Following your appointment in late April, how have you found your settling in period at Ainsworth?

The first three or four weeks, I was basically drinking from a fire hose! I was in discovery mode. In my past experience, I worked on the vendor side at IGT for eight years – and there’s a huge difference going from a big company to a smaller company like Ainsworth. A lot of the resources you can take for granted at IGT, because you come over to Ainsworth and there’s less people who are wearing multiple hats. The communication is not as structured as it was at IGT. There’s good and bad to that. 

The good thing is you can act and respond quicker and be nimbler compared to a bigger company like IGT, where there’s a lot more bureaucracy and more hoops you have to jump through. But, at the same time, documentation of information was the hardest part for me. Working through all of the manual processes has been my focus for the first three or four weeks. Now that I’m starting to understand that, I’m finally able to jump into the roadmap planning for 2027, and I also feel really confident in the releases we have scheduled for the remainder of this year.

Having previously worked for MGM Resorts and IGT, which lessons from both the operator and supplier sides are you bringing into your new role?

I feel as if I got the customer service aspect and the data analytics side of working for an operator, and that set me up for the transition over to the manufacturer side. I was well rounded in my skill sets and I could apply each one from a different perspective over on the manufacturer side. So I moved over to IGT and I would go out with the sales team to talk to customers, gather feedback on what they thought of our games and find out which games were doing well in the market. I was the conduit between our sales and product teams, where I was essentially feeding information back and forth. 

As I progressed, I focused specifically on the premium or gaming operations side of the business for around the last five years that I was with IGT. We grew the business pretty significantly, especially coming out of Covid-19, and from there I was able to learn what games worked and which didn’t – because I was solely responsible for optimizing the yields of each. I was responsible for understanding all the little idiosyncrasies that came with the product, and it was fascinating to me. It was something I really enjoyed. And now coming over to Ainsworth, I’m looking to help identify some of those regional gaps or regional areas where we aren’t performing. If we had different styles of products, it could help our performance, especially in some of the bigger markets.

Focusing on Ainsworth specifically, how do you plan to expand the supplier’s presence in North America, as well as lead marketing and product strategy initiatives?

Again, I come from the premium side of the business at IGT, so I understand there is a lot of earnings potential in premium games, but you must have a stable core business before you can expand into that space. Ainsworth wasn’t there from a core gaming standpoint. If you think about Ainsworth, we make about 40-50 titles a year, and the hit rate in our industry needs to be between 10-15% to be considered successful. So, if you’re only making 40 games, you’re putting out three or four really good titles a year and the rest are mostly filler.

Because we were trying to split that number of titles between two different roadmaps, essentially we were just weakening both sides. Instead of having three or four hit games on one product line, we might only have one, and now the perception from operators is that our games are underperforming. 

One of the first things I did was eliminate the premium product line and condense those roadmaps into one, so that we can have stronger support and more titles for the core business. Before we can dip our toes back into the premium side, we need to stabilize that core business, and I think we’re doing a good job with the recent release of Dragon Legacy. As a smaller manufacturer at Ainsworth, we need to be flexible in our pricing terms, because we don’t have the leverage of making 100 games a year. We have to be that easy-to-work-with vendor.