What are your initial feelings and aims as the new Relax Gaming CEO?
The chance to get this position is something I’m extremely proud of. It’s great to have the opportunity to become CEO of a company I dearly love. I’ve been here for almost 10 years and there’s a reason for that. Having no plans of leaving, I have the chance to lead us into the next phase, which is something that’s very close to my heart. I think also of how Relax is as a company; we have built something very special. I think the culture we have built over the 15 years we’ve been around is one of the things that has made us succeed and this strong company culture gives us the ability to both attract and retain a lot of talent.
That’s something I see as one of my biggest aims and motivations: To keep, maintain and grow that specific, relaxed vibe and foster it as we go into the next phase of the company. That said, I think it’s also good to be open-minded. Everything is changing, the company continues to grow, the iGaming industry itself is changing, so we have to both be open and eager to follow trends while making sure we stay true to our ethos and DNA.
Where do you feel the company is particularly strong? And, coming in as CEO, where do you feel there may be room for improvement?
Starting with our strengths, I think we had this when we started. We’re not new to the block. We’ve been around for 15 years and even back then we had an extremely strong tech focus. That tech heritage has made us aim for tech excellence. It’s important for speed to market and it’s important to deliver unique content. It’s important to be a trustworthy supplier. That’s an area we’re strong in, but we’re also continuously challenging ourselves to keep that quality or to improve it. It’s still in our DNA to have our ongoing focus, to keep on going and not falling into the trap of getting settled or too cosy with the position we’re in. That’s one of the strengths I think it is worth fighting for.
We have a mindset in the organisation that we always want to continue to challenge ourselves, continue to challenge the industry, being a differentiator. But having the passion and dedication to continue challenging the status quo and improve; I think that’s both a strength and improvement in the sense that this is who we are. We’ve always tried to push ourselves forward and there are always things we are strong in and areas of improvement. But, in many ways, I also think the improvements might be in your strengths. Because that’s what differentiates you and your core and that can be something you utilise as the catalyst for continuous growth.
What I take from that is doubling down on your specialisation rather than adding something new which you’re not as strong at.
I don’t want to exclude anything, but we’re always trying to improve. We’re always looking at what comes next and we never get settled. So I wouldn’t say it’s about us doubling down on what we already do, but I think it’s easy to get settled in the stuff you do well and forget about them. Sometimes that might mean you lose a bit about who you are and I think that can have long-term negative effects… So not necessarily doubling down on our strengths, just not getting settled with them.
A word on Simon Hammon. He has this very intimate knowledge of the products and it really came through – you could tell he was into the games and knew every every little detail of them. How are you looking to succeed that?
You’re spot on in the sense that Simon is one of a kind. He is exceptional in what he does, so I think it would be a bad decision if I go in and try to do things the same way he has. My focus needs to be different. I can’t replace Simon, so my focus has to be on creating my own ways of building and implementing frameworks for supporting the growth we’re in, and also utilising the extremely experienced exec team I have around me.
I’ve been at Relax for a very long time, so I have a very good view of the whole, and I know what works for us and what doesn’t. The exec team and the senior management, as well, their depth of expertise in their domains is incredible. That gives me a lot of confidence – we weren’t a one-man band with Simon and we will be able to continue. It’s important I get to say as well that Simon has been incredible for the company and the six years he’s invested into it have really elevated us. But at the same time, during that period, he has created an experienced exec team and senior management team and most of the decisions in how we ran the company have been done with these people, so I feel confident we will be able to continue.
"I would be extremely naive if I entered this role with any ambition to replace Simon. I can’t. I’d even go as far to say that I’m not sure if there’s anyone in the industry who can”
You mentioned being at Relax for 10 years. In that time how has the company changed?
We have been working a lot with the culture and with the strengths we started with, and made sure we kept them. But, for context, when I joined we had less than 30 people in the company and now we’re over 300. Over the years, we have expanded our product portfolio so we have many more verticals to stand on. Now we have 10 offices around Europe and going through a pandemic taught us about hybrid working. The company has grown so much during this time, but it has also given us the chance to grow and have a transition period that has taken us to where we are today.
Everything like that has changed, but the relaxed vibe we are famous for is something that still runs deep. Even when we get new people joining the company today, the company culture seems to be something that people really enjoy.
"The company has evolved a lot over the years and countless things are completely different from what they used to be”
Tell me about the US. How lucrative could it be for Relax Gaming specifically?
It takes quite some time to enter a market, not just the US but any other market we go into. We have high ambitions but we also remain humble in the sense that it takes time to build a local presence. It takes time to create fruitful partnerships with operators, to educate players about who we are, what our games stand for and to make ourselves a household name.
With that said, we have been pleasantly surprised with our experience in the US so far. We only launched in New Jersey in December and we’re very encouraged by the start we have seen. It seems the games resonate well with the player base, so I have increased ambitions for our presence in the US, given the first six months.
We have a lot of places where we can still grow our distribution with operators; they are going live in additional states and, as we continue with our expansion of content, we’re learning about the market with how we should create games that resonate well with the audience.
In terms of current demand levels, how is the demand for aggregation within the industry compared to the traditional routes casinos use to operate?
The demand is consistently high and I don’t see any trends of that going down. The traditional aggregation model is a need for both studios and operators because they are in a chicken and egg situation… That being said, we see plenty of winds of change within the aggregation industry. So there might be a new business model or different way of setting up that part of the business. There are more studios having ambitions to run their own platforms and taking both the upsides and downsides of that.
"I think we’re in a phase of the aggregation vertical where there will be movement over the next couple of years and that could lead to a different landscape in the future”
It’s the same for us and I think that’s been ongoing now for a while. To facilitate a new business model, we started the ‘Powered By’ leg of our aggregation model, where if a studio has their own platform, we can make a platform-to-platform agreement where we help them with the distribution, but they have more freedom in relation to how they build on their platform. So new models are bubbling up and I could definitely see trends leading to a different landscape in a couple of years.
Finally, as a COO for a number of years, I guess it was quite a natural transition into the CEO role. Do you think COO to CEO is it the most natural C-level transition out there?
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on the direction the company is going in or the phase it’s currently in. So it’s the Board that would appoint any new CEOs but I think, for them, it’s going be an exercise to assess what the current situation is and where the company wants to head.
They need to ask what the needs are for the company so they can plan the upcoming strategic cycle, and then from there, they go with the type of person they deem the best fit. That doesn’t have to be internally either. It’s the full profile people are looking at; are they more of an operational leader, a business leader or a product leader? This will all depend on what the next strategic phase is aiming to achieve.
