Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question is from the line of Larry Clapton with Chasterlane (ph).
Unidentified Analyst
Hey. I hope I won you guys a bet.
Gordon Kanofsky
Hi Larry. The new phone seems to work as well as the old one.
Unidentified Analyst
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Couple of questions, one here. When you have the hotel and everything going in Colorado, what kind of potential do you see at that place? What would be your very happy number, as far as bottom-line for that property?
Thomas Steinbauer
Well, that's I mean, historically what we've talked about is a return on our investment is around 15-16% there. And if you look at our total investment with the project we're just completing at 235 million. We're approaching about 440 -- 430, $420 million of total investments. So I guess you could take those two numbers and kind of come up with your own number.
Unidentified Analyst
Alright, now that's helpful. You've done a great job cutting expenses and bringing up margins. Do you guys have a lot more room to improve margins throughout the company or are we getting closed on that?
Gordon Kanofsky
I think it'll be a little bit more challenging in the third and fourth quarter, because some of the cost savings that we began to put in place last year in the third quarter will catch up to us on the comps. But there's always some seasonality to the margins.
First quarter is very much always the strongest. It’s just our strongest quarter overall. And so, we'll always see some fluctuation. It could be one, two or three points, depending upon the seasonality of the quarter. And then there's some things that we can't always control, like large claims in the health plan, the deferred compensation expense, largely as a function of what goes on in the stock market. I wish I could control that. But I don't.
Unidentified Analyst
We want to keep it going up, up, up, right?
Gordon Kanofsky
Yeah. Not at a lot of expense, but it'll be a good thing for everybody I think. So those things can also cause some shifts of one or two percentage points. I think margins are just an incredibly difficult thing to predict.
If there is some seasonality trends as we said. But I think the thing to look at is what is our year-over-year performance doing? I think we're doing quite well and looking at us again some of the competitors. I mean I think we're seven to eight points perhaps, higher than some of our competitors. There's others that are right in there with us within a point or two and that some of that as I say can be just fluctuations in what the gaming tax rates are.
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