Sportsbook & Gaming Advisory
Helping sportsbook businesses make better commercial decisions.
Senior advisory across sportsbook strategy, pricing, product, trading, risk, operations, procurement and market entry.
The problem
Growth is the job. It’s just rarely straightforward.
Every sportsbook operator I’ve worked with is chasing the same thing: more NGR, more actives, better bets per active, next quarter better than this one. Nobody in this industry is short of ambition or hours worked. The gap is somewhere else.
Usually it’s a handful of the same problems, showing up in different combinations. Margin doesn’t grow even when turnover does. Bonus spend goes out without lifting spend per head. A roadmap built for one market gets rolled out to a jurisdiction where the bet type mix is nothing like it. Sportsbook customers are promiscuous — the moment pricing, coverage or the app is off, they’re gone to a competitor, and technology only gets noticed on the two days a year everyone’s actually watching.
None of that is a mystery once someone’s actually looked. It takes someone who has lived inside these numbers long enough to know which of these is your problem, not the industry’s generic list of everyone’s.
Good advice in this industry sounds like an operator, not a deck.
How I help
Straight answers, close to the business.
I work with a small number of businesses at a time, directly with the people making the calls. The work is practical: understand the numbers, find the real constraint, agree what changes, then stay close enough to see whether it worked.
One: Get the picture right
Understand the business as it is.
Where revenue and margin actually come from, what the team believes, and where those two things disagree.
Two: Decide what matters
Fewer priorities, clearly owned.
A short list of decisions worth making now, with the trade-offs stated and the work that should stop named out loud.
Three: Stay until it lands
Support through delivery.
Advice is easy to write down and hard to implement. I stay involved while it reaches the P&L, at whatever level of involvement suits.
Advisory areas
Eight areas where I can help.
Engagements usually start in one of these and quickly touch two or three. They are connected in practice, which is why they are rarely fixed in isolation.
Sportsbook Strategy
Where the business actually makes money, what to stop doing, and which priorities are worth the investment over the next 12 to 24 months.
Pricing & Margin
Pricing structures, margin optimization and the trade-offs between headline generosity, retention and the numbers that reach the bottom line.
Product, Proposition & Marketing
Product positioning, roadmap priorities, customer proposition and marketing capabilities that connect the sportsbook to the wider operator strategy.
Trading & Risk
Trading models, risk appetite, liability management, and how much control to keep in-house versus buy from a supplier — across football, racing and multi-sport books.
Operations & Delivery
Team structure, managed-services models, ownership and the operating rhythm needed to turn decisions into delivery.
B2B Platforms & Supplier Economics
Platform positioning, commercial models and the real economics of data, content, trading services and technology partnerships, including supplier procurement and contract negotiation.
Market Entry
Assessing a new market, sizing the realistic opportunity, choosing a route in, and understanding the regulatory and product gaps to close before committing.
P&L Ownership
Turning a plan into a P&L that leadership can be held to, with the levers and reporting that show early whether it is working.
Experience
Twenty-five years inside sportsbook businesses, not observing them.
The advice comes from having owned the outcome: commercial leadership, product, trading, risk, operations and P&L responsibility across B2B and B2C sportsbook.
Built from inception
Built and scaled a B2B sportsbook operation from inception, covering commercial, product, trading, risk, operations and P&L.
B2B and B2C
Experience selling sportsbook platforms to operators and sitting on the operator side deciding what to build, buy and prioritise.
P&L at scale
Commercial and operational accountability for sportsbook performance across more than £1bn in annual turnover.
International operations
Led distributed sportsbook operations exceeding 200 people across multiple regulated markets and jurisdictions.
Global market experience
Product experience live across regulated markets including the UK, Germany, Spain and Brazil, with regulatory familiarity extending to jurisdictions including Ontario.
Industry presence
Speaker and delegate across major global gaming conferences including ICE, SBC, Sigma, iGB, SBC Rio and SBC Americas.
Who I work with
Four kinds of conversation.
Sportsbook Operators
B2C businesses who need a straight read on strategy, pricing, product or trading from someone who has run the same problems.
B2B Suppliers & Platforms
Providers who want to sharpen positioning, commercial terms and roadmap against what operators actually buy.
Investors & Boards
Diligence, second opinions and sanity checks on plans, teams and assumptions in sportsbook and gaming businesses.
New Market Entrants
Businesses entering sports betting for the first time who need to understand the cost and complexity before committing.
Engagement types
Five ways to work together.
The shape follows the question. Some businesses need a few weeks of focused work; others want a senior voice available for the year ahead.
01
Strategic Advisory
An ongoing relationship with a CEO, founder or leadership team, focused on the decisions in front of them.
02
Consulting Projects
A defined piece of work with a clear question: a pricing review, a roadmap assessment, an operating model.
03
Due Diligence
Commercial and operational review of a business, plan or team for investors and acquirers.
04
Board & Advisor Roles
A seat at the table where sportsbook and gaming experience is missing from the room.
05
Interim Executive Support
Hands-on cover or added senior capacity during a gap, a build-out or a period of change.
Meet Gareth
Gareth Crook
Sportsbook & gaming executive. Founder, The Sportsbook Faculty.
Meet Gareth
Gareth Crook
Sportsbook & gaming executive. Founder, The Sportsbook Faculty.
I have spent 25 years in sportsbook and gaming, in senior commercial and operational roles across Pragmatic Play Sports, Entain/Ladbrokes Coral and William Hill. My experience spans strategy, product, marketing, trading, risk, operations and the P&L that all of it feeds into.
That mix is the reason I am useful. I have built and sold platform propositions, and I have been the operator on the other side of the table deciding whether to buy one. I know how pricing decisions show up in margin three months later, and how quickly a roadmap becomes a list of things nobody chose. I also built a real-time marketing capability from scratch that was subsequently deployed across major global brands, and completed the Mini MBA in Marketing.
Across that time I have run trading and risk teams end to end, built sportsbook product from the front end through to the back-end trading platform, sat inside product, marketing, finance and technology functions, and negotiated the supplier contracts that sit underneath all of it.
The Sportsbook Faculty is deliberately small. I take on a limited number of engagements so the businesses I work with get my attention rather than a team of juniors and a template.
Contact
Start a conversation.
If you have a decision in front of you and want a senior view from someone who has made the same one, send a short note about the situation. If it is a fit, I will say so. If it is not, I will tell you that too.