“Bede has historically seen itself as a technology company. We’ve hired lots of strong engineers, and our decision making has been heavily influenced by that history. Over the last couple of years we’ve been embarking on the journey from technology company to product company and we need to better understand that it takes more than just great technology to sustain a successful business. The journey has involved painful realisations about how customer service, marketing & sales process still have work to be done in order to catch up with the reputation we’ve built for the technology.”

Alex Butcher (Managing Director, Bede Gaming)

“In contracting Games Without Frontiers, I was keen to instil a sense of shared purpose throughout the minds of those playing the game; I wanted them to see the breadth of thinking and level of collaboration needed to run a commercial enterprise. In particular, I was keen for production people to step into the shoes of the commercial team and vice versa.”

Alex Butcher (Managing Director)

“There were lots of examples of useful activities and actions taking place. It was great to see a range of different people gaining an understanding of the financial processes involved in collecting money from customers, to realise that this is a non trivial and also crucial activity of the business. Likewise, it was good to see people unfamiliar with the sales process, navigate the complexities of marketing and sales alike. Even the realisation that sales and marketing are different concerns with aligned goals but separate skill-sets was invaluable.”

Alex Butcher (Managing Director)

Some of the learning points I’ve heard from my team since we played the game:

“Producing and selling products does not guarantee to make us money!”

“Having teams coordinate their activities effectively can have massive impacts on productivity.”

“Sometimes the most effective strategy is to ignore the hyped market place (Goji berries). Chasing the news can have disastrous consequences.”

This is paralleled in real life for Bede at the moment, as the US market begins to open for gambling, but early market entrants are making questionable returns.

“In addition, I’ve had a couple of the participants request that we roll out Rocket training to their own teams as a way to spread this learning downwards through the organisation.” Alex Butcher (Managing Director)