iGaming Daily

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If you've ever felt like a big decision is weighing you down, don't worry, you're not alone. The weight of leadership in any industry is heavy and iGaming is no exception. When teams look towards leadership every day for big product, compliance or financial decisions, there's understandably a lot of pressure and our guest today has experienced that weight and is using his experience to help others help others with an honest, peer-led approach. Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement solution for sports betting and iGaming operators. I'm Charlie Horner, and today I'm joined by SBC's media director, Martin Elliott and the founder of iGaming leader, Leo Judkins. Leo, thanks ever so much for joining us today. How are you? I'm great. Thank you very much, Charlie. ah Great intro as well. Love it. Fantastic. And Martin, thanks for joining me as well. How are you doing? Yeah, very well. Thanks, Charlie. I mean, I've made the long journey up the stairs from my office to the studio. So yeah, not a hardship at all to have a chat with you and Leo. Leo and I have had a uh few meetings in the past few months about various things and I can pretty much guarantee the audience this is going to be very interesting. Fantastic. Well, no pressure, Leo. em Okay, let's kick things off and let's, how about you start us off Leo by just outlining some of your own experiences of leadership and talk to us a little bit about some of the main pain points and struggles that you've faced that uh inspired you to start iGaming Leader. Yeah, thanks Charlie. So I loved your intro actually, because one of the things I always love saying is that our mess becomes our message. And that was certainly true for me as well. Uh, started in the industry quite, uh, quite early on, uh, or poker days before, before the FBI came and like, uh, rated full tilt and poker stars. Uh, I was working at a company called, uh, poker strategy and, um, moved over to Gibraltar. I loved it, progressed really quickly in my career. Um, left the industry for a little bit and then moved, uh, moved to sports betting and casino side or operate side. Um, at bed Victor was promoted to director at 33 and. left there five years ago, resigned from that directorship and started this business. I've always uh progressed pretty quickly in my career because I like working really hard. quite passionate. But one of the things that I noticed is that as I was progressing and I was getting more and more responsibility, it also becomes a lot lonelier in your role, right? You have to make decisions by yourself. There aren't as many people to talk to anymore. As you As you get promoted, obviously your mates all of a sudden are your team, right? They're the people that you've got to manage and maybe you have to have difficult conversations with them about performance or perhaps even redundancies. Um, and who do you talk to at that level? You know, that's, that's really hard. And it's something that, uh, I really struggled with and it's translated itself. Me in late nights, uh, waking up at 3 AM in the morning with my head racing. drinking way too much. was drinking every evening just to, you know, switch off. And I didn't know how to get out of it without having to, well, feeling that I had to sacrifice my career, everything that we built up. And then I took a coach, turned it around, lost a lot of weight. And yeah, loads of people started asking how I did it. And that's kind of where this idea started for what we've built now, Mastermind, and why I resigned. and ultimately started my business to help other people achieve sustainable high performance as well. really interesting backstory and uh I'd like to bring Martin in now and uh it'd be slightly awkward because you are my iGaming leader, guess, terms of leading our team. So do you sort of resonate with what Leo said there in terms of that sort of weight and the pressure of being in a leadership position? Very, very much so. And I'm uniquely on the spot here because you have the ability to tell me I'm talking rubbish from your own experience, of course. I do. The further up you go, decisions seem bigger. So if you're working in one of these editorial roles, which is most of my background throughout my career, you're decisions every half an hour. Should you publish that? Is that a good story to work with? All that kind of thing. They're all quite small, those decisions. don't... you've forgotten about them in an hour's time, generally speaking, unless you've made a very bad one and the lawyers get involved, but that doesn't happen very often. But as you start managing bigger teams and you start having more commercial responsibilities and people are asking you about targets and that kind of thing in the business, it does get more difficult. Or in my case, I know I can't speak for anyone else, but become a bit less certain in my decision making. So on the smaller stuff, easy. Second nature, I can probably make those decisions without really thinking about them too much. But this bigger stuff is em difficult to have that confidence yourself. em One of the things I talk about a lot when I do reviews with our staff is that I say to people, come and ask me lots of stuff. You come and ask me to what decision you should make, but 95 % of the time, you already know what the right answer is. You just need somebody to give you that reassurance. And the further up you go, there are less people to give you that reassurance above you. And, you know, typically they don't have time to get involved in all those decisions and so on. So, um yeah, life just gets a bit more stressful. that's great because that's such a great example. I think that's one of the big challenges, isn't it? Where Your bosses expect you to have it figured out, but you don't have anybody to talk to about it anymore. And then you're 80 % certain that it's the right decision or 90 % certain. And that last little 10%, right. You have nobody to talk to about it. And that means that those decisions are just going to take longer to take because you're not 100 % convinced that you're able to pull the trigger. I think that's the hard bit. That's the stuff that really weighs on us, right? That's the stuff that you take home and that you wake up with at night and Is that true for you as well? The waking up in the middle of the night and wondering whether I've made the right decision or actually slightly more often I wake up and question why I haven't made the decision yet, some of the bigger stuff. yeah, that's a very, very familiar scenario. yeah, there are lots of big decisions that have to be made in those leadership positions. In iGaming that can be people-based decisions, can be financial decisions, maybe it's product and compliance decisions. So Leo, how do you deal with those stressful situations and how often do people struggle in those situations? Yeah, think, I mean, it does happen a lot. And of course our industry is super fast paced and you know, depending on where you work in the industry, there's always regulatory changes. There's always commercial pressures. There's always, right there, It's just, it's, it is nonstop. And so what happens to most of us is that we're constantly firefighting, especially when you're then at, you know, a level where you need to make strategic decisions when you're constantly firefighting and perhaps managing two levels down, that becomes really difficult because you're not doing the stuff that you're actually paid for, right? You paid for strategic decision making, but you have to fight those fires all the time. And so So I've had, um, I've, burnt out twice in my twenties and, uh, wasn't, wasn't ideal. Wasn't great. But one of the things that I realized the second time that it's not so much like often it's not so much about the stress itself. It's more, and it's not so much about the decisions and the pressure it's more or the amount of hours. It's more about the weight of those hours. If that makes sense. If you're, if you have to do things that. You know, if you're never getting out of the. uh the challenges that you've got, or you've got to make decisions that you don't agree with, or, you know, it's basically no longer in line with kind of what you stand for. it's perhaps even against your, your character traits and your vision. And, um, you know, that's where, that's where burnout really happens. yeah, stress is inevitable. We, we talk about, uh, what we call the stress curve stress performance curve and Think about it like this. If there's no stress in your life, it's actually also really bad because you're going to be unmotivated. You won't be able to come off the sofa. You're just tired and you know, like you're lacking more, right? Like when there's no pressure at all. So it's like a bell curve. So on that side of the curve, there's no performance at all. And then on the opposite side, where there's continued stress, where you never are able to put that stress down. And you're not able to talk about it with anybody because you haven't got anybody at your level. And you're keeping hold, like Martin was saying, you keep in hold of these decisions because you're never pulling the trigger because you're not 100 % sure yet. That is on the opposite side of that bell curve. And that's where burnout happens. But it's in the middle where there's a good amount of stress and you're dealing with decisions quickly. That's where high performance is sustainable high performance is when, when flow states have flow states happens, right? And I think often stress is seen as a negative and it certainly isn't. It's really interesting that you say that and it makes me reflect really because in my role I interview a lot of C-level members of staff and talk to them about their decisions. Don't necessarily think about the stress that it may be putting them under. Martin, you've done a lot of editorial based roles as well. Is that something that you think about as well? Yeah, I guess I don't when I'm interviewing somebody at the top level in gaming. And one thing I never really haven't really sat down and thought about is the, um when you speak to these individuals, it's the compliance factor. Right. That's a, and the fact that they're working in a regulated industry here, that's a whole additional level of pressure from most businesses that you work in. You know, worked in newspapers, m news agencies, marketing consultancies and stuff. Just don't defame anyone. It's not that difficult to not defame them. That's the biggest thing that can go wrong. And don't annoy your advertisers, but that's uh a different story, obviously. But you're not talking about being fined millions of pounds for getting this wrong. You're not talking about huge reputational damage coming down from any of these things. the additional pressure for people working in particularly operator side, I think, but also for many of the supplier companies as well, is huge. I haven't really considered that for this conversation. And it's two opposite sides, right? You have, on the one hand, you've got the responsibility of the P &L, right? The revenue generating side. But then you've also got the compliance side and they're almost like two different, you know, they're two different forces that need to be balanced. And you never quite get it right, I suppose. And that's such a difficult thing. yeah. I'd imagine as well. And it's different for those working at listed companies as well, because they have the additional shareholder pressure as well. Yeah, for sure. And then think about affiliates, for example, right? Like if you're a UK operated affiliates and you think about the tax hike and all those businesses now turning down their marketing spend, imagine what that does to an affiliate business. Again, that stuff that is completely out of your control as a, as a founder and CEO of an affiliate business, but it massively affects you, your staff, and you've got all that responsibility for all those families on your shoulders as well. And it's all out of your control. Right. So that's, that's, think, you know, that's where the real stress happens. certainly, certainly very, very stressful indeed. Leo and Martin will take a short break and we'll come back and we'll continue the discussion. Welcome back to iGaming Daily. joined by Leo Judkins, founder of iGaming Leader and Martin Elliott, SBC's media director. Leo, we're talking here about, you know, the weight of the decisions that, you know, senior leaders have to make in this industry. And obviously you run a business that helps support leaders who have to make those decisions and are perhaps struggling with it. Why do you think, you know, certain people are... uh lots of people find it difficult to come out and say that they're struggling with some of these decisions. I think often it's not even about struggling necessarily, Charlie. It's more about that people just aren't 100 % sure on if it's the right decision or not, like Martin was saying earlier. So very often it doesn't really come from struggle. It comes from this place of, I see all these other people that have something figured out that I haven't got figured out yet and I'm not quite sure what it is. And very often, um yeah, that comes from from the way that people are, have grown into their roles. So when you, when you grow through the ranks, right? When you, when you get promoted, like you kind of, you depend on yourself, right? You just work hard, you do your best and you get, you get to a certain level. Well, there's this expression that says what got you here certainly won't get you there. Right. And at some point that's whole uh ethic, not the work ethic, work ethic is great, but that whole approach breaks. And it no longer works because the decisions that you're making are, there is no playbook for it. You know, there's no, there is no, I don't know, there is no, there's no precedent, right? There is no, it's not been done before. Uh, you can't lean on anything. So what you've got to lean on is experience from others, but what if you don't have anybody around you? What if you're the only, what if you're the CMO, right? And you're the only, you're the highest marketing guy in the, or girl in the, the organization who. know, who has that experience? and, and then certainly the other bit is that very often the conversations that you have, they become very, um, political or transactional, right? You know, that the people that work for you in your team, they will say things that they know will reflect on their performance and will affect their salary or their progression in their career. So it all becomes like politics and you can't really, you don't, You know that you can't really have an honest conversation anymore. Yeah. And then there's obviously stuff that you can't talk about even. Right. So if you're a founder of bootstrap business and you're running out of cash and there's no runway left, who are you going to tell? You're not going to talk to your staff because they think they're all going to not get paid anymore. You're probably not going to talk to your, your partner, your spouse, because they've probably heard you talk about work enough and your friends certainly don't understand, right. Because they don't run a business and they're probably in a salaried role. So yeah, it's, the difficulty. It's like people got to where they are, work in a certain way, and then they just don't know any better. They don't know any different. You're painting the picture of, and it comes back to the line that you said right at the start, Leo, it can be quite lonely making those decisions in leadership positions. It kind of reminds me around some of the discourse that we have around social media. the fact that you look on say Instagram and you think everyone's got this perfect life and they've got everything figured out, but really they don't. I think business is probably quite similar and leadership is quite similar in that respect as well. Martin, is that something that you notice as well? Yeah, I do that all the time. I look at what our competitors are doing and go, that's good, isn't it? How have they done that? But what I haven't seen is that they are doing the same thing to us as well. Exactly the same thing. they are doing what I'm doing. like ignoring the fact that all the work that's gone in behind it, all the... You might have had disputes and go into it. There might have been some friction that's come to it. That great exclusive interview they had might have taken them six, nine months to organise and get out there. They're having the same pain as us. They've just got a different brand at the top of it. But it's so easy just to take everything at face value and not really dig down into the... The fact that everyone has problems. mean, work would be really boring if everything was perfect all the time. It's good to have the challenge at times. But yeah, I mean, as you know, I'm not really on social media. I've linked in because it's quite useful for work. The rest of it, the falseness of it really put me off. But you are absolutely right that the same principle applies in business life as it does on social media. And at conferences, right? Think about it, right? We compare ourselves to everybody else's highlight reel because the stuff people put on LinkedIn are their successes, right? Well, we all know businesses go through ups and downs. Nobody posts this, there's challenges. And it's the same at conferences, right? You see the, like I speak to so many people that have got massive stands. but even in that success, there's challenges. Every year they'll say, I can't do a smaller stand because then people will think that my business not doing as well as I want them to think it. It is, right? so, it's all a facade, know, like it's all fake. But we see that as reality when we are observing, right? But we have our own reality, which is our ups and downs. And so we compare ourselves to that fake reality, which will never match. And yeah, it's a very unfair kind of comparison. find that's one of the great things at the big industry events when you go into the conference rooms. ideal when you go and sit down in the conference room is that somebody's going to give you the answers on the stage. But 70, 80 percent of the time, the most valuable thing you take away from the session is, oh, everyone else has the same problems as me. It's not me who's doing it wrong. It's the same issue for everyone. That's great. That's really reassuring. That builds your confidence, no end. We've talked a lot about people needing that support in their decision making. That's obviously something that iGaming leader is founded upon and helps to facilitate. Could you tell us a little bit about the masterminds and how it gives people that sort of confidence in their decision making? definitely. So we run a highly vetted group of members. We have a highly vetted group of members, VPs, executives, founders, and directors. We meet once a week and for two minutes, people talk about the biggest challenge or the biggest decision, like Martin was saying, right? Something that you're You're 80 % sure about, but not a hundred percent yet. Talk about that for two minutes. And then for eight minutes, they get feedback from the others in the room. People at their level, all with 15 plus year experience. And that, that just gives them confidence in that decision making in a conviction in the direction that they're taking. And so it speeds, speeds things up. That's, that's a big key, big part of it. It's not so much about having a talking shop, even mentorship or guidance. because most people already know what they need to do. They just need somebody to say that they're not crazy and that's a good idea. that's, in its essence, that's what it's built on. I guess, as we bring this to a close, I'd like to just see if you have any pieces of advice or a bit of guidance or a bit of confirmation for people in leadership positions. What's the best piece of advice that you have for people who are... in those leadership positions or maybe working towards leadership positions. So the thing I would have needed to hear, or I would have loved to have told myself, I suppose, 10, 15 years ago, is that it's okay to not have it all figured out. It's okay to not have the answers and it's actually okay to also talk about that. that's the biggest thing. So it's not so much about, like I said, it's not so much about this talking shop idea, but it's more about If you're not sure about something, just talk about it. Just ask, just say that you're not, because that is where real, that's where people get real confidence in you as well. You don't have to have it all figured out. And I think the fact that most people feel that they need to have it all figured out and they need to make decisions where they're 100 % sure certain. That is what really holds them back in their career, in their personal lives. And so you just get messy, you know, just know that you're just know that you'll figure it out as you go along. um I think that's the best piece of advice I could give to Charlie. Mason- Fantastic. Martin, what would your words of wisdom be? They're along the same lines. I would just say to people, if you're not making any mistakes, you're probably not pushing yourself to where you want to be. You're not being ambitious enough ah with your targets. Everyone makes mistakes. You don't learn anything, really. Yes, you should learn from your successes as well, but uh mistakes are a valuable part of uh growth and having a successful career. Because I can tell you about all the ones I've made over the uh additional 30 years of experience I've got from you, uh Try to avoid crashing the company, obviously. But on a day-to-day basis, you will make mistakes. Don't be too scared to do anything because you're worried about making that mistake. there we go. Get messy, make mistakes and don't crash the company. Brilliant. Well, Leo, thanks ever so much for joining us today. I've really enjoyed having a chat and I've learned a lot from this session. So thanks very much, Martin. Thanks as well for joining me. And thanks to the listeners for tuning in to today's episode of iGaming Daily and join us tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news.