Finding top talent to fill vacant positions at the upper echelons of organizations is not an easy task. This is why executive search firms exist. They operate in a highly specialized niche, unknown to the general public and largely restricted to the realms of business enterprises and other global organizations.
UK-based global executive search firm SRI recently acquired the services of Ben Fried, a veteran of the betting and online gambling industry. Mr. Fried will lead the Betting and Gaming division as a Partner in SRI’s London office.
This move from a major corporate executive search firm has some interesting implications. To fully understand and interpret this, we need to take a closer look at the two parties involved:
Who is Ben Fried?
Ben Fried is an executive with decades of experience working in the online gambling business. A relatively new addition to the electronic media and entertainment sector, online gambling arose in the late 1990s. Fried has been a part of the industry since those early days, having begun his tenure in 2002.
Back then, he started as an analyst for the online gambling giant Betfair. Soon, he rose to the position of head of business intelligence. Fried eventually got promoted to General Manager in 2008, after a brief stint as poker operations manager.
In this senior role, he served Betfair for another four years, before finally leaving in 2012. In January that year, he joined gambling software giant Microgaming. Ben’s involvement in poker further grew during his period as he worked as an advisor for Microgaming’s poker network.
After a two-year tenure at Microgaming, Ben Fried started his gaming consultancy firm – Gaming Edge Associates. He remained the company’s director until 2018. Fried also found time to act as an advisor to social casino gaming startup Plumbee for over four years.
Beyond the gambling sector, Fried has also worked in transportation, eCommerce, hospitality, and cloud communications. He was a COO for car-hire firm easyCar, a GM at the online curated marketplace Catawiki, and worked in various positions at online luxury villas rentals service Edge Retreats and cloud service provider LoopUp.
Overall, Fried is considered an expert in his field and has worked with many industry giants. With Two decades’ worth of igaming experience under his belt, he is no stranger to understanding the types of people needed to operate successful brands like King Johnnie, Leo Vegas, and many others.
A Closer Look At SRI
SRI is a London-based executive headhunting and consultancy firm. They have offices in the UK, USA, European Union, China, Australia, and Singapore. Launched in 2001, the company originally focused on the sports sector.
Slowly, they expanded into tangential sectors like lifestyle, technology, fashion & sporting goods, gaming/eSports, and media & entertainment in general. In 2010, the company forayed into international markets with offices in Australia, Singapore, and Switzerland.
They established a presence in the vast and lucrative Chinese market with offices in Beijing in 2014. Germany soon followed with Munich chosen as the preferred base of operations. Finally, the USA was added to the list of SRI office locations in 2017.
As of 2022, the US has emerged as a key market for the company. It has offices on both the East Coast (New York, Boston) and the West Coast (Los Angeles). The range of services offered by SRI in these markets includes the following:
– Succession planning
– Talent pipelining
– Board Assessment
– Team optimization
– Leadership coaching
The company has some of the biggest brands in the media/sports/entertainment sectors as its clients. Names worth mentioning include NBA, MLB, WWE, Disney, HBO, Netflix, Lee, Patagonia, Wrangler, English Premier League, Ascot, FIH, and World Rugby.
The Missing Link?
The convergence of media, entertainment, and technology has created numerous exciting new markets in the last two decades. One such sector with huge potential, particularly in the United States and Asia, is online betting and iGaming.
With the repeal of anti-gambling laws in the US in 2018, the sector has seen frenetic growth. The ongoing pandemic has only helped increase consumer interest in safe, online betting opportunities. The market has already ballooned into a legal $74 billion industry in 2021.
Experts predict double-digit growth of online sports betting and casino gaming in the US for the next 10 years, with the industry expected to double in size within six years. The bullish market has attracted major brands from all sectors and niches.
Traditional casino/betting corporations like Caesar’s, MGM, and Golden Nugget all have a stake in the growing online segments. They are joined by fantasy sports brands FanDuel and DraftKings. Ben Fried’s old firm Betfair is also in the mix, currently owned by Flutter Entertainment, which also owns Fan Duel.
Media firms like Fox and Disney are also aggressively targeting the industry in the US. They are joined by major sports leagues like NBA, MLB, and NFL – who also happen to be clients of SRI. The addition of Ben Fried to the SRI group makes good sense from this perspective.
Fried has extensive experience and a network of contacts developed over two decades in the betting and iGaming industry. Firms like SRI rely on such networks to provide their executive search services. And with the level of growth currently happening in the US betting industry, there is high demand for such services.
Firms targeting aggressive growth need talented executives with experience to fill top positions. Ben Fried is probably the perfect person to enhance SRI’s current capabilities in the gaming and betting sectors.
