Yarbrough: Slot Machine Entrepreneur

Jon Yarbrough has always had a love of games, a love that he parlayed into a job where he could always be around them – slot machine games that is. Yarbrough runs Video Gaming Technologies, a slot machine leasing company. He leases the slot machines to Native American Tribes to use in their slot machine casinos.

Yarbrough just received the 2006 Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year Award as well. His slot machine leasing company is one of the US’s fastest growing private companies. Two years after Yarbrough first started Video Gaming; he was out of money and had to sell the technology that had been developed so far. After working for someone else, and then finding himself very depressed, Yarbrough decided to do something about it. He attended a motivational seminar and it led him to resurrect Video Gaming. After meeting with them, three slot machine operators in South Carolina gave him the money to start making more.

His offices now are actually in a different state due to anti-slot machine laws in several states. He manufactures the slot machines in Michigan, and has his offices in Tennessee. It is illegal to make slot machines in Tennessee, which is why he has to build them in Michigan. He tried getting Tennessee to allow for slot machines to be manufactured there, even if they cannot be played there, but to no avail.

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