Bet365 Betting Shops – Twenty years on from the website bet365.com, Intel traces the remarkable rise of the operator that started life in a small house in a Stoke-on-Trent bus station and its huge impact on the gambling industry.
Bet365’s dramatic rise story is the stuff of industry history. It was March 2001 when bet365.com began accepting bets over the internet, some 12 months after the dot-com bubble burst in spectacular fashion. Denis Coates, who bought the site on eBay for $25,000 and took out a £15m loan against his father Peter’s betting shop to build the site, believes the internet is where his family lives. Good luck. It was a calculated gamble he was prepared to take so the then 33-year-old was a Bet365 celebrity from a small house in the idyllic setting of a nearby Stoke-on-Trent car park.
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Then came Dennis Coates, a mathematician with first-class honors in econometrics (the application of statistics in economics) and his older brother John, who turned the online startup into a global powerhouse. And it made them billionaires along the way. However, twenty years ago, bet365 along with the green, yellow and white was the only new form of online betting that grew and fought for attention in this new system.
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“I firmly believe that startups and gambling will work on the Internet,” Dennis Coates told a local newspaper in a rare interview. However, foreign investment is hard to come by. “By then, the dot-com bubble had burst and Internet companies were losing money and not looking for the best money,” he said.
Chris Welch, VP of sports at Catena Media, was head of sales at Coral Eurobet when, in 2001, he was invited to the annual Betting Shop Manager of the Year Awards at a posh hotel in central London. A family owns a small betting shop: Peter, John and Denis Coates sit at his desk.
On the course, Welch heard from Coates how he had recently launched an online betting site (bet365) and had big plans for his digital business. Welch listened carefully, but he feared most and advised the trio to focus on their stores, as he believed his company was making money in the online arena. Indeed, last year online brand Eurobet lost £12m on Euro 2000 alone.
“In my opinion, it’s almost unthinkable for a small local writer to try to break into that space and succeed — obviously the Coates family has a different view,” Welch says.
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20 years ago then Bet365 was mostly a gambling service, while price updates and important phone numbers and teletexts were still a thing. Bet365 has a bank of call operators who place bets and deal with customer inquiries who sat alongside collectors in 2002 when Nigel Ridgway joined to work on the phone.
By then, the new business had moved out of the temporary building into a proper open-plan office with a small IT department behind a glass partition at the back of the building. There is also a kitchen and office for the Coates family. “It’s a good smoke; everything happens around you,” Ridgway recalls.
In an online booking service that would be impossible today – or even then – the fact that bet365 employs tea ladies around the office to push alcohol and serve hot drinks to staff. By the time Ridgway left in 2012, about a dozen people were paying to refresh the young army. “He’s very British,” Ridgway said. He says that when he first arrived at departure, the total number of employees grew from 25 to more than 1,000. “It was huge,” he recalls. “Every year it seems like we need more space. We can expand into the existing building and we take it over completely.”
Of course, online betting was relatively new in the early 2000s. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, it was estimated that 36% of UK households had internet access in 2001. And those who did faced 56k link clicks, limited data and crude websites.
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The UK’s three major retail bookmakers, William Hill, Ladbrokes and Coral, all released sports betting sites before the launch of bet365 in March 2001. In fact, William Hill’s online sportsbook, willhill.com, first came to life in 1998 (a winery in California first used WilliamHill.com). However, bet365 will eventually overtake these household names to become a truly global digital sports betting company.
“You don’t have to be the first to be the best,” says Mark Blandford, who, like Coates, owned a number of betting shops before starting online bookmaker Sportingbet in 1998. Improve the market by being able to see the market and the competition and opportunities. I think that’s what Dennis did.”
Bet365 focuses on working in-house as much as possible rather than relying on third parties. This includes the affiliate program, which was previously hosted at an office in Vancouver, Canada. Matthew Glazier was instrumental in bringing the program in-house when he joined bet365 as head of marketing in 2004 when he sent an incredible letter to John Coates about his credentials.
“They were up-and-coming writers,” Glazier says. John Coates himself said when I first spoke to him that he considered himself on the same level as the two writers of the time, who are now. Sounds weird to say. But it is.”
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Realizing that the internet was the future for bookkeeping, and wanting to become a first-class bookmaker, Denis Coates decided to sell family betting shop Coral in 2005 for £40m. This was a significant moment in the company’s history as the proceeds from the sale were used to pay off RBS’s debt, with part of the money being invested in technology for internet gambling that was actually liquidated. . In addition, bet365 went multilingual, so two bilingual and polyglot employees are employed to manage overseas customers.
During that time, the company has expanded into online casino, bingo and poker. However, it is the first sports betting sign. Even if you visit the website at the moment, the tab for games is less obvious and certainly less popular than competing sites. Another milestone for bet365, when the law allows, is to have actor Ray Winstone front TV ads.
Winston’s head and quick delivery to extend the game’s chances are memorable. Plus, leading customer offerings, competitive pricing and a great UX turbocharged brand. “Bet365 has a smart, driven leader,” Welch says. “They built a great product, much of it in-house, with great marketing and a real focus on live betting by the great Ray Winstone. was done.”
As with many producers, Dennis and John Coates (co-CEOs) are very hands on. Dennis Coates is the driving force behind the business and his younger brother, who has a law degree, handles the legal and marketing aspects. “The time I was there, they controlled everything,” Glazier said.
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“Everything goes through them, every major decision needs their support. Denise Betlip is working day and night on operations, the new site, or the technical side of things…nothing really delivered.” . I’m not sure it’s changed because of how big the company is, or really when I was there [2004-2010] it’s almost impossible for them to make any decisions now.”
This strong ethos is Richard Smith, who served in the mobile operations service at the company between 2010 and 2014. “All C-levels worked weekends. Denise worked weekends – she was in the office seven days a week when I was there. I worked weekends, sometimes nights. You Betson goes [where Smith worked when bet365] and everyone above that level finishes at 5pm on Friday. My boss said to me, ‘Saturday is the busiest day. Saturday [so ] Why don’t we have all the bosses in the office?’. It’s not working. It’s like any other company, which leads to a better customer experience and faster problem resolution. “
When Smith arrived, he went on a six-month ‘tour’ of the company working on customer service, payments and fraud, and software testing, before moving on to mobile, hand-held payments for business transactions. End with the tool. “Mobile is everything, like 0.5% of their revenue and it’s the primary mobile site,” Smith explains. This was before the mobile boom when dedicated betting apps were starting to appear on the scene as Apple was now allowing iOS apps into its store.
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