Whether it is the Coral Sea Waterworld Resort in Egypt, Wet’n’Wild Las Vegas or any number of Disney cruise ships, if you’ve taken your family to a waterslide park, chances are good that the slides were designed and built by WhiteWater West.
From a single waterslide park that he built in Penticton in 1981, founder and CEO Geoff Chutter has built his Richmond-headquartered company into an amusement industry powerhouse that employs a workforce of 650, generates $200 million a year in sales and has built some of the world’s largest water parks.
The company is working its largest contract to date: a $35 million order for a new waterslide park in China.
“This is the hottest company in our industry, WhiteWater,” said Jim Pattison Jr., son of B.C. billionaire Jim Pattison and president of Jim Pattison Group’s Ripley Entertainment Inc. in Florida.
The two B.C. businessmen are both involved in the family amusement space, so Pattison has gotten to know Chutter over the years, mostly from seeing him at international trade events.
“Geoff has built – and is building – one of the most significant family attraction companies in our business,” Pattison said.
From his office at WhiteWater’s corporate head office in East Richmond, the 63-year-old former accountant can look out across a field to see the Lafarge cement plant where his father worked as an engineer. In 1966, the French cement company moved the Chutter family to Paris, where Chutter went to high school.
After France, his family moved back to B.C., then to Toronto, where Chutter attended the University of Toronto and then went to work with KPMG as a chartered professional accountant.
In 1980, B.C.’s first waterslide park opened in Kelowna. Chutter’s uncle, Philip Chutter, had done some mechanical consulting work on the project and brought his nephew up one weekend to see the place. The younger Chutter quickly decided that his first business venture would be to build and operate a waterslide park.
Chutter and his uncle assembled $1 million worth of land and raised $1.5 million to build the park.
The waterslide opened in 1981. Since waterslides were a new thing, they had to do most of the manufacturing themselves, and the expertise they developed quickly turned into a secondary business.
“That first summer, there ended up being four different groups come through the park, saw it and said, ‘I’d like to do this in my hometown. Could you do the engineering and could you sell us waterslides?’” Chutter said.
They landed contracts right away to build waterslides for four other parks, and, by 1983, Chutter sold out to focus on manufacturing. It was good timing on his part, because the waterslide business was still in its infancy.
“We happened to be in a business where the industry had first started,” Chutter said. “We were lucky enough to be founding members of the whole industry.”
Competitors eventually came along, but WhiteWater managed to keep its competitive edge by doing things bigger and better.
“He’s constantly pushing the envelope as to what’s new, what’s next,” Pattison said. “Geoff’s always pushing his company to be at the front of the curve. They’re always pushing new products, new technologies, new materials, new destinations.”
Over the years, the company has continued to diversify, largely through acquisitions.
In 1987, the company added wave-generating technology for wave pools when it acquired with a North Vancouver company that had developed the technology.
It also acquired a California company that had developed a stationary surfing machine, and diversified into the “dry” amusement space.
It diversified its markets as well. WhiteWater West doesn’t build just land-based waterslide parks – it has also built water-play features for 32 cruise ships, including all the Disney cruise ships.
The company also turns up in some unexpected places. All the signs at Petro-Canada gas stations across Canada, for instance, are made by WhiteWater.
“So we’ve diversified within the water park industry, we’ve diversified wet and dry, and diversified vertically – cradle to grave in terms of the services provided – and the fourth axis for us is geographically,” Chutter said.
Ninety-eight per cent of the company’s business is outside of Canada, with China providing the biggest market – about 40% of sales.
The company has 21 offices and bureaus around the world. It does some of the manufacturing in India, Bahrain, Tennessee, Ontario and the Philippines. Locally, it does much of the manufacturing in Kelowna.
Once all the components are built, WhiteWater typically sends a supervising team to assist with the assembly.
WhiteWater’s manufacturing process is based on the Japanese “kaizen” – continuous improvement – approach, something Chutter picked up from a book about the Toyota Motor Corp.
“Sometimes I’ve made changes here, and I get the guys to roll their eyes and they say, ‘Oh Gee, Geoff’s read another book,’” Chutter said. “I’m not a person who reads a ton of books. But on some of these ones, they’ve had a pretty [powerful] effect on the company.”
One way that WhiteWater manages to stay ahead of the curve is investing in research and development and innovation. The company even employs a professional “playologist” who advises the company on how to design features that appeal to the inner child.
“We have invested a silly amount of money on new products,” Chutter said. “Arguably, we’ve stretched too much on that. But I’m quite confident those products are going to be game-changers.”
A longtime Conservative party member, Chutter took a stab at politics in 1993, running in Vancouver Quadra. He lost, but remained active with the party as a director for his riding association. He ran again in 1997, lost, and has since shelved his political ambitions.
Just last year, Chutter’s oldest son, Paul, joined the company – something neither thought would ever happen. Chutter said he was never interested in building a “family” dynasty.
“We have never, ever talked about a career here at all,” Chutter said. “It’s fundamentally something I don’t totally support.”
His wife, Erin Chutter, has a business background and could easily have come to work for WhiteWater, but instead is the CEO of a junior mining company.
Paul Chutter, who is vice-president of sales operations and corporate development, was an accomplished lawyer who took a pay cut to work for his father’s business. After earning a law degree from the University of London, Paul Chutter joined UBS, an investment bank in London. Before joining WhiteWater last year, he had been working in Toronto for UBS as director of the Canadian desk for UBS Europe.
Chutter has two other children, ages 19 and 14. When he’s not travelling – and he’s rarely not travelling these days – Chutter likes to spend long weekends at the 16,000-acre cattle ranch in the Merritt area that his father bought after he left Lafarge. But he doesn’t get a whole lot of time to play weekend cowboy these days because of all the travel.
“I’ve never travelled as much as this year,” he said. “End of September, I hit super-elite, which is over 100,000 miles in a year. I’ve never done that before in 35 years.”
It’s not that Chutter is flying all over the world as the company’s head salesman. It has more to do with customer relations.
“You sign a $30 million contract, you know what? The CEO should get off his keister and go and say, ‘Thank you.’”
