Summary
Weeks after becoming Finance Director of Stansted Airport, COVID cut its daily passengers from over 100,000 to just over 300.
James Richardson, now CFO of NASDAQ-listed Inspired Entertainment, helped raise nearly £1bn to keep the business going.
It wasn’t his first crisis. In thirty years of finance across corporate finance, banking, payments, airports and gambling, James has been through the dot-com crash, the banking crisis, the regulation of payday lending and a pandemic.
In this episode of Bets and Balance Sheets, host Vasco Vaz Rodrigues talks to James about his route into gambling, how he makes great things happen in tough environments, and finally, what he's looking for from his next role.
Want to hear more honest conversations with gambling's finance leaders?
Introduction
Vasco: Hi everyone, welcome to Bets on Balance Sheets, where we interview the finance leaders running the behind-the-scenes of the biggest gambling companies. I'm Vasco and this is the second episode of season two. My guest today has 30 years of experience across finance, and he has worked in banking, gambling, airports, and property.
His last role was CFO at Inspired Entertainment, a company listed on NASDAQ. The thing about him is that he actually never chose accountancy to start with, and that's exactly where I want to go first.
James, welcome to Bets and Balance Sheets. It's a pleasure to have you here.
James: Hi, Vasco, pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite. Really looking forward to an informative discussion.
Vasco: So you told the team that you never chose accountancy. You actually studied geography, and I heard your father chose it for you. How was that?
James: Yeah, it was interesting, let's say it was more my father's dream for accountancy, maybe, maybe then mine, but 30 years later, you know, here I am, I’m married to an accountant, who I met at the interview for what was then Price Waterhouse. And 30 years later, my dad's prediction was probably right. He actually sent me on work experience to his accountant. He was a hairdresser, ran his own business, and he figured that the guy that did his books, his accounting, actually made more money than he did. So he sent me on work experience to his accountant when I was 14. My dream was not to be an accountant. Yeah, he got me in there early for sure. But my dream was not to be an accountant. I grew up watching Tom Cruise in Top Gun and wanted to fly planes, which brings us onto airports later, I guess. And sports, sports mad, things like that. I did not want to be an accountant. Watching LA Law, Capital City, I was going to go to the city to be an investment banker or a lawyer if I couldn't kick a football or fly planes.
Vasco: Okay, but was there a phase or a period where finance or accountancy just clicked for you?
James: Yeah, I think so. I think it was probably more luck than judgment. I was at university in the milk rounds and my housemate was doing an accounting degree and he said, I'm applying for the Big Six. I was like, who are they? Never heard of them. The Big Six accounting firms, now the Big Four, following Andersen and the mergers. And so I applied and the next thing I knew, I got four offers and I could keep looking for something else to do or go and do accountancy. So I phoned my dad up and said, well, I'm thinking of taking a year out. I won't repeat on the podcast what he said to me, but it was a firm no. I'm not funding you anymore. You've been at university for three years. You've got a top job. You should go and do it.
What makes a successful CFO?
Vasco: Okay, and like after university, I'm assuming because you were not expecting to go these routes, you didn't have like a career path in mind, and you got to work across so many industries and learned so many different things. What do you think makes a successful CFO for those who are just starting now?
James: Yeah, it's a great question because as you say, probably something I've not really thought about. I just stumbled into it, started at Coopers & Lybrand. Absolutely loved it because I was out there talking to people. I thought accountants were, what my 14-year-old work experience self did, sat upstairs in an office opposite a Mansfield brewery. I worked on an adding machine and ticked things off with a bunch of ladies and Daley Thompson posters all over the wall. That was what I thought accountancy was. And along came Coopers & Lybrand to become PricewaterhouseCoopers. And I was out talking to finance directors and boards and out on audit and all these companies. And I just loved it. I was like, this is great. I want to run businesses. I don't want to be a bookkeeper or an accountant. I want to go out there and run businesses and make a difference. I didn't have a particular talent. I wasn't going to be a hairdresser like my dad or I was never going to make it as a footballer or a pilot.
So, you know, this gave me an opportunity to go out there and make a difference and do something that I suddenly felt a passion for. I could talk to people and understand businesses. I was pretty good with numbers. I wasn't brilliant. I'm not a brilliant mathematician, but I understand how business ticked and I really enjoyed learning. I was very curious as a youngster and very curious as a young accountant to understand how business has worked and the people involved in them and the functions and those sorts of things. I just suddenly thought, you know what, my dad might have been right. It's not accountancy, it's business and it's finance. And I was really enjoying it. And then in my first year of the training contract at Coopers & Lybrand, which was PWC eventually, I managed to get work experience with the corporate finance department.
Just by luck, by asking, by being out there, by meeting people, some of the senior managers and partners, and I got a two-week placement on work experience, dealing with private equity firms and working on management buyouts. And that I really loved because I was like helping businesses grow, helping them make decisions, advising them, raising finance. And I thought, you know what, that's what I want to do when I qualify. As soon as I can get out of this audit lark, which I enjoyed, I'll go and work in corporate finance and help businesses grow.
And beyond that, there wasn't really a career path. It was like, want to run a business somehow, be involved in running businesses. But actually how I was going to do that, I just saw accountancy and finance as a platform, as a way in to be able to do it. The sort of, I guess, opportunities that maybe my father never had. He grew up in a small ex-mining community. He was a hairdresser. He didn't have these opportunities. So I guess his advice of education provides opportunities. And accountancy is a good one.
Moving from audit and banking to private equity fintech
Vasco: You are successful now. So, you know, like he clearly saw it in you and he was right. That's really interesting. And it you speak about this part of corporate finance, and for me the most fascinating part is something I see across other guests and other C-levels, is that everyone shares the same passion or same interest of seeing this thing that is not material growing, which is a company. Like a company, it's not a material thing, it doesn't exist per se, but you can see it evolving through time and that's something that ignites some passion in people and the people that are behind these decisions. One of the next steps that you did after PwC was going to HSBC, but not only you went to banking but after you moved to fintech, which back then was very different from the traditional spaces. How was that change for you?
James: Yeah, I guess it was, to me it felt like a natural evolution even when I talk to people and they look at it go, well, that was an interesting move. Again, it was an element of luck, not judgment. I've worked with a bunch of really great people in corporate finance. One of them went to work at HSBC. HSBC at the time recruited two roles a year that took smart accountants who'd done corporate finance and put them into in-house M&A and Derren, who won’t mind me giving him a shout out. Derren had done that and then he phoned me up two years later. His placement, his role was up and he was off to go and work in the bank and they wanted someone to replace him. He said, why don't you come and have a chat with the bank? And I was like, well, I'm really happy doing this, right? Actually, I think I want to carry on doing corporate finance and go and work in private equity and be a principal.
But I went to HSBC and through a very long and somewhat tedious assessment centre, I ended up coming out really well and they offered me a role. They offered it to me and one of my friends at PwC. Both of us got the role. He stayed. I left. Neither of us knew we'd applied. We just both happened to be at an interview on the same day on different floors of HSBC Tower. And he phoned me up the next day and went, were you in yesterday? Because I heard you weren't around in the office. In those days, you were always in the office so you couldn't work from home. So you're either on a sick day or you're out at a client. And I was like, no, I wasn't in the office. You happen to be at HSBC? I was like, maybe. So yeah, we both got the job. It was just, it was such a great role. You know, it was working in house, troubleshooting for what was then the global co-head of commercial banking at the world's biggest bank. And so with a bit of advice from Derren and the network, I'd managed to sort of get an in to a really exciting job and been successful in securing it. And it was one of those, again, where whilst it might not have been part of my plan or my career plan, but it was too good opportunity to turn down. So I went again, jumped into something that I wasn't expecting.
Choosing breadth of experience over depth in your career
Vasco: Would you ever go back to corporate finance or were you happy that you got to experience, you know, the traditional banking as well?
James: It's great question because at the time when I went in, I really thought that's what I was going to do. I was like, look, the world's biggest bank, I worked for the world's biggest accountancy firm. World's biggest bank. I mean, that's how Derren sold it to me. It's how Mike Russell Brown, who I worked for there, sold it to me. You know, you've worked for the world's biggest accountancy firm, come and work for the world's biggest bank. It's like a toy box of stuff. And the gig there was that you did two years troubleshooting for them and then you would ideally find a solution to something and then go and work in that business.
That's what Darren had done before me. It's what most of the people who've done that role before me did. And it's actually, you know, exactly what happened to me. I then moved on. I sold a business and I went with that business. So at the time when I went in, I was thinking this is a one or two year gig. I'll get some experience, put it on my CV, work with a bunch of great people, maybe do a bit of travel. And then I'll go back and do corporate finance and work in private equity and, you know, become a principal and work on a portfolio of businesses.
It's all I really wanted to do was breadth rather than necessarily depth, get a breadth of experience and then use that to find opportunities to continue to pursue a, I guess a passion of wanting to make a difference, make stuff better. When people ask me what, I want to make things better because you're only a custodian for these roles. The roles and dome of the companies I've worked for will live on long, long beyond me. Some haven't, some have changed and disappeared. But a lot of the big brands and the big businesses will go on long, long after I'm working there. So you're a custodian for these roles for the next generation. Just like, I guess I'm a custodian for the old Edwardian house I live in, in London. I only own it for a period of its existence. And then I hand it over. I try and improve it, make it more modern, more fit for purpose and hand it over to the next generation.
Vasco: Yeah, fair. Everything has its time for sure and then you move to FinTech, which, you know, is a very technical industry. Do you think that is some kind of special interest for that kind of challenge, or did that just happen to you?
James: It was another sort of natural evolution, I think. At the time, I'd seen at the bank, mid 2000s at HSBC, and the network was all face-to-face bank branching, and it was moving digital. Some would say the big banks were slow to move to digital, and that's how FinTech stole a lead on the market. But what I spotted was that platform-powered technology, platform-powered ecosystems provided scale at speed but it also meant that often regulation was struggling or trying to catch up. And FinTech seemed the sort of bright new evolution next step of what traditional banking had been. And I'd seen that through the payments side of the business. And I spun out of HSBC at the time it was their biggest ever global joint venture. It had a brand licence agreement of HSBC's brand for 10 years. They'd never done that before. So it hit a number of firsts that deal for the bank and it was nearly a billion dollar deal in the day. That was a big deal for the bank into a joint venture and then buying the other half of that. And I stepped over then to be CFO. So I got a CFO role of a FTSE 250 size business as part of an American conglomerate that was building out international businesses. So Global Payments had started as a US FinTech payment tech business and was doing a buy and build.
HSBC was a brilliant partnership for it. They won the auction. We put that business up for sale. They won the auction. And then they offered me the chance to go and work in it. And it was a sort of fintech type business. It was taking a very traditional card payment technology and turning it into a fintech before all the Stripes and Revoluts and things like that existed. It was doing the pipe work and the payments infrastructure. And so from that, having done that for four or five years and grown it through M&A and other partnerships with other banks like CaixaBank Bank in Spain and HSBC in Malta. I got approached to go back into private equity but as a CFO in a small business and go and try my hand at FinTech. And at that point, everything I'd touched and done, wouldn't say it turned to gold, right? I wasn't Mark Zuckerberg and able to retire, but it had always worked. And so I almost sort of, without being arrogant, thought, no I can do this. No matter what they throw at me, I can do it. And then I stepped into private equity, small fintech and realised how hard it can be. You can't always predict and you can't always solve, but you can constantly try and make things better and move forward.
Working where consumer change, technology and regulation meet
Vasco: Yeah, that's fair enough. And you just said to me that you were expecting to come back to corporate finance, but in fact that has not yet at yet happened and one thing that I noticed about your career path is that there there's some some kind some interesting part of it, which is you worked in banking in 2008, you worked in payments as regulations boomed, you worked with an airport ten weeks into COVID. Like you either choose chaos or chaos is choosing you. Like how did all of this happen? And can we say that you are a wartime CFO?
James: Oh crikey, I mean, war time, the guys who are leading wars have a lot more difficult decisions than things to do than I do. So the analogy makes me chuckle a little bit. And people do know that I tend to quote Churchill, particularly when the cards are down and it's tough, know, “when in hell keep moving”, those sorts of things. I don't think I actively search out these sorts of times, four roles. But I think when you work at sort of the conduit of consumer change, whether it's moving from physical to digital or digital enablement, you've got sort of technology enablement that is such an expansionary capability these days that makes things so much easier. So you've got consumers changing, you've got technology enablement, and then regulation, sometimes struggling to keep up, if not catch up in that sort of sweet spot in the middle, you tend to find a lot of stuff happening. And those roles that I've taken have been in that sweet spot because I guess I like the excitement, I like the purpose of being able to come in today and say, did more than I did yesterday, try and make things better.
And alongside Churchill, I do have a habit of quoting Gregory J Bonann, which not many people know. He was the guy who created Baywatch. I grew up watching in the 90s. It's un-PC now, but you could watch it in the 90s. And he had a, you know, how he created that and franchised it globally. And he had a saying that, nothing, you'll never stumble across anything good if you don't constantly keep moving forwards. And so in the back of my mind was always not that he was the main quote that I would base my career on, there's always a, know, constantly keep looking for the next opportunity and moving forwards. And through that, yeah, sometimes you ride a wave like I did in payments. And sometimes our wave crashes into the beach and you've got to make sure your shorts are still on like happened in consumer finance or, you know, what's commonly known as payday lending property again, you know, with countrywide in the mid 2015, 2016 after Brexit. These things happen in these evolutionary cycles, but with technology enablement, the consumer demand and change, and the right regulation, managed the right way in that sweet spot in the middle, you can create your secret sauce that helps businesses grow.
How to drive change in a difficult environment
Vasco: Is that your sweet spot? Is that when things are tough, is that what truly excites you to work?
James: Yeah, I think so. I think it's being able to show that you can make a difference. I don't see myself as having a particular skill set. I'm a trained accountant. I'm not a specialist in any one area, but I've got a good breadth because of the situations that I've found myself in. I've not always sought them out. It's luck, not judgment. And sometimes it doesn't feel like a brilliant sweet spot.
It can be a difficult spot, but actually pulling on the experience of having gone through various cycles, know, funding a buyout of a big aircraft interiors business just before the terrible catastrophe of 9-11, the banking crisis in the mid 2000s, treating customers fairly, and then the credit crunch through to the pandemic, you know, the dot-com bubble bursting in 99 when I was in corporate finance.
You know, half the deals, 90 % of the deals disappeared overnight. I've lived through a few cycles that actually, you know, have paid dividends later on because you're constantly learning from them. And I really enjoy that. got a passion for staying curious and wanting to constantly learn and prove, I guess, that, you know, the archetypical accountant who sits there on an adding machine surrounded by Daley Thompson, adding stuff up and ticking it off, those days are gone. Computers can do that for us now. And AI can do other things for us now. But if you can link the constituent parts together and work with good people, and you're good with people, and you're reasonable with numbers, and you stay curious, and you're prepared to work hard to gain an understanding and work with people who will always know more than you do in their specific area, but you can link that together, link it together in a way that takes people with you.
Wow, you can make great things happen, even in really tough environments, even with regulatory change and regulators criticising you and the press looking and even consumers looking at sectors and saying, are they causing more harm than they do good? And the tax man chasing you in the right way when they're putting taxes up, not tax avoidance and anything like that, pay your taxes as they are due. But that changing, you can do some great things even in industries going through fundamental shift.
Vasco: That's really true.
How James joined the gambling industry
Vasco: Let's talk about gambling. How did you end up in gambling? You go from PWC, HSBC, FinTech, like how did gambling come into your life?
James: I think it's surprisingly similar to banking and finance and that's sort of how I got my first introduction to it. We were providing banking services in HSBC's day, we were one of the few that did, to gaming and gambling customers, limited banking services but nonetheless some. And then as it went digital that got harder and harder and so FinTech came in then and FinTech was able to provide banking and payment services. So I'd always sort of had betting and gaming as one of the sectors that I was interested in. The opportunity came again somewhat out of chance. I was relocating back to London where I'd always lived since we moved down here to work for HSBC and I got a phone call from a headhunter about William Hill and an expat opportunity in a nice foreign climate location. I was thinking sort of Barbados, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, they went, Gibraltar, where I'd never been. And despite having a geography degree, you had to look up on the map where it was, right on the bottom of Spain, on the tip of Spain. It's just straight of Gibraltar. I sort of looked at it. Again, it's another great opportunity, not something I saw myself necessarily doing. I hadn't sort of set my career trajectory out to going to be CF over gaming and gambling business and a B2C one at that under regulatory scrutiny at the times of responsible gambling. But what a great opportunity, great business, six, 700 million revenue operating in over a hundred countries in terms of customer base, our customer base in a hundred countries, operations in 10, 15, 20, know, really international in nature, fast moving but under regulatory pressure, regulatory scrutiny. And going through a lot of change as the gaming and gambling market moved from primarily face-to-face to digital.
Vasco: And what do you think like incentivized them to pick you? What do you think they saw in you that they thought, yeah, this is a perfect fit for where our company is right now? And on the other side, what made you excited about gambling? You know, like what did you see in finance and gambling that you're like, I actually really want to do this?
James: Understanding it was the first thing. mean, I'd never placed an online bet Before they approached me. I had to open a William Hill online account Even understand what it looked like and I was a fintech guy So I wasn't massively into apps and I hadn't done I'm done betting I think I placed a bet on the Grand National once a year at my local William Hill shop just having to be a William Hill shop on the high street where I lived which is still there And that's about as far as he got and that scared the living daylights out of me walking in and trying to work out what you do. So just understanding it, found fascinating, but it wasn't actually that different from payments. It's an underlying or banking or finance really, an underlying platform that effectively has a margin by balancing in William Hill's case, it's sports book or taking a margin off the return on slots and games. And so I found it just fascinating, like really fascinating and the chance to do an expat role and the chance to run a big business.
I think to answer your question, they came to me because they saw my background in sort of taking businesses that were going through tumultuous, I guess at that time, regulatory change, because I'd just come out of a payday lender. I always joke my parents are proud of me. They'll say I've been a banker, I've been a payday lender, I've been an estate agent, and I've worked in gaming and gambling. So when I ran airports, they were particularly happy they could actually talk about what I did, rather than just say I'm an accountant which of course makes my dad proud. But the sector I work in was always a little more challenging. So it was an opportunity. It was a platform powered technology. It was fascinating to understand that it had a great brand and prestige behind it. Again, at one time they were one of, if not the biggest gaming and gambling companies in the world before the other ones, know, the online ones took over and ate breakfast, lunch and evening meal with a prestigious brand attached to it that I'd seen on the high street. And I thought I could go in there and make a difference as part of a new management team.
Using regulation to make a difference in gambling
Vasco: It's funny that you mentioned your dad and, you know, parents saying where you work at. It's something that I've seen across all the other people that we spoke with. There's this, you know, social opinion on gambling. Did you ever have second thoughts about working in this industry because of that?
James: Not gambling specifically, because by that point, I'd already been in banking, as we were seen as the scourge of society in the mid 2000s. And then I went to work at Dollar Financial, which were Europe's biggest pawnbroker, but also the biggest payday lender, actually bigger than Wonga at one point. And I was married, my wife, worked for the regulator. She's a regulatory accountant. So you work for the water regulator and the financial regulator at that point. At the same time, I was a payday lender. I sort of asked her, I was like, what do you think? I remember before I went to Dollar, you know, consumer finance business is known as a payday lender. And she's like, if you think you can make a difference there, and it's something you want to do, you should go and do it. Don't worry about the stigma attached to it. I think some might have, but I was relatively I wouldn't say risk seeking, but I was agnostic around the reputational risk where I thought that I could improve something, particularly for those businesses that I saw that were regulated in the regulator space, even going through a tough time. You know, if they had integrity and a licence and you could help ensure that they maintained what I call that sort of North Star of integrity and the moral compass of the North Star, you know, you could really make a difference through regulation because you've got the brand and the reputation attached to your company. It was tough because the regulator held you to often a higher level and then look back and say it's a wonderful thing. In banking, it happened. In financial services, in high cost short term credit or payday lending, as everyone knows it, as it certainly happened. In rental regulation, it is now happening. People look back and say, why wasn't it regulated earlier? Why weren't consumer protections put in earlier? The same holds true in gaming and gambling. Hindsight's a wonderful thing. You can't change the past, but you can influence the future.
Vasco: Exactly. And it it's quite interesting because I feel like people judge gambling very fast, but it it's actually an industry that has so much scrutiny and it's challenging. It's not like not everyone can be successful working in gambling because it's definitely not easy and ends up, you know, like giving you a lot of skills that can be applied in a lot of places. So yeah, all the respect because it's a very, very strong industry to work at.
James: You probably have to be a diplomat, a politician, an accountant, a lawyer, a compliance expert. And again, it’s back to that moral compass, North Star, ensuring that you take people with you on that. It's very easy to become very negative of it and critical of it. But your best place to change something from the inside, not from the outside, criticising it.
Vasco: Yeah. Exactly.
Making gambling a not-for-profit industry
Vasco: And one thing that our previous guest said is that CFOs don't have unconventional takes. But I have to ask you, do you have any unconventional takes about gambling that you think people would probably disagree with you?
James: Yeah, so it's tough when you're an accountant to take an unconventional stance, I guess.
So I guess for us, being unconventional is quite, it seems even more risky than if you work in marketing or product or something like that. And I think the gambling industry is probably one where everyone's tried to think about it in unconventional ways and being criticised for the outcomes of that and regulators trying to keep up and catch up with it.
There is one thought I would offer. It's not necessarily what I would subscribe to, but the question I would ask, so rather than take an unconventional stance, the question I would ask, I guess, is, and I'd ask this of the industry and the regulatory bodies and regulation as well, given the way the industry's gone and where regulation now is, and I challenge both sides of the coin on this, would it be better if gaming and gambling, was just seen as run as a not-for-profit like the lotteries can be and often are. And would that lead to the industry being bigger, more successful, potentially more profitable and able to do more good? Now that would be anathema to most of the gaming and gambling companies that have built themselves on capitalism and profits. And it would be an interesting take for the regulator and the tax authorities who are regulating and taxing the gaming and gambling sector to the point where, you know, is it becoming capable of continuing to generate profits? When gaming taxes double overnight. So there's Diane's conventional stance is again, lottery and gaming and gambling, you know, how should you balance it? And should they be run as one big nonprofit, state, beneficial, society benefiting industry?
Vasco: Well, I think I'm gonna ask that to our next guest and see what they say.
James’s mistaken identity story from William Hill Online
Vasco: Another thing is like I actually I don't work in gambling, but I work with a lot of gambling companies and I attend a lot of the events that you probably attend because there's so many during the year. One thing that is very unique to this industry are the stories that people either get to experience or get to hear.
Do you have any that you can tell that is like your favourite story? Either you experienced it or you were told by a friend that it can actually be on record?
James: Ah the old hearsay hearsay hearsay.
Vasco: Or that you experience, I'm I'm open to either.
James: Yeah, okay. I mean, there's a few that I probably couldn't mention to stay off the record. I guess the one that, and I don't, I've no idea if this is true, but the one that I've got the closest sort of credibility of being able to mention is when I joined HSBC. Now, I don't know if this is true, but the rumour has it when I joined HSBC because of my name, they thought it was…”The James Richardson” joining, Sport Italia guy, not the accountant James Richardson. And they thought that the rumour circulating internally is they got a you know, sort of a new ambassador, because at that time we had Robbie Savage and A.P. McCoy was still there. And so they flew out the head of media to Gibraltar for my first morning to go and meet me. And I only know this and I don't know if it's true because I saw him at breakfast on my first morning and I recognised him. It was a guy, Lee, won't mind me shouting him out, who I went to university with. And I hadn't seen for 10 years and I saw him across the breakfast room of the Sunborn. I thought, what's Lee doing out here? And I remember he worked for William Hill. I went over and said, Lee, what are you doing out here? And now whether it's true or not, he out and been sent out to meet James Richardson and I can't believe it's you. I thought it was a football Italian guy and you've been invited to go on Robbie Savage's podcast if you like, which I didn't accept. That would have been a whole new challenge. I could talk a lot about Italian football. I've done about a balance sheet, but not a lot about Italian football. I didn't think Robbie Savage would be too interested in my numbers.
Vasco: Fair enough, fair enough. And your first role in gambling was the online global CFO about William Hill and you were sent to Gibraltar, as you said. Now this was right as Brexit was coming on. How was it for you to be managing a six hundred million plus business from a territory whose future relationships with the UK and EU were so unstable or unpredictable?
James: Yeah, was interesting for sure. It was a bigger cultural challenge than I probably anticipated. I hadn't worked out in Gibraltar and worked abroad before I worked with a lot of different people from different countries, but not actually been based there. So William Hill had his challenges, but also culturally, you know, we were the biggest employer on the rock at the time, but fast being overtaken by others.
I won't mention but they know who they are, the other big betting companies. So we'd had a lot of prestige and power on the rock and that was waning. So we'd been seen as the employer of choice but we probably no longer were. There was obviously a lot happening with responsible gaming and gambling and a lot of pressure. We were the cash cow of the business at the time. The retail business wasn't making much money, if any. The online business was making a lot of money but was under growing scrutiny of regulation. It was my and our, the management teams, gaming and gambling licences from the UKGC to the GGC globally that we were trading under. So we held personal and professional liability and responsibility for it. So it was a real difficult balance of maintaining growth and profitability whilst ensuring that we could demonstrate that we were acting responsibly.
And so it was a really interesting role because I was right at the coalface of having to sit on compliance committees and make decisions. In 100 countries we had customers in. The top 20 were by far the most important. UK was still nearly 50%. So we had a lot of regulatory scrutiny in green markets. We had grey markets we were allowed to operate under a worldwide licence, but with implications on our licensing in green markets. US was just regulating at the time. There's some interesting stories on to geocache and make sure that geo track where all the bets were being placed, because you could only have them placed online in the state of Nevada. Otherwise your licence at risk. Thankfully, I didn't have to worry about that side or there are some interesting stories from it because I had everything other than the US. So it's a really interesting balance and taking people with you on that journey and rebuilding a finance team that had gone through tumultuous change with point of consumption tax coming in. Hit profitability reduction in marketing spend, which was becoming less efficient, not more efficient because pay-per-click was getting more competitive. So change in optimisation was getting more difficult. So generating leads was a new customer referrals was becoming more challenging as marketing spend had to reduce and efficiency and econometric modelling of lead generation and things like that was getting much more scientific.
So trying to build science into the data side of the business to help marketing at the same time as reduce cost and take a new team with you on a journey into the unknown where before you, if you’ll pardon the pun, print money, and now you had to be mindful of sort of regulation in every market, whether it was gray or green, because the gray markets had impact on your green market licences.
Vasco: You mentioned a lot of different situations that marked your periods at William Hill and I mean I think that period is quite remarkable. When when you joined, it was also at the same time, like you said, the US lifted the ban on online betting and William Hill was among the first to move so fast and capture 24% of that market on that year. While in the UK everything was changing for William Hill. you had the fines, you had cuts, you had the 721 million statutory losses. How was for you to be in a business that was actually going into two very different directions at the same time?
James: Yeah, it was a balancing act for sure. It sort of tested your resolve. I think it tested everyone's resolve in that business. There was a lot of management change at the time. There's some great people in William Hill who'd been there a long, long time. Some of them moved on and went elsewhere. Some sort of stuck it out and wanted to be part of the change for the future. It came down to a big balancing act of ensuring again that we stuck with our purpose, our integrity and the principles of supporting the strength of the brand. But accepting we had to make some tough decisions because a lot of other businesses were able to move with more fleet of foot than we could. We were in a lot of markets, we had to withdraw from some of those markets, we had to change operations in other markets. A big part of the focus was the US. A lot of the investment was going into the US. And the UK retail business was obviously going through a lot of change with the Triennial. And the online business was going through a lot of regulatory scrutiny that we were having to ensure we navigated with every decision that we made and every demonstration of change that we were having to do or being asked to do by our various stakeholders. So the stakeholder set was certainly widened from what it was. You've got different shareholders wanting different things. You've got the regulator looking for change. We're obviously under intense scrutiny in the public in terms of responsible gaming and gambling and signs of harm and triggers of harm and things like that.
So it was definitely a balancing act to try and frankly keep it all together. But a heck of a life experience. And you know what, I made some great friends there. I've got a lot of contacts still there, even though I was there for a short period of time, was relatively, know, William Hill had lifers in there. I was only there for two years. There were people that had been there their whole career, both before me and after me. Our business has gone on and changed in many ways since I left in 2019. So I came back, thankfully, before the pandemic, which obviously nobody knew about. Otherwise, I may have been stuck on the rocks at the time I was flying in and out of Gibraltar whilst living out there, but my family were in London. So I think I clocked up when I counted over 65 flights in just under two years. So hence, you know, why not? I'll go and join an airport. Why not? I can watch other people take off.
Vasco: We are going into that for sure.
James: I can watch other people take off because I've done enough flights, both short haul and long haul. Over the course of two years, 65 was pretty good. I didn't even get that many air miles either because it was the bargain basement, the budget airlines that didn't have loyalty schemes.
Settling a £6.2 million fine caused by decisions made before James arrived
Vasco: No, fair enough. And I mean, besides all the challenges that you spoke about, you also inherit, you know, a very big cleanup which was a six point two million pounds record fine from the Gambling Commission regarding to the anti money laundering failings. Do you think that was the hardest part of the job? And when you accepted working for William Hill, were you aware that this was gonna be one of the challenges that you had to face?
James: It was definitely the hardest part of the job, think, dealing with the regulatory scrutiny and again, with the benefit of hindsight, looking at what the industry had done and been able to do, probably with often the best of intentions, but in pursuit of profit and capital returns and ROI.
It was tough to look back on it and then be asked to not justify, well you sort of had to justify it because you had to justify why you were changing and why it was going to be different going forwards and why it would work with reference to hindsight of the past and things that had been done when I wasn't there. I was aware that was going to be a challenge. I'd faced it in high-cost short-term credit and I think that was even more pronounced than it was in gaming.
High-cost short-term credit with a sector, a small part of a consumer finance sector that grew very rapidly. Regulation was definitely left in the wake. Gaming and gambling had been around a lot longer. It's one of the oldest industries in the world. And so people had had longer to get used to it. And some of the natural fire breaks would already be there without regulation. But again, they had caused consumer detriment or consumer harm, just always accused of doing just like banking had in the 2000s and high-cost short-term credit did in the 2010s. So I was aware it was going to be a challenge. I like to think I don't underestimate many things. I think the amount of change and the cultural side of it and how the online business has grown again, you know, with retail being so different, but intertwined from a trading platform perspective.
Because ordinarily you'd find solutions, you'd just parcel them up and find a solution to them. We were so heavily intertwined. And then you've got the US element that was regulating and the focus on the US regulators of looking at your UK licensing and your worldwide licensing and what you were doing there. So there are incredible interconnected aspects of that business that I probably, with hindsight underestimated just how intertwined they were and how they were all linked. I always talk about the law of unintended consequences and we seem to have them everywhere. And that was, I guess, a function of being such a business with a legacy and a past and that had grown up through various cycles and then had been disrupted by technology and then had diversified geographically. It had all the makings of the perfect MBA thrown onto a rock in Gibraltar with a new management team, with all different stakeholders wanting different things. The board wanted one thing and corporate head office wanted another and the US management team wanted and needed another and the retail team needed another. Trying to keep all that and bring all that together. In an industry you weren't a specialist in, relying on others, SMEs with vested interests. I would say I think most people in business like that, particularly who are so passionate about it, and the one thing with gaming is I think a lot of people in it are passionate about it. We'll come on to talk about airlines and airports, but gaming is definitely one of the few that I've worked in where the passion was so great. You've got a lot of people with a lot of passion with the best of intentions, but not always able to see the bigger picture because they're working in their part of the business, retail, online, US, gray markets, avoiding black markets, green markets, evolving green markets, licensing markets that are going from gray to green.
Vasco: You really need to be inside it and like consume it day to day.
James: Yeah, and that's what I just enjoyed that. was like, you could be in any conversation trying to understand this. Again, this sort of drive to stay curious and ask questions. But the compliance side of it was tough. I mean, you know, sitting on the compliance, because I had to sit on the compliance boards, making decisions on what we were going to do, how we were going to justify it to the regulator, then going in and seeing the regulator, because it was my licence, talking about it, then being investigated on the stuff that happened in the past and then having to settle those fines. Again, I'd gone through it with high-cost short-term credit and managed to maintain a licence. Some lost theirs, we maintained ours on an interim trading licence and then a full FCA licence transition from the FT. So again, I got experience of it. I think that's why William Hill came to me. You didn't need to be a betting-gaming specialist, but I actually developed a real passion for it. That's probably, come onto what took me back to it, but I developed a real passion for that segment in a way that I didn't think I would, again, I didn't plan out to, set out to, but I developed a real passion for it, just like I had for finance and banking, which opens up opportunities and possibilities for people. Gaming and gambling as entertainment done the right way or a guy who likes sport, it's a fun place to be.
How established gambling brands should respond to regulatory scrutiny
Vasco: And I can sense, you know, that's passion and also that respect towards William Hill's, you know, legacy and history. Do you think that matters when accepting a new job, the history of the company, or do you are you more focused on what comes next?
James: I think it's a great question, I think it depends. If you're going into a new startup, then obviously you haven't got that and I've worked with some of those as well. So you don't have that. think if it helps build a purpose and it helps keep that sort of the north star of the business honest, then brand and reputation can be used for competitive advantage.
If they can't and you're doing the wrong thing with it destroying your reputation not maintaining your brand then there's no value in it. I mean brands intangible you can't put it on the balance sheet. Yeah, then there's no point having it So if you're going to go into a business that no matter what stage it's at and what sort of? Position in the life cycle it's at, if it has a brand and a resident brand and a history and you can't use it then you're probably looking at a very different solution, which is that brand and that history and that legacy isn't going to be around for long, it's going to be consumed by something or change. If you can, then you should use it for competitive advantage to be able to best resolve. And I think in regulated markets where you're at risk of being held accountable for decisions of the past with the benefit of hindsight, if you are going to rely on that brand and that reputation, then you need to make the right decision about what you're going to change in the right way so that you maintain it, otherwise you'll lose it. Whilst it might not be valued on the balance sheet, there's no point then having it.
Vasco: And do you do you think the brand was the biggest support in making people and regulators trust William Hill again? Because you had to rebuild this trust after everything that happened. Like did you rely on the brand or do you think that there were other things that came into play?
James: No, I think it was many other things because actions speak louder than words, right? A brand is just a word, but if, you know, and saying you're going to do something, yeah, it's just, you're just saying it. And that's where the regulator, so you couldn't use that as a defence with the regulator anymore than you could with the consumer. It helped you recover where you had to make change because of course you had a legacy customer base. So if you could explain to them why you were doing it, and that's the difficulty of it, sometimes it's easier not to have the brand and the legacy and just start from scratch. But if you want to rely on that brand and you are going to make change to support the reputation of that brand and therefore keep that brand, then you've got to do the right thing. My experience is the regulator and the consumer and society will play no credence to a brand if there's no reputation behind it that you're seen to be doing the right thing.
Vasco: Fair enough.
Cost cuts and raising nearly £1bn during COVID at Stansted Airport
Vasco: Now James, we are gonna go to the part of the podcast that I'm more excited about, I have to say. Which is you went to work for an airport. Now I want you to try and travel back to 2019, you know, pre COVID, pre all that craziness. You were offered a position of CFO for Stansted Airports. How did that come about?
James: Yeah, of all the things betting on airports, I figured was going to be a safer bet at the time than some of the more cyclical industries.
Yeah, my father could finally say, you know, actually tell people what his son did rather than he was just an accountant. Going all the way back from PwC, he was fine with that. When it was the big six or the big four, it was OK. So, yeah, my father could finally say I was an accountant. But that wasn't the driving force to go and work at Stansted Airport. It was, something that I was approached about. I wanted to be a pilot when I was young because my next door neighbor was a pilot and he looked great and you he went in the RAF and flew fighter jets and then he went to BA and ended being a captain and travelled all over the world. I thought that sounds great to me, but I couldn't get in the RAF because I had an operation on my ears when I was 12 and so they wouldn't let me in. It was probably right because when I was young and I used to fly, yeah, it wasn't the greatest. That resolved itself, but too late to be a pilot. So yeah, it was an opportunity approached and you know what, thought, I told my father, I remember when I couldn't be a pilot, I wasn't gonna get in the RAF to do pilot training anyway, I could have gone and done something else. That one day I'd run an airport. So I thought, you know what, I've got the opportunity here. It's completely different. I'm gonna bet on an airport because this has got to be more stable than what I've just come out of with William Hill. I'd relocated back from Gibraltar. I was going to do something else in London related to the sector and at the last minute before I took that they approached me about becoming the Finance Director of Stansted Airport.
Vasco: And ten weeks later we had COVID, which grounded everyone on earth. How how was this?
James: So I was, I mean, it affected everyone, but I sat there thinking, I can't believe this. I joined an infrastructure business that plans for 25 years, know, slot coordination twice a year. So you know what your numbers are going to be to within a very small percentage every six months. I joined in November, December, 2019, and no one had even heard of COVID. As I joined, I remember someone mentioning something about a virus out in China or something like that, but that was it. No one had heard a thing about it. So I joined, yeah, just before Christmas 2019 and I think that Christmas we hit our record passenger count for a day at Stansted. And don't quote me on the exact number, but I think it was somewhere around 103,000 passengers went through Stansted in a single day and I remember someone telling me and it was the airfield director or the ops director that was a record day and yeah by February early March we've gone from 103,000 passengers to the lowest day I think so I used to get the daily passenger count so with numbers and it was just over 300 passengers so from 103,000 passengers to 300.
Vasco: When did you realise the challenge that you had in front of you?
James: I think because the whole world was in such a state of shock about it and I'd seen some cycles before I thought, you know this can't go on forever. This will go back. It will recover right at some point. The challenge for the airline sector and the airport industry was when it would recover and how quickly it would recover and they were really the first industry to be so materially impacted because shut down, lockdown, that was it. All our passengers went away. Most of the businesses could move online. Airlines and airports couldn't do anything. They bumped along the bottom for the longest period while the government changed, chopped and changed, you know, travel guidance and what you could and couldn't do. And then we're probably the last to bounce back because of all that changing. I mean, most people, we didn't even understand where you could travel to, how and what you needed to do, never mind the public and the airlines who were trying to plan it. And it's an incredibly complex business. It's very simple business, but incredibly complex as a sector. You have to keep planes in the air, otherwise they've got to be reassessed. They have to be flown so many hours, pilot hours have to be maintained. Can't just be on simulators. It got really hard. And that's where you heard about the ghost flights and things like that. So I think I realised how difficult it was going to be probably after the second lockdown where we'd been released and then lockdown happened again. And even within that, you got the red, amber and green countries you could travel to. And that was changing daily. So for a business that could plan its passenger numbers and therefore, largely for revenue, three years out relatively accurately and six months out almost spot on, we couldn't plan from one day to the next what it was going to be. And the biggest challenge with that was the cultural change because it was an industry that was so used to being able to plan and so certain. A lot of people in that sector, who'd spent their whole life in that sector, just couldn't deal with the fact that it was uncertain. Whereas perhaps the likes of me and others who come from different sectors who had to deal with uncertainty of regulation coming in, of tax changes, of technology disruption, could cope with it a little better. I mean, I think that's why they approached me. They actually approached me because they had a big technology division because an airport really is a technology platform. Okay It's a big airport infrastructure with billions of pounds worth of physical assets But it's actually a technology platform that enables you to get from what used to call kerbside from when you're dropped off or you get out of your car to the plane gate as efficiently and as effectively and cheaply as possible in terms of passenger processing with all the regulations and security and compliance. But also, you know monetise you through the right commercial offering there whether it's a pint in Wetherspoons or some toiletries from Boots or a meal at Comptoir Libanais. So it's a really interesting, it's like running a city. And I just found it absolutely fascinating. So when they gave me the opportunity to do it, I jumped at it and worked for Ken there, who's now the group CEO. And it was, I think, the most interesting of all the businesses I've been in operationally, the most interesting. And I would probably also say the people in it again, are lifers. They just love aviation and airlines. So probably some of the most passionate people who stuck it out, even when it was really tough, times were tough. It wasn't for everyone and some took a choice not to stick with it during the tough times. But most of the people who've been in it for a long time stuck with it. Bit like gaming and gambling, they just had a pure passion for it.
Vasco: And it's it's funny, it was completely uncharted territory for everyone. And Stansted didn't know, but they actually probably needed a CFO like you for those periods. How like the numbers are still very shocking. You had almost 90% volume of passengers lost, you had the 700 million pounds losses as well. How did you survive? What did you do to make sure that everything was able to recover afterwards.
James: Yeah, I mean, we had a small executive team who pulled together really well, who were determined that we were going to manage through this. As you say, I think it, as difficult a time as it was for everyone, I think it helped that everyone was going through it. So there was a bit more tolerance of you know, the fact that there was a complete unknown and you were having to make decisions one day that you didn't know if they were going to pan out correctly the very next day, never mind a month out, a year out, or as airports plan for 10 or 20 years out, you were literally having to shoot from the hip a little bit and deal with, you know, airlines and partners who were also going through a tumultuous time. So I think it was, you know, testament to the team there, you know, we shrunk the sort of number of people in finance right down. A lot of central services went down. We didn't make any compulsory redundancies. We offered voluntary redundancies, some people who'd been there a long time decided to take that. Others we put, I think we made around half the staff. I think we made around half the staff, put half the staff on furlough. I think we made half staff redundant, sorry. I think we put 70 % of the remaining on furlough. So there's a very small skeleton operational staff and then a support staff of finance, legal. The teams have slimmed down a lot.
I went from running one airport to running three, commercial, property, the tech division all came into me and I had a smaller suite of FDs work with me. Many of them are still at MAG now. Some of them are now the divisional FDs. And it was just a function of all pulling together and knowing that with our group CFO and having the right head of corporate finance, we raised nearly a billion pounds, we covered our losses and we positioned that business really well for recovery as the numbers subsequently showed. So we made place some tactical, necessary tactical bets, you could say, but it just worked incredibly hard. know, the passion and the purpose in that business, it was formidable. And it wasn't just in Stansted or the MAG. You saw that across the sector with all the airlines did, what the partners did and what the other airports did to ensure that that sector could recover when the public and when the consumer needed it to, which was as soon as the release valve was given and countries went green, everyone wanted to get back on planes and go on holiday and do things.
How to manage investor expectations in a period of uncertainty
Vasco: And that's when in 2024 you had the busiest periods in Stansted record ever, besides those one point one million investment programme. How was it going from making sure something survives to then having six hundred million to extend the airport?
James: Yeah, was, I have to us my two words again, interesting and tough because you look back on it in hindsight now and you think, that, you know, wasn't that bad was it? But actually we were, we were raising nearly a billion just to survive and then worrying about how long we would be in cash burn status. And then the next minute we were trying to convince investors to invest at least that amount again over the next 10 years in the airport to grow it. And that, you know by doing so we could become more profitable. And then you get all the, you know, well, what if scenarios of what if there's another pandemic? What if we end up in another lockdown because we've still got the scars of the past? We've had to raise a lot of money to keep going. That debt has to be repaid. Those people that put equity in want to return on that money that they've put in. And now you're asking us for more in a period of uncertainty where nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. So it was actually, it was tougher to raise the money to grow after the pandemic, having raised the money to keep the business surviving during the pandemic, then it would have been had it not happened at all because clearly the business had more debt, it had to raise more money, we had to sell non-core property assets that we no longer held, that we could have sold in the future to fund that investment. Return on capital went up because people had put more money in and the sector was seen as more risky, not for anything that the sector was doing because you can only control the controllables, but the unknowns of a pandemic and the catastrophic impact that it has on that sector. I say, others, know, retail, yeah, it's tough, but the supermarkets could go online and their online sales boom, retails go online, their online sales boom, but airports, they've got no passengers and airlines had no one to fly. So it was the uncertainty outside your control that made it a different type of challenge. And so it proved to be, not that I ever underestimate it or anything, certainly more difficult the second time around. When I was first in at the airport and we were just getting to the point of securing the investment to expand the airport, because it's nearly at capacity, and grow it, it seemed easier. And then the pandemic came in and raising the money to rescue it was difficult, but OK, because you sort of got no choice at that point. The investors either let it fold or they fund the cash losses. But then the questions asked them when you're coming back to ask for more to grow the airport. And that money's been spent sort of rescuing it, if you like, or keep it going during a time of no passengers was particularly challenging. A lot of sensitivity analysis and scenarios, and even with the auditors, it's like, well, what sensitivity do you want us to run? No passengers. For how long? Because an airport and an airline can't survive for long with no passengers at all. So how much cash do you need us to keep on deposit to maintain a going concern? Or 12 months of cash burn? And then you've got to keep that aside, but you can't, we want to invest that. So you want a lower cash balance. You know, we want to maintain a lower working capital and cash balance. And so all those trade-offs of the what ifs in an environment that nobody knew, like what happens if we've had three lockdowns, was it? Three or four? They all blur into one now. What happens if it happens again? Well, it ends, right? There's only so much you can plan for. But the key with airlines and airports is particularly airports are long-term investments.
What James learned at Inspired Entertainment
Vasco: Exactly. And you certainly love a challenge because as things were getting good for the airports, you decided to go on another journey and you joined Inspired as their CFO in January 2025. Now I know you're in gardening leave, so we're gonna stick to what is public record, but when you joined there was a major shift in that business, right? You had the parks that closed, the pubs that were restructured, you had the major cuts in headcount. A lot of things were changing. Do you think that's why Inspired hired you? And when you get to a role where you're meant to execute something like this, how do you decide what stays and what gets out?
James: Yeah, there's some great questions in there. I'm not sure I've got the answer to all of them. I think it was just like everything else, don't know, it's an element of balance around what we needed to do and have done at Inspired. It was a business that was going through a lot of change again. I mean, again, right back to the sweet spot: consumer demand was changing through in gaming and betting and the US market was opening up. Technology enablement was at the forefront. We were a B2C and B2B business when I joined. They asked me to look at how we can evolve that business. had public knowledge, it had had an accounting restatement and hadn't filed its accounts on time. So that was the first, know, the first non-negotiable. The first thing we had to do was ensure we built credibility back with the public markets, that we filed our accounts accurately and on time. We also had to refinance and because we hadn't been filing on time, refinancing had to be delayed. So get the filings on time, sort out the accounting remediation, refinance the business, and then look at the evolution of the business model and start to shift that from physical and digital to more digital-led. And they gave me two years was the board agenda, the board timeframe to do that. So that's what we set about. How do you prioritise? We had to prioritise first what kept us alive as it were, and that was to ensure you file your account sometime and that they're accurate and not restated. So that was the first job, and we made sure we did that, built a team that could do that, work with me on it, and get through the accounting remediation. I’d taken over from an interim who'd done a great job getting us that far. So finish that off, file the accounts, all the restated accounts are in file the first quarter and every subsequent quarter on time ensure they're accurate. So I the executive officer, it was my responsibility and the board's and then work on the remediation and the controls. We're on NASDAQ, so it's Sarbanes-Oxley controls. Make sure we work through that and remediate on the control weaknesses. And then alongside that, once there was credibility in the numbers, we could refinance the business, which we subsequently did. At the same time as working out how we would evolve the business from primarily, in the UK anyway, it was face to face. We ran machines and games at holiday parks and pubs and we had pool tables and jukeboxes in there as a legacy of the business that we'd acquired in the past from the breweries. Yeah, was sort of luck at how we could evolve that and what we do with that.
Vasco: So you basically had to not only fix how the business was operating, but also rebuild interest again in another business. What was the most interesting thing for you or the thing that you actually enjoyed or are the most proud of your tenure at Inspired?
James: I think it was delivering on the mandate that looked, you would look at that and go, crikey, that looks like quite a full plate. I think delivering on that and keeping all the plates spinning, I think is what I'm proudest of and having a team around me that, you know, we took on that journey, that we ensured that, you know, every day was better than the day before, that we delivered on what the board wanted and that we did what we said we'd do. And that, you know, when I leave that business, it's in a better place now than it was when I found it. You know, we've divested the UK retail business, the refinancing's complete, and all the accounts have been remediated, the controls are remediated, and everything's filed on time. That is inside two years. Sometimes you look at things and think, that be done? It had to be done, it needed to be done. But having a business that again had passion and belief to be able to do that at a time when it'd been through a tough year or two. I'm particularly proud of.
How to make capital allocation calls under the pressure of a 2 year mandate
Vasco: And I mean you had record revenue now, so it's a big success story. What is the discipline it takes to make all these capital allocation calls that you just mentioned from the refinancing to cut the legacy parts and letting the digital drive most of your margins?
James: I think a critical focus on “cash being king” was always drilled into me. I think understanding what the various stakeholders want and then telling the story or being able to explain to them how we go about delivering on that within the remit of the capital that you have available and the market in which you find yourself. I mean, nobody could have predicted, pardon the pun, prediction markets, maybe having the impact that they have on the sector. So going back to, know, something I've sort of referenced before, controlling the controllables, and then ensuring that you can't please all the people all the time. That being able to knit together a story that explains the prioritisation of what you're doing and why, particularly in regulated businesses where you've got to be mindful of changing regulation and then changing tax, control the controllables, and then deal with that whilst being able to explain to the various stakeholders the decisions you're making and why, the order you're making those in, and then a focus on ROI to support that and justify it because logic will always trump emotion. There can be a lot of emotion when things are changing and regulations coming in, markets are regulating, states are regulating, tax rates are going up and they really go down, some cases doubling. Being able to explain the logic behind the decisions and the order in which you're making them helps with some of the more emotive factors where people have understandable vested interests because they're passionate about their geography, their territory, their product. And trying to balance all that, taking everyone with you, is the most important thing, I think. And that's where good, a good handle on the numbers, but a good articulation of the story supported by those numbers. You don't need to know all the detail, but you need to know who does know all the detail, so that you can go to them and find it if you need it. But actually having the time and space to be able to step back and think, so how am I going to explain this relative to the audience that will resonate with them and enable them to either ask a question or want to go and find out something themselves because they're curious or help me find a solution to what they perceive as a problem rather than asking you as a CFO to solve all their problems for them because you're not able to do that is my experience. If you could do that, you're probably superhuman.
Vasco: And to finish this inspired part, I wanna ask you, was there anything foundational that supported the success story that allowed you to be successful in this venture?
James: I think there were a number of aspects to Inspired's business that helped. I think a strong team and people with brilliant sector knowledge. I think the diversified business model really helped. We're in 30 plus countries. We've got a virtual sports business. There's a gaming business. There's a retail business. So diversification helped because you can place your bets in different places at different times on different colours, if you like. And I think a legacy, a legacy of a business that knows what it's doing and can navigate technological, societal and regulatory change and do that through, you know, I guess technology adaption and the use of technology. We'll see where AI goes and what that does and what impact that has. I also think it helped being B2B as well as B2C with recurring revenues, key customers, took a bit of the compliance. It's a different compliance requirement when you're B2B than B2C. And some great partners.
So, it was a good platform play, great partners, recurring revenue contracts, good technology base. It had gone through some difficult times reporting and accounting and finance-wise. And we remediated that while still navigating all those other facets, whether it was Trump's tariffs coming in or wars that impact confidence or prediction markets that results in sector re-ratings, all of those external factors. Or you could really just control the controllables and having a good business with good fundamentals that's diversified product-wise, vertically and geographically probably helped. Definitely helped.
Why the best CFO’s are Jack of all trades, master of none
Vasco: Good. And before we finish our conversation, I have two more questions that I really wanna ask you. The first one is for all the aspiring CFOs, you told our team that to be a great CFO, you have to be jack of all trades, but a master of none. Why do you think this?
James: Because I think if you think you're the smartest person in the room, you're probably not. Invariably, there will be somebody in the room who knows more about any one specific area than you will do. And I think if you can help bring the constituent parts together such that they are great. So if the whole can end up being greater than the individual contribution you can knit that together. Then I think you've got the makings of a great business leader. If you can bring the best out of people and enable them to be their best, then you've got the makings of a great business leader. And I think a CFO is a business leader. You just happen to be, I was always saying, the CFO runs the business by the numbers, taking account of the people. The CEO runs the business by the people taking account of the numbers. And if you get that partnership in lockstep, great things happen. The CEO runs it by the people, but he knows this CFO's got the numbers and the CFO runs it by the numbers. He knows the CEO's got the people. You can take a lot more people with you. And once you've got hearts and minds, people will go the extra mile. And so yes, there's a case for being a specialist in a subject matter expert, particularly earlier in your career, particularly if you find a niche that you're really interested in. But if you want to be a CFO, you've got to be able to do a lot of things and you've got to be able to do a lot of things competently. That doesn't mean you've got to do everything the best, but you've got to ensure that you can surround yourself with people that are able to do the best things and bring them together so that collectively, the individual parts of the best things become an even better thing.
Vasco: Very good answer. And now that you're living Inspired and the CFO role, this to me at least feels like a very reflective moment. A moment for you to think, because you have thirty years of experience. So my question for you is what does James Richardson want from the next chapter of his life?
Yeah, crikey, when you say 30 years, it makes me feel old. It makes me sound old. Who'd thought 30 years later, I'd still be sat here from Daley Thompson posters to start. I think for me, it's about, yeah, taking a bit of time because I can for the probably first time in my career. I've got the luxury of a little bit of time and then finding the next thing that gives me the purpose and passion that have enabled me to do the things that I've done. Sometimes in cases where I would have, or my 15, 16, 18 year old self would have looked at it gone, my goodness, you'd never take that, you'd never back yourself to do that. So a bit of a rest, a bit of a reset, and then finding, you know, the four Ps. Marketing people talk about product, price, place, promotion.
I always was taught, I think, when I did my accounting exams and I think about, you know, the four Ps being things like, you know, people, profit, perspective, passion, finding the next role in that sweet spot of a sector that's probably going through consumer change, technological evolution and regulation, where I can help make tomorrow better than today, grow something and leave it in a better place than I found it. That for me feels like a great life fulfillment. And then I'm young enough to have a few gigs left in me, I hope, before I embark on a portfolio career, but who knows. So find the next thing that I can help take people on the journey and make things better for the next generation.
Vasco: I have to say I'm really curious about what's coming next, but I'm sure it's gonna be very good and they're gonna be very lucky to have you. Thank you so much for coming today. I had the best time having a chat with you and learning everything you've done, and I hope you enjoyed it too.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure, great, thanks a lot.
Vasco: Thank you.
