Old Saybrook — If experience matters, and in the gaming and hospitality business it’s pretty much a given that it does, The Hartmann Group has a lot to offer.

For starters, there’s the firm’s namesake.

Jeff Hartmann, founder and chief executive officer, launched his gaming career with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe in 1991, before the tribe’s Foxwoods Resort Casino opened, and spent more than 15 years at Mohegan Sun, serving by turns as chief financial officer, chief operating officer and finally chief executive officer.

Soon after his 2012 departure, he founded The Hartmann Group, landing Revel, the then-troubled Atlantic City casino, as a client.

For six months in 2013, Hartmann toiled as Revel’s interim CEO, leading it through a prepackaged bankruptcy. He then pitched a Mississippi project to the Mashantuckets, who announced in June 2016 that they would partner with Hartmann and others to develop the $265 million Foxwoods Resort Casino at Biloxi Pointe. At the time, Hartmann called his firm's contract to manage the Biloxi casino “a big step forward.”

In an interview last week in his firm's offices in the Saybrook Junction Marketplace on Boston Post Road, Hartmann said financing for the project should be in place by the end of the year.

Hartmann has assembled a team whose members have considerable experience, much of it with southeastern Connecticut’s gaming tribes and their casinos. 

Mike Bean, The Hartmann Group’s president, joined the firm after more than a decade at Mohegan Sun Pocono, the Mohegan Tribe’s commercial racetrack casino in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where he was president from September 2012 until his resignation in May 2016. He said he left the Pennsylvania casino to work on some projects with Hartmann, particularly the Biloxi project, and formally joined The Hartmann Group this spring.

A Norwich native, Bean previously held positions with Harrah’s Entertainment, Boyd Gaming and Foxwoods.

Paul Brody, The Hartmann Group’s vice president for strategy, has dealt extensively with Indian tribes and served as the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority’s vice president of corporate development for a decade. In that capacity, he coordinated the Mohegans’ bid for a Palmer, Mass., resort casino, a project local voters shot down in 2013.

Chris Wilks, vice president of finance and analytics, spent 13 years at Mohegan Sun, while Justin Tesler, operations analyst, began his career at Foxwoods. Dan Garrow, chief technology officer, has more than 40 years’ experience in several industries, about half of it in gaming and hospitality, including a stint at Mohegan Sun. He is a member of upstate New York's St. Regis Mohawk Tribe.

The Hartmann Group has relationships with “strategic partners” with expertise in digital gaming, database analytics, marketing, retail development and Native American finance.

“We want to leverage all of our collective experience,” Bean said. “We have a lot of complementary talents.”

He said the firm is targeting three areas: advising gaming tribes; resort casino development and management; and consulting on casino amenities, including food-and-beverage, retail and entertainment.

“We can address all aspects of an operation,” Hartmann said.

Brody, who, interestingly, also serves as president and CEO of Mountain Dairy in Storrs, said The Hartmann Group can fill a niche related to Indian gaming’s evolution. After emerging in the late 1980s, mostly in western states, federally regulated Indian gaming grew rapidly in the ’90s as laws increasingly served to facilitate it.

“That led to an educational revolution on reservations,” Brody said. “Then came the recession in 2007 that stood the whole industry on its head. But by 2010, many tribal members were educated, they’d gotten degrees and the expectation was that tribal governments were ready to take over (casino managmement).”

Now, Brody said, tribes need help sustaining their revenue streams.

That’s exactly what The Hartmann Group can do for another of its clients, the Chehalis Tribe of Washington state, owners of the 22-year-old Lucky Eagle Casino. Facing new competition from the nearby Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s ilani Casino Resort — developed and managed, ironically enough, in partnership with the Mohegans — the Chehalis Tribe enlisted the firm.

“They asked us to take a look at the operation and report back to the tribal council,” Hartmann said. “We start by listening to tribes and processing what they have to say.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com