Leadership Corner: Jerry Pupillo
Interviewed by Andrew Gomes
Advertiser Staff Writer
Name: Jerry Pupillo
Age: 36
Title: General manager
Organization: Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park
Born: Munster, Ind.
College: Hawaii Loa College; Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management
First job: Working a shovel in his father's refractory business
Breakthrough job: Hawaiian Waters, where Pupillo was the first of about 300 employees, hired and started as sales and marketing director
Little-known fact: Hasn't missed a day of work since 1986
Major challenge: Managing the unmanageables, like the cost of insurance and water
Book recently read: The Power of Focus: How to Hit Your Business, Personal and Financial Targets with Absolute Certainty
Hobbies: Surfing, scuba diving, fishing for tako
Mentor: Osamu Ozaki, head of Best International Marketing Group
Q. You recently added a new ride, Da' FlowRider stationary-wave machine, that's the first of several additions under a five-year expansion plan. What's been the consumer response?
A. So far it's been great. ... It was sort of our fear how the surfing community would buy into it. A lot of current pros or ex-pros from different disciplines from surfing to skimboarding have come out and tried it out, and they're coming back, too.
Q. Has the ride met, exceeded or fallen short of initial expectations?
A. I think from the excitement level it's exceeded.
Q. How do you expect the FlowRider to affect longer-term park attendance?
A. The longer-term plan is actually to create an evening show with sort of the Flowrider as the main stage. ...
Q. What's next in the expansion plan?
A. Eighteen-hole miniature golf. The plans are being finalized for that right now. ... We'd like to put in a fitness center. ... We've talked about maybe doing a drive-in theater.
Q. Any other water rides?
A. Primarily a giant flume family ride where you'd probably have four to six people in a round raft. Or like a giant whirlpool or toilet bowl. Tornado is what they call 'em. It's a giant bowl that you ride a raft on. You sort of take off on a straight flume or get put into this large drum or toilet bowl, you swirl around in that and gravity takes you down and you get flushed through a giant hole into your ending spot.
Q. How do some of the new rides like the tornado get designed? Are you involved with that?
A. ... Basically each year there is a water park convention and we go and are on the lookout for their latest and greatest slides. They come up with a major new concept once every two or three years.
Q. I saw the company's mission statement: "We are fun!" How much fun did you imagine it would be running a water park in Hawai'i when you applied for the job?
A. I felt it was something I really wanted to do. I knew it would be fun. I knew it would be a lot of work. It's a job like anything else. But there is a lot of satisfaction. We're not selling widgets here, we are offering fun and it's a continued challenge to make sure that everybody that comes into the gates has fun.
Q. How much of a challenge was opening the park in 1999?
A. It took an incredible amount of energy. But because Hawai'i was looking for something like this, there was an excitement level — when Hawai'i opens up something (people) go and flock to it because it gives them a new offering. The challenge is always reinventing what we have and adding to what we have to keep the kama'aina market excited.
Q. How challenging was it to meet initial attendance goals?
A. The first seven months, it was new, everyone was excited about it. In 2000 we came back and put in a new ride and had a very strong year. In 2001, we were on a great pace and then (the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks shocked Hawai'i tourism). From that point we really went into a survival mode. We did whatever we could to keep it safe, keep it lean and still provide the fun that we could. Through 2002 and halfway through 2003 it was really a survival mode. From that point we started to map out our next five years, and fortunately the numbers have come back, and that's why now we're looking at this growth mode.
Q. What specifically did you do in response to the drop in tourism after Sept. 11, 2001?
A. We buttoned down every aspect that we could. We internalized anything that we might have been outsourcing, controlled our labor, watched our hours of operation. We asked more of the managers and supervisors to cover some of the hourly things. We looked at every line item in our budget and made sure that we weren't wasting in any areas. By that we cut our expenses by almost 30 percent. And then we focused on driving that top line ... continue to push on the sales side. We feel so fortunate and thankful to the kama'aina market. They continued to come back.
The tourist market we knew we just had to ride it out.
Q. What's the ratio of kama'aina to tourist attendance?
A. 70-30.
Q. Now that tourism and the West O'ahu population are growing, what's had a more significant impact on the park?
A. They both have been very, very important. We do 50 percent of our business in the summer. We do a tremendous amount of our local business in that time frame, and on weekends the rest of the year. There's a heavy reliance on (tourists for) our weekday business.
Q. What's your next challenge?
A. Growing the company beyond just what we are — a water park here in Hawai'i. What I want is to reach beyond the confines and take our skill sets and apply those beyond. One of the things we have done is secured a contract in Fremont, Calif. There's a start-up water park there and we'll actually be management consultants to the City of Fremont when they open up this water park. We'll go in, we'll hire staff, we'll train staff, we'll work with them to develop their standard operation procedures.
