that organizations will continue to benefit from investing in anyone’s learning and development, not just women.