Having begun preparations to take over as IGT Incoming CEO in December, how have the early transition stages fared?  

I have this counter, it’s been 43 days since I started, and that’s counting weekends. As you know, I had to sit out a year in between roles, so it was very important for me to hit the ground running. While I couldn’t compete, I spent a lot of time reading about the industry, continuing to keep myself educated. I read your publication a lot. Every day is very dynamic in this industry. As I started this journey, I didn’t really start from scratch, as you can imagine. I’ve spent the last seven years in gaming and I had a vision and a strategy of what I thought we could accomplish here, and what we could do here. It was funny, because in the very first town hall, I woke up that morning, went to the gym and I went straight to Durango on the first day of my non-compete. I presented my strategy to the team because no one at IGT had seen any of my slides. I did them all by myself. The strategy is very simple, it’s really the five C’s. Culture, capabilities, content, commercialization and cash flow creation; in that order.  

First of all, we have to make sure we have the right culture at IGT. We have to make sure we create a meritocracy, where people believe this is the greatest gaming company in the world. You could come here, work really hard, use your talents and then be rewarded for them. That’s a really important thing. I definitely don’t think we’re there yet. We still have a lot of work to do. Capabilities are really not just about making sure the talent that sits within these four walls are in the right roles, but also being honest with ourselves around what is the talent that we are missing? And how do we source that talent?  

But if you don’t have the right culture, you’re not going to get the A players that want to be here. Content, obviously, it’s the lifeblood of what we do. If you don’t have great content, you’re not going to make it. I will say I’m very pleasantly surprised, the IGT team has done a really good job over the last 12 to 18 months. And ensuring that we have the right structure and culture to incentivize our studio leads and give them the creative freedom to really express themselves. On the commercial front, I just had lunch with a customer and asked, ‘how do we become the best supplier with the least friction to do business with?’ That’s not just about price. Obviously, customers always want to talk about price, but it’s about adding value. The last part is cash flow creation, which is ‘how do we become the most efficient organization so we can reinvest all that money in the first four Cs?’ 

I’m glad you brought up the non-compete, what did that time off provide from a personal perspective as much as professional? 

The first month was kind of depressing, because I hadn’t taken any material time off ever since I started working. All of a sudden, you start to realize how much of your identity is intertwined with what you do for a living. After the first month, my wife said, ‘you really need to do something because there’s 11 more months,’ and she made it very clear she was the CEO of our household... I was just a guest in that space. I stopped annoying her as much once I realized I worked for her. I did dishes, laundry, whatever she needed me to do. But then I did a few other things in the year off.  

Number one, I got physically fit again. You can imagine these jobs are really demanding, and it’s easier to put off going to the gym or doing whatever. Number two, I grew hair. I‘ve shaved my head since I was 30, but my 15-year-old asked if I could grow hair, and I said ‘of course I can’... So I did. Number three, I spent time with my family and friends I hadn’t really spent quality time with. I took a one-on-one trip with my daughter, my son, my wife, my two sisters to Guatemala where I’m from. I even took my brothers-in-law on a one-on-one trip, or four-on-one I guess!  

The last thing I did was use my brain. When you run a business, it’s sometimes really hard because it’s all very reactive. You walk in and have no idea what the day is going to look like. All of a sudden, I didn’t have that. I spent the time really thinking about the dynamics of the industry, the dynamics of IGT and everything that made IGT great 15 years ago. How they lost their way, where we stood from a competitive landscape. There’s seven pages of just handwritten free notes I took unencumbered by anyone’s opinion or stress. Every morning, I still look at those. It’s this weird freedom I’d never experienced to really dissect the fundamentals of the industry, without being accountable to deliver anything. I am very grateful to Apollo for allowing me to do that, because I do feel like if I had started working the next week or the next month, it would have just been a completely different experience. 

How does your background in finance and gaming shape how you want to lead IGT?  

I always tell people, I am not the smartest person in the room, but I have the good fortune of working for great organizations. A lot of what I do in the strategy the team and I have defined is really leveraged on those experiences. I started my career in public accounting, and governance is a really important part of running a business. It’s not the fun part, but it’s the necessary part. It’s the part that gets you in trouble if you don’t do it right and I learned that early on. I then worked at Procter & Gamble, a direct-to-consumer business. I worked on Pampers, their most global brand. I learned a lot about how it isn’t the product you’re making, it’s about the product the consumer is consuming. In a weird way, with Pampers, your consumer might be the mom or dad, but the actual end customer is the baby, who doesn’t have a voice in the equation. You can’t lose sight of that.  

If you think about gaming, it’s very similar. My customer today is the casino operator, or the online operator, but the real consumer is the player. We could spend a whole day talking about the similarities between all of those industries, and obviously my prior employer and my first foray into gaming. I learned a lot, went through Covid-19, supply chain constraints, labor shortages. All of the different things and how to act and react was critical. I have a little book I keep of every boss I’ve ever had and all the things they did that I hated. Not the things I loved, but the things I hated. I pull that book out once in a while because it’s really important as you progress in your career to not lose sight of your lowest-level employee. That book is really helpful for me to stay grounded and make sure the decisions I make not only impact the business, but an individual and their families. 

I’ve learned that when someone makes an employment decision to go somewhere else, they’re not leaving you. They’re actually doing what they believe is right for them and their families. Treating them respectfully, still continuing to have a relationship, even if they become a competitor to you, is something that’s incredibly critical. Sometimes this industry is not great at that. I think people take things personally, and it’s almost borderline that you’re a traitor. I don’t believe in that fundamentally. I just think that’s poor leadership.  

Having spent six years with Aristocrat, what drew you to IGT and how do you feel the opportunities with this company differ from your prior role?  

It was an interesting journey. It was the hardest career decision I’ve ever had to make, and I really agonized about it because of the people. There’s some great people there. There’s people that believed in my leadership, that stuck with me through some tough times, Covid-19 for example. I was an outsider from the industry. There are people that were willing to take the time and teach me the business. That was such a critical part of the success, really.  

If you look at IGT and the history behind it, it’s kind of the parent to a lot of success in a weird way. If you look at the game designers or studio heads that are at other companies now, many of them started their career here at IGT and have since gone off and had fantastic careers elsewhere. Competition is really important. 

I was with a casino customer for lunch today and, when I walked his floor, my pitch to him wasn’t ‘I want 80% of your floor.’ My pitch to him was, ‘you need diversity on this floor because your player base is diverse and I want to help you drive incremental value and growth in your own business.’ That doesn’t mean an 80% share, even though at one point IGT probably had greater than a 70% share. I think it becomes very dangerous when any one supplier becomes too dominant, because all of a sudden it’s no longer the casino’s floor, it’s the supplier’s floor.