Boylesports founder bets on British expansion

Bookmakers have to wait a day longer than everybody else for Christmas. However, it is often worth the wait. On St Stephen's Day there were three race meetings in Ireland, with Leopardstown topping the bill.

The racing continues today and through the weekend, alongside English Premiership football, world championship darts and a range of other sports to snap punters out of their post-Christmas torpor.

While many of them use technology to bet, plenty more will escape domestic bliss for a few hours and head for their local bookie shop. If they do, the odds are short enough that it will be a Boylesports.

The group has 192 shops around the country and is one of the top three players here, alongside Paddy Power and Ladbrokes. The chain's founder, owner and chief executive, John Boyle, says its turnover, that is the value of all the bets staked with the company, has reached €1 billion a year. The money flows through all of its channels, the shops, website, mobile app and telephone lines.

Boyle established the business in the teeth of one recession in the 1980s. If the official figures are to be believed, it has just seen off its second, through which it has actually developed the business. Its most recent acquisition, Tom Flood Bookmakers Ltd, brought it to its current number of outlets. That figure was 100 at the end of 2006, so it has come close to doubling since then. It added around 50 stores in the last three years.

The numbers have doubled as well. In 2006, turnover was just over €500 million a year. Acquisitions have driven much of the growth. As rivals found the going too tough, Boylesports moved in and took over. It bought shops vacated by British operator William Hill, which pulled out of the market here, and Celtic, previously owned by broadcaster and former government minister Ivan Yates, a victim of the recession.

Opportunity
"What appeared for us was opportunity," Boyle says of the recession, "and if you want to know is there going to be the same opportunity in the next five years – definitely. We could easily manage 250 stores in Ireland, because there are lots of areas that we are not in." He calculates that it could easily fit another 30 to 40 in Dublin alone.

Boyle’s ambitions are not going to stop there. His company has set its sights on entering the British market. It already has internet and mobile customers there, but he is now talking about bricks and mortar.

“We’ve looked in the past, the time that the Tote wanted to sell, that’s going back to 2006, 2007. We were showing interest then in buying their stores,” he recalls, “but then the recession arrived and the British government, who owned them, they took them off the market, because they were only going to get half the value.

“At that time we were very keen and I had spent a good few months over there in preparation for that,” he says. “So if the right acquisition knocked on our door, we’re looking for opportunities over there, so we expect in the next five years to have a presence in retail.

“You don’t know what opportunities are going to knock on your door. There’s three, four, different companies that could become available over the next number of years, and if you can show that you are good at retail in Ireland, you can do it anywhere in the world.”

Return on investment
In terms of what kind of investment his company is prepared to make, Boyle says the group always weighs things up before moving. "We don't just go in a borrow money, we look at things and we want to make sure that we get a return on our investment."

His preference is for something that would, in common with the Irish business, be spread across the country. That is far more likely to be an acquisition rather than starting from scratch all over again. “With the type of company that we are now and the kind of backing we can get, I think we could be a top five player in the UK in the over the next 10 years.”

Boyle opened his first shop on Market Hill in Co Armagh, which had a population of 2,000, in 1982 with a £6,000 loan from his father. He opened his second in 1989 in Drogheda, which, with 50,000 people, seemed like a huge market in comparison.

The business, now headquartered in Dundalk, grew through the 1990s, with the momentum increasing as the country finally shook off the recession that had dogged the previous decade and then embarked on a period of phenomenal growth from the mid-1990s until the current recession struck in 2007. In 2004, the business had a turnover of €266 million and two years later it topped half a billion.

A lot has changed in the last 31 years. Boyle’s first premises had no TV, no seats and the odds were chalked up on blackboards. These days, they have armchairs, plasma screens showing racing, sports and the odds, toilets – and free tea, coffee and hot chocolate – which is popular with punters.

In the early days of its expansion, Boyle himself put a lot of effort into identifying potential locations for new shops. While technology has changed the face of the bookmaking business, he is still in his own words, very much “a shops man”.

Part of the chain’s brand has been the extra comfort and facilities. This is based on its founder’s view that the company should offer high standards to its customers to ensure that they want to come in and spend some time there once they do arrive.

“If you have an hour to spend, we’d like you to spend it here,” Boyle says. “People like space, but if you’re in a closed-in environment, you’re not inclined to stay very long. Before, you might have come into me for 10 or 15 minutes and then you were gone over the street and stopped in somewhere else. Now you can come in, have your cup of coffee, read your paper. It’s creating an environment that people are very comfortable with.”

More automation
The company is continuing to spend money on the shops, updating the screens and the odds displays. It is looking a new system with more automation.

A key feature will be that each shop has eight 55-inch screens, four of which can be used to form one large display for a specific event. “It’s like being at the races,” he adds. “The whole thing is for people to engage more and feel like they were there.”

The group intends rolling it out across 60 shops on time for the Cheltenham Festival next March, traditionally one of its busiest weeks, and intends covering the entire estate within three years. “It’s a €5 million investment,” he says.

The wall of images and information that greets you in a Boylesports shop these days is maintained by a team of 25 people in head office. The detail, information and, most importantly, number of betting markets is far ahead of the chalk boards of the 1980s.

Boyle believes this is one of the reasons that big chains such as his are beating small independent players; they don’t have the resources to offer the same number of betting opportunities or information to their punters.

Betting in running, while an event is under way, is now becoming the norm. “We expect the growth of live betting to hit 80 per cent,” he says. “People don’t bet now until something has started. Technology has allowed that. In the past, people came in on a Thursday to do their bet on the golf, and you wouldn’t see them again until the weekend, when they would come in to find out how the tournament had gone. Now the betting is updated on every hole. That’s where your betting slips have increased.”

Similarly, with football, the company offers bets on goal- scorers, timing and so on. Punters are engaged from start to finish, rather than simply placing one bet before the event begins, only to see it sunk within minutes of the start.

Last year and early in 2013, the group spent €1 million on boosting the technology needed to support its online and mobile business. Smartphones and tablets are driving the mobile side to the point where it has overtaken “traditional” online betting. “Everyone,” Boyle says, “has a betting shop in their pocket now.”

Spending the money paid dividends early on, as the company’s systems withstood the intense activity of the Cheltenham Festival with no outages.

This year Boylesports centralised its technology arm into one base in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Boylesports had outsourced its developers and designers to South Africa, Russia and Vietnam.

“We’ve changed our whole strategy there and we are now insourcing it, we are taking it all in-house under the Boylesports umbrella, in one office in Manilla” he explains. The roles there include, design, development and customer service, and the 60 people are employed there.

It was in the closing days of last year that the Irish company first set up there in a small office, and Boyle concedes that it has grown very fast. “It’s going very well,” he says.

Gambling hub
Choosing Manila was easy, Asia is the world's gambling hub – Macau turned over $38 billion in its first year as a legal betting destination. "That's where the expertise is."

While the company has opened offices in London and Manila over the last 12 months, its headquarters in Dundalk has grown alongside this. “There was never any feeling of a threat, as it has always been expanding,” he says. “It will always be our head office that will never change.”

Something else that is unlikely to change is Boyle’s own affection for the traditional bookie shop side of what he says is now an international business. The shops are where his heart is. “It’s where the interaction with the customer happens.”