A wild ride: Rhino Entertainment CEO looks back on a rollercoaster three-year journey since launch

Fresh from being crowned rising star at this year’s EGR Operator Awards in October, Rhino Entertainment has been on a journey of rapid growth since it was founded in 2020. Beginning life as a startup during the Covid-19 pandemic, the firm has grown to a 170-strong workforce across its two offices in Malta and North Macedonia.

The Malta-headquartered firm operates five casino sites – Casino Days, Lucky Spins, Big Boost, Buusti Kasino and Big Baazi – serving Finland, India, Canada and Ontario, Norway, Estonia, New Zealand as well as Japan.

At the helm of the casino firm is CEO Ross Parkhill, who has extensive experience in online gambling having started out as a professional poker player and subsequently worked for the likes of Tipico, GiG and Betsson before joining Rhino Entertainment as managing director in July 2020 when the operator launched its first brand.

Hailing from an engineering background, the Northern Irish boss places huge importance on the use of data to provide unique insight into exactly what its players are looking for from its products as well as maximising its marketing budget by spending in the right places.

The operator has also focused on innovation with its proprietary middle-layer technology consisting of a fully customised CMS and gamification engine, in-house-built cashier and the use of AI in its marketing operations function.

For Parkhill, Rhino having its own in-house tech and development team means it can tailor its offering to players’ needs. “We have built some of our own technology to make sure we can localise or create things in our front-end that players will hopefully like and then choose us over our competition.”

EGR: How did the idea for Rhino Entertainment come about and how has the firm grown over the last three years?

Ross Parkhill (RP): It was at the time when there were a lot of different markets regulating and a lot of companies were struggling with that. An initial idea that one of the investors pitched to me was that there was an opening in some of the emerging markets where the bigger guys were struggling because they had to deal with Sweden, the UK, etc. And I’d seen that first-hand with my brands at GiG, where we had so many things to deal with that sometimes your other markets were getting left behind.

So, the idea was to look at those emerging markets pre-regulation and see if we could launch some nice casino brands that just focus on players and product, and hopefully use that to build the business and grow the sites. It was a few years ago now and already things are harder than they were back then. That said, it certainly wasn’t an easy time either. It was right at the start of Covid. Literally, a few weeks after I signed on with Rhino the first lockdown started. But then again, in some ways it was good because there wasn’t much else to do apart from work.

We launched in a few English-speaking markets to begin with and have now expanded into regulated markets like Ontario and Estonia.

EGR: How would you describe the company culture?

RP: We grew quite quickly as a business, both in revenue and headcount. Over the first few years we doubled, and this year we’ve grown NGR over 30%, depending on how the last few months of 2023 go. We’re at about 170 people now. We’ve tried to hire more senior people to come in and help us develop the business side.

Part of that was hiring our chief people officer Marie Theobald, who came in with a lot of experience around company culture and she was tasked with helping us to embark on that culture journey.

We had about 120 people at that point. Getting 120 people aligned with the same goal doesn’t happen coincidentally, it takes a lot of thought, work as well as structure.

We’re about six months to a year into that journey defining our cultural pillars. We’ve devised three pillars now that we try to incorporate into recruitment or objective setting. We do feel it’s really important that people have some guiding values or understand why we’re all doing it and how to make an impact.

The more people you have, the more challenging things can be and there’s enough challenges in this business already. If I’m being completely honest, 170 is more people than I ever thought we would have when we first started Rhino. Our plan was about 20 people. We haven’t hired for the sake of hiring; we’ve brought some things in-house because it’s efficient, you get more control and we do some of our own development, which requires a team and so on.       

EGR: Can you talk about the first markets Rhino launched in with Casino Days and also plans to enter new markets?

RP: Canada and India were the first two markets we officially launched in, pretty much on the same day. From there, we added quite a few in Europe, then Japan and a couple of others along the way. More recently, Ontario and Estonia. At the minute, we’re not planning any new market launches. We’re active in eight individual markets now, most with different languages and different considerations and, if we can do those well, we’ll have a good business and will keep growing and optimising. We have looked at Latin America but we don’t have sports at the moment, so it’s not something we’re going to pursue too much.     

EGR: How is the business performing in Ontario and what regulatory challenges did you face after gaining your licence in December 2022 and relaunching to players in January 2023?

RP: We had an all-time high in the group in September across GGR, turnover, NGR and FTDs, which is the culmination of a lot of hard work. That included Ontario, where we had to close for a few months as part of the licensing process. It was a hard deadline, and they were reviewing our application, so that was quite a stressful time because we were closing a big market and then re-opening and relaunching, but now we’re starting to get back to the levels we were at before and seeing some nice growth there. Ontario is a challenging market, with a lot of big American operators that have bigger budgets than Rhino, but we think we can try to box-clever and stand out by focusing on what we’re good at.

Ontario’s regulators – iGaming Ontario and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario – have been pretty good to work with. The regulations are quite prescriptive. I like it when there aren’t too many grey areas because you don’t get into trouble. Ontario has a control matrix which becomes your Bible when it comes to making sure you’re doing things right there. So, the business has been growing this year and will continue to grow more next year.

Every time you try to push forward, there’s always some pain somewhere and something that causes hassle like payments in grey markets or marketing challenges in regulated markets. We’re really just trying to overcome those bumps as best we can.

EGR: How well is Rhino performing in Japan and how important is localisation of product?

RP: Japan’s always been a tough market. It takes a different mindset. In the past 18 months, we’ve had a team to specialise in that area. Those guys have really worked hard, even educating the rest of us on how to respect the market properly. You notice small things; for example, in some of our European markets, players will never read the T&Cs but in Japan lots of players will read them from start to finish. We’ve been improving our product and localising it so that our Japan site is now very different from the rest of our sites.

Japan has had some challenges in the market, particularly around payments and acquisition, which has made it tricky for operators and affiliates, so we’re trying to overcome that like everyone else. What I like about Japanese players is they are quite loyal once you prove you’re a trustworthy site, give them lots of attention and make sure campaigns and everything else is localised. That’s very different to some of the European players who will play with six or seven sites. In Japan, we plan to keep on improving month by month and hopefully we can take a spot as one of the key operators in the market.

EGR: How is the business showing innovation in product development?

RP: It’s very, very hard to have a true USP. We have a lot of the same games and content on our sites as our competitors. The players are coming to gamble and not necessarily for an additional USP. A strategy for us and the one we’ve so far executed quite well is to focus on the fundamentals and make sure our customers find a consistent and reliable service and offering.  

EGR: Which systems have you built in-house and what benefits does that bring?

RP: Some of the staff who’ve been with Rhino from the start are casino players themselves and they love product, so we’ve built our own technology in-house – the Rhino Layer (a proprietary CMS and aggregator service) and Rhino Cashier – to make sure we can offer our players gamification and specific features that aren’t available as standard on our third-party PAM platform.

We have a pretty good data setup, which we call the Rhino Lake. We also have an ambitious team and quite a few developers who want to build cool things, but sometimes it’s really hard to decide what to build next. You can build things you might think are going to be sexy and cool and players will love, but we’ve been trying to use data to make sure that when we carry out tests it works properly, and we could see players coming back to re-engage. We’re trying to use data on the marketing and product development side. We don’t want to go developing what we think is the coolest level-up function in the world but half our players don’t use it.

EGR: In September, you launched a new casino brand, Big Boost. How does it complement your existing B2C portfolio?

RP: We wanted another brand in our portfolio in certain markets with a slightly different style to see how it compared, because while we might not enter new markets next year, we are looking at maybe adding another brand. So, it was a test to see how it performs versus some of our previous launches.

It’s been our most successful launch so far. I’ll be honest, I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t because you have a couple of years of learning, more data available and a better team than ever before but still, it’s nice when it comes true.

EGR: What’s your marketing strategy at Rhino Entertainment?

RP: We’re quite aggressive in trying to grow brands quickly and we’ve been doing that quite well for a couple of years now. We’re not a startup anymore, so we have reasonable marketing budgets which help and allow us to do that. We do use affiliates heavily in many of our markets. With the Rhino Lake, every deal we sign now we can pretty much track all the way down to the net contribution level when there is a click involved. So, we can see the ROI of everything we’re doing.

In the past year, we’ve been moving into more of an above-the-line strategy with TV and out-of-home. In Ontario, we’re working on a new TV spot to help us stand out, get brand awareness and move away from being affiliate-reliant.

We are using data to try and optimise our marketing strategy. And when you’re being aggressive that’s quite important because it’s very easy to burn €100,000 on something that doesn’t work, especially if you lack visibility.

EGR: What’s next for Rhino? Do you have any plans to diversify into other verticals like sports betting?

RP: We’ve been looking at sports for some time; it would change some of the business but we won’t rule it out. We were close a couple of times to pulling the trigger. If we do sports, we want to do it right. We want to make sure we can launch a sportsbook that is competitive within the markets we want to launch in.

Next year is very much about optimising what we’ve been doing well and trying to grow our existing markets. Ontario is huge and we’re still relatively small there. You can get spread a bit thin. It’s good we are quite ambitious but sometimes you have to just rein it in.

We’re hoping to grow 50% next year in terms of revenue without adding too many more to our headcount. We will probably look at another brand at some point because we’re developing some cool features that we’re launching with our existing brands. We can then pick and choose which ones do the best.