Wavelengths Recovery
Detoxification, Residential & Outpatient Treatment
Warren Boyd, founder and CEO, has 30 years experience working in the industry. Warren understands that there is nothing pretty about addiction. Therefore, he believes that you have to take the person out of their environment and provide them with a safe and comfortable home that we would trust for any of our loved ones to go to.
Wavelengths understands that the path to sobriety can be challenging but it can also be a place where you grow into a happy and healthy person. You’ll be surrounded by caring people and experience treatment that is both uplifting and invigorating. Sobriety can be stimulating and tap into your desire to find happiness in experiential activities that do not involve substances.
The Wavelengths staff is very diverse. Many of our employees are former clients who bring their own unique skills and backgrounds to our treatment model. Coupled with our professional staff of licensed clinicians and medical providers, we are a blending of empathy, caring, strategy, and unwavering dedication to changing lives and sustaining success.
A.C. beckoned Boyd in the form of a 1997 phone call from Steve Wynn. The two had joined forces a decade earlier to spruce up part of Fremont Street in downtown Vegas. Now Wynn had a different idea: a 50-50 partnership in a new casino he wanted to put up in New Jersey. The 2,000-room Borgata would ultimately cost $1.1 billion. It was nice—stocked with 300-thread-count sheets, gold-tinted windows and 13 Dale Chihuly glass chandeliers—but still just another casino in an increasingly crowded city.
Back in Vegas, Boyd soon envisioned something even grander than the Borgata and readied plans to redevelop the Stardust, drawing up a blueprint for four hotels, a casino and a spa on a 63acre lot that would be rechristened Echelon Place.
Like the Borgata, the Echelon faced a slew of established competitors. The Mirage had opened in 1989, and since then the city added a number of upscale casinos, including the Luxor (1993), MGM Grand, (1993), the New York-New York (1996), the Bellagio (1998), the Venetian (1999) and the Wynn (2005).
Nevertheless, the Stardust was torn down, and by the time Boyd Gaming halted construction on the Echelon in 2008, it had already spent $1 billion. Estimates showed that completing it could cost at least five times that amount.
Boyd and Smith thought work on the Echelon could resume within a year. It never did. “It was worse than we thought it could be,” Smith says. “Three years later, we finally said, ‘Okay, it’s not three or four quarters. This thing isn’t getting any better.’ ” In 2013, the Malaysia-based casino company Genting Group bought the Echelon property for $350 million. “It was very disappointing. It was going to be the crown jewel of the company,” Boyd says. “As much as we didn’t want to stop construction, as much as we didn’t want to sell it, we knew that we had to in order to survive.”
Things were grim in Atlantic City, too. By 2013, more than a dozen states beyond Nevada and New Jersey had casino-style gambling, and total gaming revenue in A.C. had fallen from a record high of $5.2 billion in 2006 to under $3 billion. By one measure, the number of out-of-towners visiting A.C. fell by more than 20% in that same period. The Borgata wasn’t immune. Since 2006, its revenue had declined by almost a third, to roughly $700 million. Boyd and Smith decided to walk away, dealing its 50% stake to MGM Resorts for $900 million in 2016.
With the luxury plans gone, Boyd returned to what had made his company successful in the first place: cheap casinos serving low-stakes gamblers. Rather than expand in crowded Vegas, Boyd cast his eye around America. Building new casinos would require a level of risk he no longer wanted to stomach; besides, he had Smith at his side emphasizing new construction’s drain on their barely recovered cash flow. Better to grow through acquisitions.
In the last six years, Boyd Gaming has purchased 13 casinos, spending $2.9 billion. To make those deals, Smith studied the numbers on prospective purchases and targeted casinos with $10 million to $15 million in Ebitda, eventually moving on to ones closer to $20 million—basically pinpointing places that dominated their local area. “If there are five competitors in the market, we don’t want to buy the fifth [best] asset or the fourth [best] asset,” he says.
The little gambling empire now stretches from Pennsylvania (the Valley Forge Casino Resort) to Illinois (the Par-a-Dice) to Louisiana (Sam’s Town Shreveport). In October, Boyd Gaming completed its latest deal, a $575 million purchase of four casinos in Missouri, Indiana and Ohio from Pinnacle Entertainment.
“They’ve put some good financial rigor around what they’re doing,” says David Katz, the Jefferies analyst. Wall Street is upbeat on Boyd Gaming; a majority of analysts suggest buying the stock. Observers see the rural casinos as less susceptible to broad changes in consumer spending. Vegas, on the other hand, proved vulnerable in the 2008 recession—the economy there shrank for three years straight, a year longer than the country as a whole.
Boyd and Smith now meet several times a week, frequently on the floor of one of the Vegas casinos. They find an empty card table and light up cigars, usually long, fat Churchills. “That’s where we go over all of our business,” Boyd says.
despite his advancing age, much of Boyd’s life is unchanged. He still drives a Mercedes sedan that has ECHELON spelled out on its vanity plates. “I always ask, ‘Dad, why don’t you take those off?’” his daughter Marianne says. “He says, ‘It just reminds me that everything doesn’t always go perfect.’” Boyd has never sold a share of Boyd Gaming since it went public, and he lived in the same house for 40 years before recently moving closer to Boyd Gaming’s offices. “I’ve had friends ask, ‘That’s your grandfather?’ ” recalls his 31-year-old grandson Sam Boyd Jr., an HR executive at the company. “They’re expecting something super-elaborate, like bodyguards.”
Higher up in the company are two more Boyds, Marianne and her brother Willie. She is vice chairman, he is a vice president, and both sit on the board with their father. Those three Boyds control a sizable portion of Boyd Gaming stock, about 26% of the firm. Neither Marianne nor Willie sees a time when a Boyd isn’t leading the business. “Willie and I will probably try our best to carry on that sort of family feeling within the company,” Marianne says.
And they have plenty of their dad in them.
“I think it would really, really help the company a lot if we had a property on the Strip,” Marianne says. “Because people—that’s what they want to do when they’re in these smaller towns and they like to gamble. They want to come to the big city, and I think they would like to be on the Strip.”
The thought is almost impossible for her to shake once she brings it up. “I’d love to just have a property on the Strip one day,” she repeats.
“I would too,” Willie says.
Then, as if suddenly reminded of her father’s travails, she adds, “If the price is right.”
“at the beginning of our existence, my dad and i were risktakers, and you needed that.”