The new CEO of one of Nevada’s best-known companies — gaming equipment maker IGT — says he and his team are only on Chapter 1 of the story of the company’s return to prominence.
IGT CEO Hector Fernandez was tapped for the job in December 2024, but had to wait a full year to take over because of a non-compete clause he had as CEO of his former employer, Las Vegas gaming equipment rival Aristocrat Gaming, a subsidiary of Australia’s Aristocrat Leisure Ltd.
That whole year of not working gave Fernandez an opportunity to take up other things in his life, reflect – and plan for the challenge of bringing IGT back from the global gaming conglomerate run by Italian executives from its London headquarters to a new Las Vegas unit still known for producing the 30-year-old classic Wheel of Fortune slots.
“I remember thinking when I had to sit out a year, because I’d never worked, I thought, ‘This is going to be terrible.’ And that was the first month. It was pretty bad,” Fernandez said in an interview at IGT’s southwest Las Vegas headquarters.
But Fernandez said he got through it by embracing three things he felt he needed to do better.
Getting in shape
“I got physically fit,” he said. “Part of doing this job is hard, and you have a lot of working dinners and stuff, but because I had the time I got physically fit, which is really important.
“The other thing is that I got mentally fit. When you run a business, you’re on the go all the time. And it can be a very reactive role because those are the issues you’re facing today.”
Since Fernandez had time, he was able to research and plan for the future.
“So I basically spent the whole year training, and then I would have these blank pieces of paper that I would tape to the wall and I would write down ideas, and I would write down thoughts, and I would do a lot of analysis about the industry,” he said.
“I could still read what I wanted. And I formulated the plan, the strategy and the execution for this job. I couldn’t compete, but I could use my brain. That’s what I did. And since the last thing I did, as I call it, I got emotionally fit.”
The emotional training part involved spending time with family members.
He went on one-on-one trips with his daughter, his son, and his wife. Then he explored some of his past.
“I went with my two sisters and I took us back to Guatemala, to all the little towns we’d never been to, to where our parents grew up. And then we did some family vacations,” he said. “The emotional part of it made me have this reset moment around prioritization. So one of the things that I feel like I’m much better at now and I’m pretty ruthless about is prioritization. Because you realize you can be sucked into work all the time, but you have to prioritize the things that are important.”
The importance of family
The connection to family is extremely important to Fernandez, who credits his mother with instilling in him the drive he needed to be educated and become a successful businessman.
“My mother created this vision of the art of the possible,” he said. “She drove us around with her friends who had a car to nice neighborhoods and she said, ‘Do you want to live in that house?’ and I could see in the back yard that they had a water slide. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, did we win the lottery?’ It might have been the first time I thought about games. “Is that what just happened here?” And she said, ‘No, no, no, this is a place where you can live one day.'”
The reality was that Fernandez’s family were typically poor immigrants and did not have a car. The principal of the public school he and his sisters attended recognized them as bright students and worked with their mother to get scholarships to attend a private school. But to get to school every day they had to go and make three public bus transfers to get there.
“I dreaded taking the bus. I dreaded it. I dreaded going to private school. I dreaded it. But for me it was a means to an end,” he said.
College life
It paid off.
Fernandez’s good grades allowed him to win financial aid to attend Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts school in Southern California that has a reputation for being one of the hardest to get into. He studied economics with a minor in accounting and government and then earned an MBA from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business where he also became a certified public accountant.
Early in his career, Fernandez held senior positions at Deloitte, Procter & Gamble, Amgen and Western Digital.
In November 2018, Fernandez left Western Digital in Irvine, California, after a four-year career there to become CFO of the Americas for Aristocrat in Las Vegas. After spending time as president of the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Aristocrat, Fernandez was named CEO there in March 2022. After nearly three years at that, Apollo Global Management, which became the new owner of IGT in July 2024, came calling.
The former owners of IGT, key players in the Italian lottery industry, announced in February 2024 that they would spin off their non-lottery business and merge it with another Las Vegas game manufacturing company, Everi Holdings. The new IGT-Everi combination would be based in Las Vegas under CEO Vince Sadusky and the lottery business would be a new entity overseas.
But about a month after the spinoff announcement, Apollo Global, the parent company of The Venetian and Palazzo, agreed to pay more for the new company and closed the deal. Fernandez resigned from Aristocrat knowing he had a one-year sit-out to complete.
Now that it’s over, Fernandez can start writing the new IGT story. He gathered IGT employees for town hall-style meetings.
“So in the initial town hall, one of the things that we talked about was that we’re writing a novel together and we’re on Chapter 1,” Fernandez said. “So the novel hasn’t been written. The introduction has been written and it’s essentially Apollo buying two-thirds of IGT’s public assets and putting them together.
“That’s kind of the opening of the book. And we talked about how we’re not going to try to replicate a culture where any of us have worked before, but we have this unique opportunity, which is such a cool job, to build the culture that we want.”
The five C’s
Fernandez told employees that he did not want a remake of what IGT did 10 years ago, but to install five C’s in the business.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Culture is No. 1. Capability is No. 2. Content is No. 3. Commercialization is No. 4. And cash flow generation is No. 5, in that order, by the way.”
Nailing the company culture comes first, and Fernandez has some ideas about what that is.
“The easiest way I can think of to define culture is when you wake up in the morning and think about going to work, what’s the first feeling and emotion you get?” he said. “Is it a feeling of dread? Is it a feeling of anxiety? Is it a feeling of anticipation? Is it a feeling of excitement? I have this rule that if three out of five days you dread going to work, it’s time to find something you need to do. Life is too short to dread going to work.”
Just because IGT isn’t going to be like it was a decade ago doesn’t mean it’s going to throw away past successes.
Wheel of Fortune
Fernandez admitted when he was with Aristocrat that he coveted IGT’s Wheel of Fortune slots.
“I think Wheel of Fortune has a long run,” Fernandez said. “And I think as a company we need to get better at innovating Wheel of Fortune. There’s so much opportunity there. I was jealous of Wheel of Fortune when I was in my previous position. I wanted it. I saw the value. And now I have a responsibility to do that, to imagine that dream and make it come true.”
Fernandez believes Wheel of Fortune is still successful because the game show is still on television and it hasn’t changed format over the years, even though it changed hosts. IGT did not see a drop in popularity when Pat Sajak retired and Ryan Seacrest took over as host. Slots players still love co-host Vanna White, and she continues to interact with slots players on certain occasions. Due to its long run, the game has legions of fans of all ages, allowing its popularity to endure.
His Southern California roots have led him to become a sports fan of LA teams – the Rams, Dodgers and Lakers. He also loves the Olympics and, despite not being a big hockey guy growing up, has become a fan of the Vegas Golden Knights.
While Fernandez is intense in the workplace, he still considers family life and giving back to the community among his best qualities.
“I’m very committed to helping my family and other people as well,” he said. “So I’m really big on giving back, not just money, but time and effort and energy.”
Fernandez was recently elected to the national board of the Alzheimer’s Association and is a board member of the American Gaming Association and the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College. He regrets that his mother didn’t get a chance to see all the success she helped him achieve.
“My mother passed away four years ago from early onset Alzheimer’s, and she didn’t get to see this,” he said. “But I think she’s looking down. I think about her and I think about the responsibility I have for her.”
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