When I moved out here, I think it took me a long time to get used to the fact that I worked for owners who had the ability to look at things long range … In Atlantic City I woke up every day and the mission was, how do I steal market share from my neighbor? And here all of a sudden it was, no, let’s think long term, let’s think about our employees, let’s think about the community. … If your numbers were good this quarter, or if your numbers were down that quarter, it was the end of the world or it was 70 degrees and sunny. “I really am a from-the-ground-up guy.”Ī: I had spent 28 years working in publicly traded companies, so everything that you did you did for shareholder value. “I’m not one of those managers that, you know, stepped into a place and said, hey, I learned all this stuff and I’m going to do this or do that,” he said.

He split his time between his own bar and the Golden Nugget until he and his brother sold the club and Ryan took a permanent job at the casino as food and beverage manager.įrom there, he worked his way into large leadership roles in a series of well-known Atlantic City casinos, including Trump’s Castle, the Taj Mahal, Resorts International and Trump Marina, where he helped transform the casino industry from what had been a place where old jazz singers and comedians retired, to a destination for top-tier entertainment, landing acts from Van Halen to Prince to Diana Krall.Īlthough he never finished college, Ryan has put his years of experience in the industry to use on the national faculty of the American Hotel Association and as a guest lecturer at Cornell University and the University of Delaware. Ryan said he was intimidated by the scale of the project, but said yes.

The casino, which had not yet opened, was asking for help setting up beverage service for the new property. Ryan, general manager and chief operating officer of the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio, grew up working in bars and restaurants in New Jersey and was running a nightclub with his brother in the late 1970s when Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget came calling. Although he had watched in fascination as some of the first large East Coast casinos were built, Paul Ryan’s own foray into the industry was purely an accident.

Fantasy resort and casino atlantic city