hi paul thanks very much for joining us today hi tim thanks for thanks for having me yeah it's our pleasure to have you on uh really excited to talk to you about a couple of key topics recruitment and uh so the land-based industry in the uk which are specialisms of yours and uh obviously you've written a few articles for us in the gaming insider magazine so it's great to have you on the jr huddle for the first time thank you looking forward to it yeah i think that to start off with would be great by way of intro if you could uh tell our listeners those who are familiar who maybe aren't as familiar with you about kind of your industry experience and your career in gaming so far sure i mean i've been doing it as long as i've been legally allowed to i started out at 18 in betting shops i went to college and then um loved the idea of betting gaming casinos i became a dealer coming out of university and i've been in it ever since working full-time um in operations and at uh grover's head office for a number of years went self-employed 14 years ago um main speciality since then i've been opening new casinos i've done it i think 11 now 10 or 11. uh and then my business partner and i stephen jackson started grs recruitment eight years ago and we've been doing that ever since so it's kind of a twin stream mostly half casino operations half um betting and gaming recruitment yeah sure both uh from a journalistic point of view both are really interesting topics so i'm i'm you know more than happy to talk recruitment and and casinos as well i think we can start with recruitment as you say you've kind of you've got a firm set up with your business partner if we would talk uh let's get industry recruitment first what's the so if we're to kind of sum up the the recruitment landscaping gaming at the moment uh what would kind of your overall summary be it was a mess at the moment um from a i mean spinning into casino staff and staff junior management and senior management staff junior management is a is a nightmare at the moment as you can imagine as you'll know casino staff outside of london certainly get paid broadly minimum living wage um you know with minor variations regionally and you've been in a situation where the casino's been closed for however long they were closed and a lot of not [Music] a available of doing that they um had a couple years off or a year and a half off and a lot a bunch of went did something else completely so kind of stacking shelves in the supermarket but it's a it's a familiar story now we used to say why would you be a dealer when you can earn or more or less the same amount in sainsbury's and now you can say if we've had a national pay rise to a minimum of 10 pounds an hour and that's higher than entry rate for a couple of the major operators so staff and junior management is very very difficult there's a lot of people left the industry brexit hasn't helped because uh if you're from eastern europe and you used to work as a dealer if you didn't apply for right to remain you can't come back so that's another lump that's been taken out at a senior level it's um perhaps not as difficult it depends i mean when you're looking for people with casino experience there's only a certain number of those and a few have left the industry some of the operators are trying to bring people in from outside so for example grover will um have their regional operations managers have come from outside the industry as far as i can gather that's it's been very successful you know the it's a bit of a old wives tale that you need to have done 20 years on the tables before you can understand how to run an operation you know at that level casino hotel bingo club bowling alley broadly the same you're managing the managers certainly um everything in between staff and senior manager is also difficult it's i mean from a recruitment standpoint it's great because people can't find the people they need and we're in a position to help them but we can't always do that you know if you if you want 10 dealers in birmingham like we can't find them that is not there they've left the industry they don't want to come back so it's certainly challenging yeah my next question was going to be what are the biggest challenges kind of recruitment companies are facing in gaming at the moment but i think you outlined a few quite quite articulately there on uh i'll rephrase the question kind of based on what you said on the junior level um basically how hard of a sell is it given kind of as you say you can maybe pick up just as much at sainsbury's um but at the senior level like i'm guessing you know it's uh it's still an attractive proposition for kind of execs and maybe ceos and people like that i think so yeah i mean certainly the it's perceived offline and online aren't necessarily perceived as that different from people from outside the industry and online is booming and has been through curving and beyond um so i think the at that level your skills are more generic more transferable if you can be a compliance director um for uh an oil company you can be a compliance director for a casino company it's just a different set of rules so that side of it is relatively easy to navigate one of the things we are finding talking about challenges from a recruitment standpoint is i think this probably goes across all sectors not just gaming there's been a it's been a buyer's market for skills for a long time they've been more people than than senior vacancies now it's getting more difficult to find people there are some recruitment practices that have stayed the same and haven't really updated and one of them is speed and nimbleness and it goes at both levels at staff level if you get someone who's interested in a in being a dealer you better talk to them within a day and you better have them in for a table test and an interview and a meet and greet within three days so if you don't they're gone they're they're get a job in the local pub or wherever it might be and you've missed your chance and i think the same holds true to a certain extent at a senior level it doesn't necessarily it's not a matter of days but definitely a matter of weeks if you mean we had a case just recently about three weeks ago where one of the uk offline operators was looking for a mid to senior level marketing person we spent a ton of time trying to find them the right person which wasn't diff it wasn't easy because there's you know there's a lot of jobs out there and not many great people found someone they interviewed them and about four weeks later they said i would like to talk to him again way too late look they were long gone you know people don't stay on the market for long you know in a market as hot as this one so i think it's challenging in the basis that it's frustrating when um perhaps employers haven't adjusted from the days when they were just shout we need this and they get a ton of people applying and they pick the best one to where we are now where you've got to work a lot harder and people aren't going to wait why would you wait for one job when there's three others that look just as good we've made you an offer yeah i think that that's uh i guess that's a key point to note for any kind of recruiters any gaming companies listening but i think on the to flip it maybe on the candidate side um if there's a ceo role which kind of you know it's a good role in the industry people want it um it's in demand the role itself um if you're a candidate looking to land kind of take that next step into leadership uh what should you be doing to kind of make sure that an operator or be a supplier picks you well anyone at that level will already know what i'm about to say which is networking it's it's the number of jobs that we would love to have a chance to fill they get filled because they they'll it'll be someone they already know it's all about i'm not suggesting there's anything um unethical going on but if you're already known to a to a prospective employer then you've got a massive edge um and i think that that my partner and i we try and be as well connected as possible i've worked in the business for a long time steve's been recruiting for 15 to 20 years in the business he he's the best connected man in gaming i always like to say and that that's what makes a huge difference on a specific note i think um even at the very senior levels some or an enhanced awareness of how important compliance is these days you know if you've never worked in a strictly or tightly regulated industry um then i think that that's something that will be an issue and if nothing else you need to demonstrate an awareness of how restricted that can be particularly in the uk and it's obviously getting worse likewise online and internationally the the scale of fines that have been levied at the moment and there's new ones out every day including today um and the threat to personal licenses and to livelihoods and to businesses is acute enough that i think employees need to be comfortable but you might not know the law but you need to know that abiding by the law is important there is no more seat that pam's stuff or there is the company's going to go down and that's not a risk people are prepared to take yeah absolutely um as we've already kind of discussed uh plenty plenty to sort of unpack with regards to recruitment and i think uh your upcoming article for for our next issue uh it does does touch on on the kind of some of the things we talked about but certainly other issues in recruitment um another another speciality of yours as we've already said is kind of the the land-based the casino sector in the uk um i'd like to move on to that one now and then maybe we'll come back to recruitment a little bit later if if needs be but um obviously casinos an interesting time you know a lot of them were well not actually interesting sorry that's a bad word um obviously during the pandemic it was a terrible time for casinos um but i guess now it's a little more interesting in that they're back up and running generally what's kind of the uk sector saying at the moment what do you think of kind of performance and and operations right now obviously it's pretty dynamic with and the last restrictions being lifted a matter of days ago um i think the general consensus is in the first reopening when were allowed to open the first time it was a little bit better than people expected you know they thought it was going to be a wasteland and people would be scared to come in i think the um it's fair to say if you divide the uh clientele into people who come into play and people come in for a pure you know a social experience which traditionally operators have done in terms of how they measure their business the um leisure customers the non-heavy spenders um probably have been a bit more reticent to come back or possibly they've preferred to go back to just going to parven restaurants and cinema and that kind of thing the kind of stuff they missed with casinos being been an occasional thing i think the gamblers by which i'm not necessarily talking about enormous sums of money i'm talking about anything from 50 pound a visit upwards outside london they've been quicker to come back i think because they really like gambling they're going to victims because they want to gamble as opposed to the leisure players who go in because they want to try something different i think they've come back so it's the picture i'm getting generally is the attendance is a bit lower but spends a little bit higher which is a it's a theme that's been um um pushed a little bit by at least one of the major operators as well who've been kind of jacking up the minimums and accepting the fact that that's going to exclude some players i think the landscape as a whole in casinos has been effect clearly has been affected by kobe but the thought process has as well and i think operators now some look very carefully at what kind of customers they want particularly on tables when traditionally or perhaps in the collective consciousness casinos are tables and they have slots and electronic in the background um i think that's really changing now it's it's in the operator's interest to change that because tables are incredibly expensive to run um but i think the um perhaps the early restrictions when there were only three people per card table and four people per roulette table from a social distancing point of view i've crystallized that in a few people's minds that that actually if you focus your attention on the people who play more heavily and particularly play faster or essentially lose faster then it's more profitable and especially in a world when you've got you're getting pinched as well because you don't have any staff because they've left the industry and because at the time they're out with cobrador um with um uh close contacts that kind of thing if you're gaining stuff a cut in half and the number of people you have per table is cut as well because of restrictions then you've got to focus on the on the people who spend and i think they're going through that process has made operators realize what's possible that they're that um actually a table full of what we were going to call saturday night players who've got 50 quid each and they want two three hours entertainment out of it it's just not enough you know if you've got limited staff you can deploy those staff better elsewhere so whether you go really kind of savage and push the minimums up such that they just can't play they can't afford to play they don't want to play and then in theory force them to go and play in the electronic games whether you pitch it as directly as that or whether you just say increase the price to make it more expensive to play because you've got to be on the staff it amounts to the same thing i think there'll come a day and i think this this process is ongoing it'll push through sin as we recover from code there'll come a day when table games really just are too expensive for the average person to play um and i think from an operator's point of view that's not necessarily a bad thing yeah so what you've described here is that essentially a case of fewer players but overall the revenue has actually increased because for example um we were at the hippodrome in in december and not to say if it's a good or bad thing but just objectively um if you were betting on black or red it was minimum fifty dollars fifty pounds bet which is what you what you're kind of describing there yeah i think we're a little way away from um fewer players with more revenue overall but in terms of um just on the base that we have we haven't recovered properly from code you know in in london no one's traveling into lot very few people are traveling into london the traditional middle of the far east business has been destroyed um by the travel restrictions so it we're not quite at the stage where revenues increase despite emissions falling despite there being fewer gamers but it's it's a step in that direction and then that that judgment can only really be made once we're back to the kind of starting levels that we're at before which i don't even know if we'll get there and from an operator's perspective if you can make broadly the same revenue on tables with 70 70 of staff you're a mile ahead and then ideally the revenue that you've lost off the tables go play on the electronic games if the gambling review leads to more slots then you've got more playing position for them i think i think people are just being more mindful of speed of loss which sounds like a scary term problem gambling wise but i mean it purely in the sense that if i'm and i like a punt in the casino i'm probably worth a hundred quid over two hours so if i'm you know obviously i'll win occasionally but people who've got um who are willing to lose their money a little slower it's get to it's going to get to the stage where they just can't afford to accommodate them on tables yeah no absolutely um and i think i was going to ask where does land-based kind of uh gaming go from here in the uk i mean how popular are casinos overall but what you said there i think maybe suggests we can't answer that directly there's kind of different compartments to it but uh something based on what you've said there does that mean casinos could actually um inadvertently because of covert become a little bit more efficient maybe in the long term i think so i think that that that the it's been an accidental lesson or to where we're going as inaudible one thing that i'm always conscious of is i started out as a dealer in 1995 and i was acutely aware that the the plan was to present the casino as a as a exciting almost not dangerous but edgy nighttime proposition if you're in a casino it was exciting there was things going on and the whole idea is to present the face of something a bit different in the late 90s early 2000s the operators went towards trying to make it more open and welcoming and much more brightly lit disaster in in terms of results people still want that edginess and it looks like an operating theatre there's no there's no edge to it now design wise it's gone back to well not to the smoky horrible low-ceiling places but still quite a an edgy atmosphere i do wonder given how heavy the pressure is on stuff not just on gaming stuff on staff at every level and how the pressure's been on costs i wonder if it's going to be possible to keep the kind of mystique element that has traditionally been what casinos have been all about and you know the more you aim at the the mass market which everyone wants to do and want to bring in new players i think it's probably fair to say the number of serious casino players that are being developed is lower than the number of casino players who are being pushed out either by um aml regulations or safer gambling regulations or just don't find it as interesting anymore and that's that's i do wonder where that's going can we can we bring in enough people who are going to play enough and fast enough to justify having a casino operation the alternative to which is it ends up very electronic you know slots electronic roulettes and just a handful of tables and then do you lose the thing that makes a casino a casino um you know there are arcades on every street corner already we all saw what happens with betting shops when they had four fixed odds betting terminals if that is the atmosphere you end up creating in a casino where's your usp what are you offering that other people aren't and that's going to be interesting to see how that shapes out yeah definitely plenty of food for thought when it comes to striking that balance um a couple of sort of final questions for you uh first one is can you tell us a little bit about the background there you've got my michael vaughan cricket it took a while to figure out where it's from it arrived uh my wife bought it for me at a a charity dinner i think there might have been champagne involved it's it's a marker-born signed cricket shirt but it wasn't obvious which um competition it was from i consulted um some sports fan friends it turns out it's from some weird t20 competition in the in the us of all places you can't quite see it in frame there's a there's a it's bizarre it's a it's a cricket shirt from a uh i think a 2010-ish tournament with a bat next to it there's about 40 or pretty about 100 years old though my wife didn't know what she's getting when she got it but it looked like a christmas present so it's now my backdrop yeah not sure i mean definitely a nice background an interesting one um final final question for me is uh uh if we kind of go back to i guess the recruitment but also the land base overall really what are your kind of final thoughts do you have any kind of uh big kind of uh predictions or just just themes and thoughts on 2022 coming up because we just entered february um you know we've got the whole year ahead well i mean covered recovery is obviously a big part of the theme um i'm looking forward to i mean as you know the uk offline industry is dominated by two groups and they seem to be going slightly uh diverging directions one is very much focused on um premium pricing the table element the other seems to be more premium pricing and the electronic element they're both desperate to see what the gambling review holds you know more machines per casino would be a huge difference maker the ability to offer rng games um is very much the forefront of everyone's minds because that then enhances your electronic offer but it seems clear that the everybody is going to have to if not push then pull people from tables onto electronics and then is there a tipping point at which it becomes too electronic not personal enough loses the edge and then everyone says to themselves what am i getting here that i wouldn't get at an arcade or online or a bingo club and i think the i don't know if that line exists but i think if we get there we'll get there quickly and we'll we'll drip over the cliff edge before we realize it i think that that that would be something that would scare me but you know these operators know what they're doing they see figures that i don't perhaps um but certainly that's that's something i'm looking forward to seeing if they're successful in pushing people onto onto electronic games in volume and keeping the industry alive so i'm very conscious you know you compare casinos to bingo um the bingo industry has been singing the same song for a long time but we're going to bring new players into the industry are going to bring younger players we're going to make it more gender balanced and as far as i'm aware i'm not a bingo expert as far as i'm aware judging by the number of clubs in operation that hasn't happened and you struggle to see a future for bingo you know cassini has got a few more years than than bingo have even in the worst case but i hate to think that in 20 years time someone will be having this conversation saying why didn't they see it coming yeah absolutely plenty to think about um play i'm sure we'll ponder um perhaps in future interviews but definitely in your columns in our magazine um but for now thanks very much for analysis really enjoyed speaking about the two two key issues really especially in the uk sector and uh yeah thank you very much for your time thanks a lot tim that's great