Back in business? William Hill Online discusses its transformation programme

As EGR takes its seat in the corner office of William Hill’s Gibraltar hub, the firm’s Online MD wastes no time in diving straight into his presentation. It’s a business story Crispin Nieboer has likely reiterated numerous times over recent months to analysts, shareholders and board members alike, but his positive pitch makes it sound like he’s telling it for the first time. “I think what we’ve achieved at William Hill has been nothing short of extraordinary,” he says as he reflects on the firm’s progress over the last 12 months.

Nieboer’s exuberant tone is in marked contrast to the unusually gloomy weather and downpour EGR encounters on its way to 6/1 Waterport Place. The office complex, home to fellow betting brands such as bet365 and Betfred, is currently being renovated; however the real rebuilding work going on at Europort Avenue is inside at William Hill Online headquarters.

Last year, the FTSE 250 firm’s once formidable online arm was permanently – some would say prematurely – written off by many across the industry on the back of its sluggish performance. Indeed, a catalogue of business errors, staff departures and the occasional profit warning had seen Hills’ digital business continue to fall behind its online rivals. But with 2017 drawing to a close, Nieboer believes that narrative has now well and truly shifted.

On the up and up

“William Hill has quite rightly been off in the background, sorting its business out and getting its house in order, and we haven’t really been out in the press very much bearing our soul and telling people about all the great stuff that’s been going on,” the MD explains. “But I think after the trading update in November, it is a really great time for us to tell people what’s been going on at William Hill and the fantastic results we’ve been getting out of our transformation programme.

Crispin Nieboer, William Hill Online MD

“It can be easy to talk about bet365 and Sky Bet because of their scale and numbers, but I think there is a very compelling story here about what William Hill has done. I remember doing an update to the City last year, and two of our fairly large shareholders at the meeting said that usually when businesses like this go into decline, they don’t come out the other side because you need such a big increase in marketing cash. I’m glad to say that hasn’t happened.”

The aforementioned trading update did show some demonstrable signs of progress. Group revenues were up 4% year-on-year, with online up 6% driven by strong gaming growth of 14% in the period. And the results were met with a warm response from City analysts too. Numis, for example, said it remained “supportive of the clear improvements made by the company over the last 12 months”, while Shore Capital described the update as a “solid statement”.

“The reason I think what we’ve achieved is so positive is that when I was made permanent MD at the May trading update, Online net revenues had a decline of 11%,” Nieboer says.

“As part of this, gaming was down 4% and sportsbook was down 17%, while wagering in the UK, which is our heartland, was also falling. Where are we now? Net revenue is up 6%, sportsbook wagering 13%, and gaming revenue 14%. That’s in a non-tournament year and it’s not like we’ve spiked one area; when I look at our KPIs it’s across all areas of the business.”

It will obviously take more than a few analyst notes and comparatively modest growth figures to convince everyone of the legitimacy of Hills’ “transformation” and apparent turnaround. However, with the business achieving a double-digit uplift in both the top- and bottom-line in a nine-month period, it would be nigh on impossible to claim the operator isn’t in a far better place than it was this time last year. So what changed?

Team building

The most immediate alteration to the business is one of personnel. The senior William Hill Online team is almost unrecognisable from what it was two years ago under the leadership of former City analyst Andrew Lee, who was followed out of the exit door by what seemed like an endless wave of senior execs. The Times even went as far to describe William Hill as suffering from a ‘brain drain’.

Nieboer openly admits how difficult it was initially to attract and retain top talent. But now it seems he has steadied the ship and is getting a lot of traffic coming the other way since taking the reins on a permanent basis earlier this year. In the last 12 months, the Online MD has been busy creating a new executive team in his own image, some of whom EGR meets throughout the day at William Hill’s digital HQ, including COO Grant Williams, marketing director Kristian Welch and CIO Itay Fisher. And Nieboer claims this injection of new talent has been a crucial factor in William Hill’s renewed fortunes.

“We’ve spoken previously about some of the old guard and there was definitely a bit of a hiatus, which understandably played out in the press at the time, but to make this type of turnaround in this short timeframe, you need a professional and experienced team to make it happen,” the former Gaming Media Group CEO says. “If you look at the scale of decline the business was in and the scale of growth it is now in, I think it’s been an amazing achievement by the team here. A really important part of our success is the management team we’ve put together.”

Before establishing his own team, the first thing Nieboer had to do was change William Hill’s “unique” operating model. When he first joined from Hills’ Shoreditch hub, the digital business had three divisions – innovation, development and operations – which Nieboer, although he praises for being forward-thinking, believes was inappropriate for a company like Hills. As a result, Nieboer completely redesigned the model to one based on three P&Ls for sports, gaming and international, with service functions added around it. The result? Nieboer claims the new model has led to new efficiencies and an improved product pipeline.

“If we had been a medium-stage tech business, that original model wouldn’t have seemed that extraordinary, but I don’t know any other gaming and betting businesses that were doing that,” he explains. “The problem is who calls the shots? It’s no good if you’re innovating stuff which doesn’t get developed and put in the real roadmap in front of customers, and it’s no good if you’re developing products which the ops team don’t like. The question here is who is in charge of what we’re putting in front of the customer and who is in charge of making sure it makes money?”

Stacking up

As a consequence of its revamped operating model and the arrival of new personnel, Hills is undergoing something of a cultural shift – all of which is neatly summed up in William Hill’s revamped internal Will2Win magazine which EGR is handed a copy of at the start of the day. In it a number of execs talk about how the company’s ‘Continuous Improvement’ culture will enable the business to fulfil its overarching Group strategy of ‘Setting the Standard’ by encouraging creativity, enabling employees to take ownership of ideas and providing a structure for which these can be shared openly.

“For me this is all about never settling for anything but the best so everything in front of the customer is platinum or gold, not silver or bronze. I don’t care how agile people think it is to put stuff in front of the customers which is not top standard – that’s not agile,” Nieboer says. “We’ve also moved to a company which is a tight circle between data, customer insight, reprioritisation and then feedback, whereas previously there was lots of decision-making that wasn’t customer- or data-led. So we’ve taken the subjectivity out of it, which you couldn’t do without a modern data platform.”

Over the last couple of years William Hill has been busy condensing its nearly 10 smaller legacy platforms into one powerful data management beast. Nieboer describes the process as having been a mammoth undertaking for a business like William Hill, which has offices spread across the globe, but the result is the ability to obtain a single view of the player and to enhance the customer experience. The so-called UNO platform has also been a crucial part of why the firm has been able to complete 65 projects in nine months, with approximately 180 projects currently live.

“The speed of which we have rolled out that platform and the associated marketing tech stack was impressive, and the performance we are driving in areas like PPC and programmatic put us first equal with the likes of bet365,” the MD claims. “So we are now in a strong position and we want to scale that. The quality of the data platform and marketing tech set-up is such a big building block for improving customer experience, because if you don’t know who your customers are and how they are interacting with you, then their experience will obviously suffer.”

This renewed up-beat tone around William Hill’s technology is clearly a far cry from the darker days of the initial Trafalgar roll-out. The highly-publicised Project Trafalgar was widely seen as a monumental failure after the first iteration of its disparaged UX was so badly received by its customer-base. As a result, Hills had to work hard to rebuild its reputation and move quickly to develop a far slicker mobile product that, according to a recent report from Credit Suisse, is now up there with the best in the business with regards to UX, settlement and latency speed.

End of the beginning

Trafalgar no longer feels like the elephant in the room during our interview. Nieboer insists the operator has learned from its mistakes and across the business it is now far more focused on customer testing before taking any risks on launch. In fact, he believes the initial strategic logic with regards to engineering was absolutely spot on, while the fact it owns the technology itself means the firm is now well placed to capitalise on the speed and velocity of releases the platform is capable of.

The combination of Hills’ in-house platforms and new operating model has seen the company release a wave of new products in recent months which seem to be getting real traction. Its customer-generated #YourOdds feature, for example, hit the two-million bet mark recently, while William Hill also claims to have led the way with its personalised odds-enhancing Bet Boost product. Clearly both of these products have enabled the business to compete more strongly in the fierce UK recreational market.

“Imitation is always the best form of flattery and Bet Boost was great for us to get out as it met the customer need for instant personalised rewards,” Nieboer adds. “I find the industry so funny like that – when we release something strong everyone will copy it as fast as possible and you have a time to market of five or six months. It’s flattering and shows we’ve done something right. Giving customers that control and reward is really important.”

As a result, Nieboer is convinced William Hill is now in a strong position to claw back some of the UK market share it almost certainly lost over the last couple of years. This tells its own story in and of itself. Firstly it shows just how far the business was allowed to fall, but it also demonstrates how much the business has improved in a relatively short period of time.

Whether it can be a market leader again though is another question entirely. Indeed, talk of a William Hill comeback has been mooted for some time now to the point where it will nearly always be met with a degree of scepticism. However, it does seem on paper like the company is doing all the right things needed to complete its turnaround, and it would take a brave person to bet against the company becoming a formidable online figure once more.

“People disagree about what growth will look like next year and I think we can actually do even better than that,” Nieboer says. “Previously, when we were in turnaround mode, I would have said success was not losing market share, but now we are on the front foot I want to get back into market share growth. That is the aim.”