By 6 a.m. most days, Kenna Beaver is already at her desk. It’s not just coffee that gets her there.
As senior vice president of products and services for Las Vegas-based House Advantage, she has two big jobs: overseeing the company’s HALo suite of loyalty solutions, now in 80 markets around the world, and doing the same for HA’s subsidiary, eTouchMenu, acquired by CEO Jon Wolfe in 2017.
Any given day, Beaver may be meeting customers, doing product demos, learning a new software architecture, overseeing HALo custom builds, and generally managing the product life cycle from end to end.
At the same time, she and her team are busy growing HALo’s footprint outside the non-gaming space and bringing eTouchMenu deeper inside.
More coffee, please.
A Houston native, Beaver grew up in Las Vegas and spent most of her career in marketing—for MGM Grand, Green Valley Ranch, even Hooters. That was followed by three years at Choctaw casinos in Oklahoma, where she introduced the HALo platform to the organization’s eight tribal casino resorts and associated businesses.
In May 2017, in search of a new challenge, she made the big leap from operations to supply.
“I had never been exposed to the technical side, but coming from marketing and operations I understood how customers would use a particular platform,” she says. Though sometimes daunted by the complex technological tools and the associated jargon, she also was undeterred. “I’m someone who loves to constantly learn,” Beaver says. “That’s when I’m at my best.”
Now it’s part of her job to make it all sound simple. As a loyalty management system, HALo “brings all your data together from a brand perspective and allows you to lay out a marketing strategy from A to Z,” at the corporate level and also based on individual property needs. She calls eTouchMenu a “line-busting” solution, a DIY digital kiosk that enables patrons to reserve a place at the buffet, pay for it with a loyalty card or credit card, and return to the gaming floor until they’re ready for that prime rib.
Beaver looks back on 2018 with pride. “We’ve taken on a new company, learned how to merge the two, and expanded some of our development footprint. I think us coming together as a team has really been a gratifying aspect of it for me, and it’s been personally satisfying from a quality-assurance standpoint, testing and creating the user interface experience and really pushing it at every level. There’s nothing that we can’t do at House Advantage, and we strive for that here.”
With offices in Reno, Memphis and Macau as well as Vegas, “we’re always looking to expand markets,” Beaver says. “As we continue to move our eTouchMenu product from outside gaming, we’re also moving our HALo platform into non-gaming loyalty as well.
“I’ve never worked harder in my life; it’s non-stop, but I’ve never been happier. Hey, it’s nice to have a 9-to-5 life so you’re free to do other things, but I love where I am right now.”
