Fitzdares CEO: You should be able to bet what you like if you can prove affordability

Seldom will you encounter the options ‘Sir’, ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’ under ‘Title’ when signing up with a betting company online. Then again, Fitzdares isn’t exactly your typical betting company. Launched in 2006 by ex-Ladbrokes PR manager Balthazar Fabricius, and with well-heeled individuals and Britain’s aristocracy now as clients, this exclusive West London outfit harks back to a bygone era of impeccably turned out on- and off-course ‘turf accountants’ where a personal, professional and discreet service was assured. “Our clients come from all over the social spectrum,” stresses William Woodhams, Fitzdares’ gregarious CEO, as he tries to downplay the notion all its clients are blue-blooded or landed gentry.

“They just love sport and really dig customer service. So, we’re definitely not snooty. You certainly don’t have to have a title to bet with us, and in fact we’d rather you didn’t sometimes.” Woodhams himself epitomises the image of old-school bookmaker with his slicked-back dark hair, oval spectacles and suit from Saville Row’s Norton & Sons. His wristwatch is a Patek Philippe. The 42-year-old’s background is in marketing, though including spells at French Connection and LVMH (Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton).

So, he didn’t cut his teeth in the gambling space clerking for on-course layers or settling each-way Lucky 15s by hand in betting shops. This wouldn’t have been a natural career path following a degree in archaeology and anthropology. That said, Woodhams was a Fitzdares client for 15 years prior to joining the firm in 2018 and his family was involved in the world of horseracing.

And horseracing is at the core of this privately-owned bookmaking business. Unlike most betting firms today, around 60% of its turnover involves racing (followed by tennis and football). Indeed, precious few Fitzdares clients steer clear of having a flutter on the Sport of Kings altogether. Equally unusual is the fact ‘higher-tier’ clients have their own phone number for ringing through bets to the Fitzdares brokers. It means they don’t have to go through the rigmarole of reciting account usernames and passwords. “If people do like to use telephone betting, they have their own number and so that means they can call us on any line and we know it’s them because we voice verify them,” Woodhams explains.

Woodhams insists Fitzdares’ clients come from all walks of life

Yet in these days of dedicated apps, biometric logins and bets struck with a few taps, dialling a number and relaying your selections to a human on the other end of the line seems counterintuitive. Inconvenient, too. In fact, bet365 recently hung up its telephone service after 20 years due to dwindling interest in betting in this analogue manner. However, Fitzdares pounced on this decision by running a tongue-in-cheek ad in the Racing Post mocking the prospect of customers’ calls going unanswered at bet365’s HQ.

“We thought they [bet365] were completely bonkers,” Woodhams insists. “Thirty-year-olds now have got through this app blindness and are starting to want to have great customer experience. So, everyone is shelving it [telebetting] and we’re ramping it up – we’re 90% sure we’re doing the right thing.” Customers can also email or text the office to place bets if they so wish. Incidentally, Fitzdares claims it was the first bookmaker to introduce text betting. Naturally, there’s also a website and app. Because three-quarters of its mobile users have iPhones, Woodhams says Fitzdares “invests heavily in the iOS experience” and had a dedicated native iOS app, as opposed to a ‘wrapped’ version, even before Apple’s recent crackdown on repurposed apps.

While the digital product is powered by sports betting supplier FSB Technology, the layout, aesthetics and overall UX is designed in-house. Small touches such as the uniquely detailed jockey silks besides horses’ names help separate Fitzdares from the herd. “We’re obsessed with that detail, and other bookmakers just don’t care,” the CEO remarks.

In addition, Fitzdares previously resisted including live racing streams, although this common feature was integrated into the app when racing in England resumed on 1 June after the shutdown due to coronavirus, and it has gone down well with users. The app also includes live chat – not just for customer service, but for placing bets. For instance, if the algorithm determines the maximum stake on a particular horse is £300 and a customer tries to bet more than this amount, a broker will be notified, enter the chat function and “nine times out of 10”, the larger stake request will be approved and accepted, Woodhams says.

“All those frustrations you have with technology as a punter, we are hopefully ironing out by using human beings.” He continues: “The best customer by far is the one that uses the app and telephone. If you can get a customer to talk to you in the human sense through the app or through texts or phone, that’s both on a compliance and customer service experience level by far the best.”

 Ace of clubs

With Fitzdares billing itself as ‘the world’s finest bookmaker’, it was perhaps fitting that the company decided to reinforce that sense of exclusivity by opening its own opulent private members club. Beginning life in 2018 as a pop-up at London’s more high-end establishments, the club now has a permanent home at the heart of London’s Mayfair, inside the building of The Running Horse public house on Davies Street near to Claridge’s. The Fitzdares Club, which costs £600 a year to join and has a membership limit of 2,000, boasts a chic interior by designer Rosanna Bossom, with plush furnishings and nine 4K HD screens showing live sport 12 hours a day, six days a week. In fact, a love of sport is “non-negotiable”, informs the club’s prospectus.

There is also a kitchen on site preparing plates of food like grilled onglet of beef with shoestring fries and chimichurri (£27), or poached hake with mussel and bacon chowder (£26). Or members can decamp to the bar for lighter fare like lobster croissant or the eponymous Fitzdares Club sandwich (both £12). Bottles of the locally brewed Fitzdares Ale are available if the well-stocked wine cellar, from which two rare magnums of claret are opened daily, wasn’t enough. For Woodhams, the club is simply a sumptuous bolthole to watch sport and relax over a postprandial game of backgammon or a few hands of gin rummy. “There is nowhere to watch sport in a really luxury environment,” he gushes.

Located in the heart of Mayfair, The Fitzdares Club costs £600 a year to become a member

“We say it’s about as close to being there as you could be, except it isn’t because the food is delicious, the wine is great and there is no travelling… For me, it’s the best place to watch sport; I’ve not seen better, even in [Las] Vegas.” The club opened in early September and enquiries about membership came flooding in, even if the ‘new normal’ means social distancing and staff are now having to don protective masks. It’s the same for members when moving around the venue. Despite all the challenges, particularly renovating a listed building constructed in the 1830s, Woodhams describes the project as a “labour of love”, from burrowing two kilometres of cabling in the walls for the TVs and audio down to the specially commissioned Polkra candles burning throughout the club or the ‘snail’ holding a copy of the Racing Post in the lavatory.

Indeed, there was no compromise on the attention to detail. This obsession was aided by having accommodating builders. “We didn’t like the plug sockets in the whole club [so] I mentioned it in a meeting at 5pm and I went in at lunchtime the next day and they were all changed.” Members aren’t actually able to physically place bets at the club as Fitzdares doesn’t have a betting licence for the venue, nor did management want to try to secure one. Those wishing to have a gamble are instead encouraged to bet via text or the app rather than ringing the office. This is so fellow members aren’t “intimidated by the size of your stake”, says the club’s prospectus.

Stake and chips

Woodhams reveals that a typical sports wager from its “bread and butter customers” varies from £200 to £500, yet it’s not uncommon for the firm to lay lumpy six-figure bets providing it’s a liquid market. “As long as we know you, we’ll pretty much take anything. It blows our mind how people get knocked back from other bookmakers when there’s plenty of liquidity in the market,” he exclaims. Fitzdares also has an online casino with an upmarket feel that puts an emphasis on live table games, which are supplied by Evolution, although some slots have been added to the mix. Indeed, Woodhams refers to the casino product as a “super premium offering” sans the “leprechauns and tacky games”.

With Fitzdares attracting higher-staking customers than your typical online bookmaker, the potential for the government’s upcoming review of the Gambling Act to result in stake caps or loss limits, as some industry observers anticipate, could portend trouble for the business. Fitzdares doesn’t have a VIP cohort of customers per se, as management like to say all its clients fall within this category, but nevertheless Woodhams is anxious about the industry having to acquiesce to some form of cap. “I do worry about limits. I don’t think there should be online limits necessarily; people should be able to bet what they want to bet if they can prove affordability.”

While on the topic of the review, he is adamant that the writing is on the wall for gambling marketing. “The time of mass promotions and mass advertising are coming quickly to an end. The advertising, you might as well knock it on the head now.” In fact, Woodhams urges the sector to, as he puts it, “calm down”. “Stop advertising on shirts, stop bombarding people with SEO, stop trying to monetise your casino and just let the sport do the talking and manage your books accordingly. And stop running your book at 0% margin because, ultimately, you can’t win.”

Overall, he believes the industry has utilised technology almost “too successfully” to acquire customers and that moves to get its house in order around RG and compliance will end up being insufficient. “However much the BGC [Betting and Gaming Council] and the big players self-regulate, that won’t be enough. Our entire business is now built around compliance and we’re staffing up. Because we have a much smaller customer base, it is probably easier for us to go through every account to make sure the compliance is correct, but if you’ve got a million active players, you’re in a horrible place as to where this could go.”

The Fitzdares Club’s interior was created by interior designer Rosanna Bossom

Hit for six

Six months ago, Fitzdares found itself in a horrible place when coronavirus forced the shutdown of British horseracing and offices. The day after the Cheltenham Festival and Al Boum Photo’s back-to-back Gold Cup victories, most of the 20 staff transitioned to working from home with dual-monitor setups and work phones, although Woodhams half-jokingly remarks that Slack has become the bane of his life. But it was the dearth of sporting action, particularly domestic racing, that was the most difficult aspect. “It was horrendous during lockdown. We were promoting Hong Kong racing and doing what we could with what we had, but our members were never going to bet on Taiwanese badminton or virtual sports.”

Fitzdares still managed to end its financial year in June in the black despite lockdown coinciding with what is traditionally the firm’s most profitable three months (the biggest event in a normal year for turnover is Royal Ascot while the Cheltenham Festival is the key event for acquiring new customers). The business emerged from lockdown with its marketing “in sixth gear”, says Woodhams, including promoting its 1950s-style Drive-in Derby with live race commentary from the large screen piped through attendees’ car radios. The PR around this unique event and the creation of the Fitzdares Club helped boost organic online searches for the brand by 2,000% post-lockdown.

The bookmaker has also been ramping up its involvement with household names from the world of sport and sport production. For example, it introduced a service using WhatsApp voice notes whereby well-known commentator John Motson, OBE, ex-England cricketer Sir Geoffrey Boycott, OBE, and BBC Sport’s former racing hack, Cornelius Lysaght, provide their views on upcoming matches and big race meetings. Fitzdares also publishes sporting previews and features on its own media content platform, and even prints a biannual newspaper, the Fitzdares Times, trumpeted as ‘required reading for the discerning gambler’.

Woodhams concedes that printing a paper in this digital age might sound like he is “on crack” but he believes there is a gap in the market for quality sports content with a betting angle. “The Times has a racing tip on their website and that’s about their racing coverage. The second most popular sport in the UK and The Times doesn’t cover it. There’s no good content on sports for our sort of customer base.” Interestingly, Woodhams suggests there is room in the betting industry one day for a subscription-based bookmaking model, with the Fitzdares Club and the online and print media content being the initial steps towards this. “Every industry, from [private members clubs] Soho House to Amazon and Netflix has a subscription service.”

Until then, the focus remains on building the Fitzdares brand and swimming against the tide in an industry characterised today by faceless corporations constrained by the automation and algorithm gods. Part of this is achieved by reinforcing that air of exclusivity. “We’ve been on the journey building really incredible customer experiences, both through service and physical experiences,” the CEO says. “Why can’t you go to the races and just have amazing food and wine, and why can’t you go to a club in Mayfair and watch greyhound racing with Beef Wellington? It sounds like fun to me.”

While membership for the Mayfair club may be out of reach of some, the hope for Woodhams, who says he still classes himself as more of a businessman than a bookie, is that more regular, lower-staking punters give Fitzdares a spin besides its high rollers and horseracing’s illuminati. “We want to show UK gamblers there’s another way of having a bookmaker – it doesn’t have to be all about prices, offers and an app,” he asserts. Woodhams singles out two famous luxury retail brands to underline his point: “When it comes to experience, people want a bit of Harrods and Selfridges.”