SANDUSKY — Staring up at the 205-foot tall Steel Vengeance roller coaster and watching its empty train whoosh by on yet another practice run, a wide-eyed Richard Zimmerman couldn’t help but gush like a little kid with a new toy.
“I get just as excited about the little stuff as I do the big stuff, but this,” the new CEO of Cedar Fair LP said as his gaze drifted across the steel-and-timber showstopper at Cedar Point this season, “this is a fabulous looking coaster. It really, really hits the mark on what we like to do.”
Mr. Zimmerman, 57, on Jan. 1 succeeded Matt Ouimet as chief executive officer. He has personally ridden Steel Vengeance multiple times along with its sister coaster, Twisted Timbers, which opened a week ago at Cedar Fair’s Kings Dominion park near Doswell, Va. He said those who come to Cedar Point — which opened for the season on Saturday — will find the new coaster is nothing like its predecessor, the shaky, bone-rattling Mean Streak.
Steel Vengeance, he said, is exhilarating but an “incredibly smooth” ride.
And smooth easily describes Mr. Zimmerman steady journey to the top spot at Cedar Fair, the Sandusky-based operator of Cedar Point, 10 other amusement parks, three water parks, and four hotels.
Essentially, he has been on a two-year audition for the CEO role after becoming company president in October, 2016. Throughout that time and during a six-year stint as chief operating officer from 2011 to 2017, he has worked closely with Mr. Ouimet to foster and implement numerous initiatives designed to bring Cedar Fair up to speed with or exceed its competitors.
A 30-year veteran of the entertainment/leisure industry, Mr. Zimmerman began at Paramount Communications, starting on the financial side then moving to the amusement parks division and becoming general manager of Kings Dominion in 1998.
When Cedar Fair bought Paramount Parks in 2006 for $1.24 billion, Mr. Zimmerman stayed on, taking charge of Kings Dominion and Canada’s Wonderland park in Toronto. He moved to the executive suite as a vice president in 2010 then became chief operating officer a year later.
Then last October Mr. Ouimet announced he was moving into the chairman’s seat and Mr. Zimmerman would now take control of the CEO reins.
Mr. Ouimet, a former Disney Co. executive, had a clear vision when he became CEO in 2012 — to connect families, bring them to Cedar Fair’s parks and make them “laugh and smile.”
"We want to remind people that time with family, time with friends is precious. This is the place to spend it," he said six years ago. To that end, he emphasized family attractions, beefed up hotels and water parks, emphasized events at Halloween and Christmas, created a sports park complex in Sandusky, and implemented new technologies and digital platforms that made coming to parks easier.
Mr. Zimmerman said he still believes strongly in that business model.
“For me it all starts with the guest experience, giving our guests more as they come every day. I worked closely with Matt and the rest of the team as we forged our strategies over the years,” he said.
Mr. Zimmerman said he plans to provide an even deeper, broader, high-quality experience that resonates with guests to keeps them coming back.
“Steel Vengeance is a great example,” he said. “We could have built it a little smaller, a little less. But we build things to scale. So we think about how do we take something and build it up to scale where it produces that impact in the market, where it makes your experience that much more memorable so that not only do you want to do it today, you want to keep coming back and do it again and again.”
It would not be a stretch to say that there were enough initiatives and ongoing projects handed to Mr. Zimmerman on day one to keep him busy for the next five years.
The new Winterfest event, now in its third year, is showing so much success that a sixth park, Kings Dominion, will get the program. “More than half of our parks will be open now into December. That didn’t happen before,” Mr. Zimmerman said.
Knott’s Berry Farm in Los Angeles rolled out a new “Peanuts” Celebration event early this year. Snoopy and the gang proved such a huge success, the event likely will be implemented elsewhere, possibly Kings Island near Cincinnati this year, and other parks next year.
These events create “incremental audiences,” a term Mr. Zimmerman uses to describe financially impactful revenue streams that otherwise might not have occurred.
Cedar Fair is looking hard at creating those streams through a variety of events and programs, he said.
On the resort side, Cedar Fair broke ground this year on a Springhill Suites by Marriott in Charlotte and it’s close to announcing a new hotel in Toronto. Meanwhile, at the outdoor sports complex in Sandusky, the company is about to break ground on a new indoor sports complex.
Additionally, Cedar Fair hopes to give its flagship Cedar Point park an attendance boost via a new dedicated advertising campaign that will hit the Chicago area and other markets this season.
Cedar Point even has a new catch phrase: “It’s a place like no other.”
While events like Winterfest and the Peanuts Celebration, hotels, and new roller coasters will draw heavily on Mr. Zimmerman’s time this summer, he also has his own projects to pursue.
“You’ll hear us talk about data analytics and consumer insights. We’ve built a state of the art CRM [customer relationship management] platform to analyze who’s coming to our parks and how do we communicate with them,” he said.
“We’re going to look more and more into ‘How do we mine those consumer insights that can drive our business?’ You’ll hear us put a lot more definition around that as we move forward,” he said.
And he plans to focus on growth opportunities mostly at four of the company’s parks, Cedar Point, Carowinds near Charlotte, Knott’s Berry Farm, and California’s Great America near Santa Clara.
“The chain has performed really well. All the parks have done well, but those four in particular have helped drive our business,” Mr. Zimmerman said.
While the new CEO did not get into specifics as to what new products, attractions, or events those parks and the other Cedar Fair parks could expect, he did say the company will continue to provide a mix of both new technologies, such as virtual reality, and traditional thrill rides.
“VR is in its early phase. We think it’s going to progress very fast in terms of how it evolves. But we’re waiting for the technology to catch up with how we think it can be used in the guest experience,” Mr. Zimmerman said.
“So I think you’ll always see us look to evolve our approach to attractions and entertainment, but you’ll also see us do it in a way where we can have the impact on the most number of guests visiting our park,” he said.
“We like building things that create memories and deliver memorable experiences. Some of those experiences will be on big coasters,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “Some of these experiences will be with some of our events, like Halloween Haunt, which every year, you know, Saturdays in October are some of our biggest Saturdays of the year. It has tremendous appeal, so we keep reinvesting in the things our guests tell us they want.”
Contact Jon Chavez at jchavez@theblade.com or 419-724-6128.
First Published May 6, 2018, 2:00 p.m.
