Ken Potrock, president of Orange County’s largest employer, the 34,000-cast member Disneyland Resort, doesn’t mind spending extra hours at work.
As part of the Business Journal’s eighth annual OC500 publication, we asked OC execs and community leaders questions such as their favorite local places to visit, and where you’re likely to find them outside the office.
Potrock, who was tapped to lead the 500-acre theme park in 2020, tells the Business Journal you’re most likely to find him outside work at “the new Tiana’s Palace restaurant in New Orleans Square enjoying the delicious house gumbo.”
He says his top place to visit in OC is the “Haunted Mansion, my favorite attraction, in Disneyland park during the holidays.”
Potrock’s not alone. Disneyland Resort in Anaheim has continued to report year-over-year growth in attendance and visitor spending, leading growth in the domestic parks segment which also includes Walt Disney World in Florida, according to parent Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), which last week reported its latest quarterly earnings.
For more on OC’s largest employers, see Katie Murar’s front-page story, and this week’s list on page 16.
Chad Lefteris, CEO of UCI Health, is seeing a major expansion of his group’s presence in Irvine, with a new hospital and medical complex under construction along Jamboree Road.
That expansion is one reason why UCI, No. 2 on this week’s employers list, saw a 5% boost in its workforce over the past year.
When asked for the OC500 what his biggest accomplishment for 2023 was, Lefteris told the Business Journal that it was “taking over 8,000 teammates to Disneyland to celebrate and thank this amazing team.”
When asked to name someone in OC he’d like to meet for lunch, Lefteris chose Ken Potrock.
We’re happy to pick up the tab for that power lunch, as long as fellow OC500 member and Business Journal Publisher Richard Reisman is also invited.
Subscribers to the Business Journal this week will receive their copy of the OC500, our annual directory of the biggest newsmakers in the local business community over the past year, along with the print edition of the newspaper.
Business Journal Editor at Large Rick Reiff, who moderated last week’s annual OC Community Indicators Report luncheon sponsored by the OC Business Council and OC Forum, had a pithily somber take on the findings: “We’re getting old, we’re losing population, we can’t afford our homes, we are losing folks to opioids and kids aren’t doing well in school.”
But Reiff struck a positive chord in referencing the county’s “innovative energy” exemplified by two companies profiled in last week’s edition of the paper: Alzheimer’s researcher NKGen Biotech, which recently went public, and flying-taxi developer Overair, which aims to have service up and running by the time of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Says Reiff: “The Jetsons have arrived.”
