Tropicana Entertainment will emerge from the bankruptcy after filing two years with a new owner, and with little if any debt on the books. The new owner, billionaire Carl Icahn, will also pump millions into paying off creditors and upgrading Tropicana properties, according to the Las Vegas Sun. Employees will maintain their jobs, which was far from a certainty before and during the bankruptcy.

Tropicana’s nine casinos will pull in revenue of about $700 million, which does not match pre-recession numbers, but Tropicana Entertainment CEO Scott Butera says that the important thing is to be out of debt. Clearly revenue is down, Butera told the Sun, but the idea is to make money.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, Tropicana’s troubles can be traced back to former owner Bill Yung, who took a costly gamble when he purchased the Aztaca casino chain. Yung had been a purveyor of mid-level hotels, like the Marriott, and his purchase of the casino chain coincided with the onset of the recession.

Revenue increased by 77 percent, but costs to run the new facilities increased by several hundred percent. Yung responded by laying off employees and reducing overhead, which did not prove to mitigate the problems.

Service got worse, and complaints about service shortfalls shot up. In 2007, New Jersey regulators had also revoked the company’s license to operate the Tropicana in Atlantic City, forcing them to sell it off despite its profitability. Poor performance by Laughlin holdings, and a bad ski season added to wildfires near Tropicana holdings in Lake Tahoe pushed the casino company closer to the edge, the Las Vegas Sun said.

With $2.7 billion in debt from the casino purchase, and with the recession in full swing, the company had to file for bankruptcy. Though there were money-making portions of the business, they went into bankruptcy willingly, without negotiating with their lenders. As such, Tropicana had equal amounts of debts and assets, around $2.8 billion.

Butera went on to praise the bankruptcy process. This word, bankruptcy, frightens people. But it’s been incredibly beneficial for us, he told the Sun.

Other casino companies have avoided bankruptcy because of the tight restrictions it can lead to, the stigma that it holds in the eyes of investors and partners, and the opportunity it gives competitors.

Tropicana, on the other hand, needed to recover from fundamentally flawed management, Butera told the Sun. It also needed to repair its image in the eyes of industry regulators. Since the bankruptcy, Tropicana’s operations operate under completely new general managers and updated guidelines.

It was a bottom-up process. We literally had to deconstruct this company and rebuild it from scratch, Butera says. It was very, very challenging.