Established Operators
Are you looking to acquire new talent for your business?
I have experience in:
- Prop trading companies
- Betting exchanges
- Spread betting
- Fixed odds
- Asian / agent systems
- Affiliate networks
- Sports insurance
Within the industry itself I have experience in the following domains:
- Operations
- Data Modelling
- Trading Systems
- Strategy
- Project Managment
You can download my CV here.
Executive Summary
I'm passionate about performance. Your companies success is a product of your employees success. Our role as business leaders is to give clear goals, an environment that supports creativity and accepts failures, and then get out of the way.
I believe that good motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic; that encouraging curiousity, creativity and innovation is the route to commercial success; and that a climate of thoughtful intelligence, supported by open and honest feedback, will lead to peak performance.
Not quite stats geek, not quite dev, and not quite trader, I inhabit the middle ground, making me an excellent communicator and able to understand and translate requirements effectively between teams.
This range of experience, coupled with an ability to speak the language of multiple disciplines, and focus on the needs of the business, gave me the opportunity to own and lead a £multi-million project which aimed to secure our long term ambition of becoming world leaders in sports modelling, before taking on responsibility for the operations of the wider business.
My Experience
Startups:
Getting stuff done; everything is urgent, but not everything is important. Calmly managing priorities to make steady progress is vital to a startup's success. Eventually I should run out of important things to do - that's the point at which you fire me.
Fail fast; a theme I have seen repeated far too often is the fear of putting something live because it's not yet *something* (it really doesn't matter what the *something* word is). This fear of failure is completely natural, but it's crippling your ability to move forward. Define an MVP, agree it, and once it's built, get it out the door and start learning. And when I say agree it, I mean every single stakeholder must agree that the definition of the MVP gives a product suitable to put in front of a customer. Don't put off the conversation with sales (it's always sales) until after you've built it hoping to convince them then. Seriously, just don't.
Build, Measure, Learn; as a mathematician and quant (before I moved into Ops) I have the statistical ability to create and run meaningful experiments and it's my belief that this iterative cycle is the most important part of building a successful startup. The agile framework lends itself to integrating these results into the business development as quickly as possible.
Creating a productive environment; Andrew Garrood, CEO of MustardBet, is fond of saying, "we're defined by how we fix things" - we all make suboptimal decisions, but it's how we deal with them, what we learn, and how we apply that to the future which fosters productivity. During the innovation stage employees must have freedom to fail - in a startup you simply can't afford the time and monetary cost of operating in any other way.
Growing the team; as the business grows it will be natural to find employees with more exacting domain knowledge - I can't be your payments / compliance / AML guy forever - nor would I want to be. I do, however, have plenty of experience recruiting for these roles and getting people operational.
Gambling Specific:
UK and Isle of Man Licence Applications; I have successfully completed licence applications in both these jurisdictions for Mustard Systems Limited, managing the entire process from initial requirements gathering to the final submission.
Compliance / Policy Work; the creation of company wide policy documents to address the regulatory requirements following review of the legislation.
Information Security and Remote Technical Standards; I prepared the ISMS policies and was the main point of contact for the auditor. I ensured our development team produced a product compliant with the Gambling Commission's Remote Technical Standards.
Payment Services and PCI-DSS; acquiring a suitable payment processor and acquiring bank can be notoriously difficult for new licence holders; a lot of the mainstream payment providers do not deal with gambling related companies. Additionally, you will be required to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and, at the very least, complete and Self Assessment Attestation of Compliance - a process I have completed for Mustard Systems Limited.
Third Party Integrations; I have experience sourcing and evaluating third parties for the supply of game state data, pricing data, ID&V, payment services, casino games, address finders, and live chat. I have enough technical experience to evaluate their offering, and enough commercial experience to negotiate at industry rates.
App Development; I worked closely with an external team who built the Android and IOS apps for MustardBet. On a weekly basis I worked with their PM to review progress, monitor performance and prioritise the backlog. I was also responsible for managing the process and relationship with Google and Apple once the products were complete.
About You
If you're worried that your business isn't able to keep up with the industry, that things feel stale, that progress has slowed but you're not sure what to do about it, please get in touch.
Additionally, if you have an unfilled role, or just want to see where I might fit into your business, let's meet for a chat.
I am available as a permanent employee, contractor or consultant - all subject to availability.