The episode opens with a pre-roll montage of highlights from the conversation ahead — sharp takes on the UK gambling tax, leadership philosophy, and product innovation — before Leo Judkins formally introduces himself as founder of iGaming Leader Mastermind. He thanks episode sponsor SumSub, a full-cycle verification platform used by top iGaming operators for onboarding, AML and fraud prevention, then sets the scene for the conversation with Savvas Fellas. Leo paints Savvas as a founder who embodies his brand: opinionated, direct, and unafraid to call out the industry's shortcomings. He notes he first encountered Savvas on stage at the Power 50 event, where the man's presence made a clear impression. The tone is set for an honest, no-spin conversation about what it actually takes to build a challenger brand in one of the most regulated industries in the world.

Savvas opens with frank context: no strong educational background, grew up on a council estate in Birmingham, arrived in London after graduating and set up an affiliate site to practise SEO, PPC, and retargeting. A bingo comparison site evolved into a white-label operator, giving him both sides of the publisher-advertiser equation and real data without full CPA exposure. But the frustrations accumulated — staging environments, clunky back offices, poor real-time data, and a system that only listened to operators doing serious revenue. The meritocracy wasn't there. Savvas's response was characteristic: 'How hard can it be? I'll build it.' He used the revenues from his affiliate business to fund MrQ's development in the background, went live in August 2018, and then gradually wound down everything else. The rest, he says with understatement, is history. The founder's fingerprints — fairness, transparency, stubbornness toward the status quo — are visible on every aspect of what MrQ became.

From the story of MrQ's origin, Savvas pivots to the broader pattern of the entrepreneurial mindset. He acknowledges that the same energy that launched a company — 'How hard can it be?' — is also the energy that led him to impulsively win a 20,000 square-foot Crown Prosecution Service building in St Albans, only needing 5,000 of it, and then decide to turn the rest into a co-working space on a whim. The self-awareness is genuine: shiny objects are fun, and entrepreneurs are wired to want to fix things and prove they can buck trends. But he's learned to be more disciplined about it. On the ADHD question — Leo asks whether Savvas is super focused or more scattered — Savvas is honest: he gets distracted easily, has ADHD, and doesn't medicate. His best work happens when his back is against the wall. The people around him, particularly his CFO, have better focus than he does, and that structural support is what keeps the business on track when Savvas's instincts might pull it sideways.

Asked about secret sauce after 8 years of bootstrapped growth, Savvas dismisses the idea of anything objective or easily transferable. What he's arrived at is deceptively simple: a crystal-clear mission, a defined vision, and a set of values that function as the first-principles framework for all day-to-day decisions. He uses a shipbuilding metaphor to make it tangible — instead of micromanaging who cuts which plank, a leader's job is to make the crew yearn for the open ocean. Then they'll figure out the boat. MrQ's mission is 'to make every play unforgettable and to burn the rule book when it gets in the way' — a statement that, in Savvas's telling, should be the reason people join, not just a slogan on a wall. Even the analogy of NASA's cleaner who sees his job as 'helping put a man on the moon' resonates with him: every hire should subscribe to the mission, not just their functional role.

MrQ's strategic focus on the UK market and core casino product is, Savvas admits, something he has to actively protect against his own nature. Pressure to add sportsbook comes up constantly, as does the temptation of new markets — and each time, Savvas's challenge is to flip the burden of proof: not 'why aren't we doing it?' but 'give me a compelling reason why we should.' His CFO has been the key guardian of that focus, catching Savvas mid-enthusiasm and gently asking: 'But why would we be doing this?' The point about one-way doors is pointed: sportsbook, international expansion — these are decisions that look reversible from the outside but have hidden exit costs once you're inside. You can find the fire exit, Savvas says, but it's very hard to locate. Steve Jobs' observation — that he's almost as proud of the things Apple didn't do as the things it did — resonates deeply here. The leadership team has, in the past 12 to 18 months, been presented with a couple of real opportunities, and each time the answer has been the same: focus is the thing, and once it's gone, it's gone.

Finding the right person for the right seat is hard in any business. In a values-led operation with six explicit principles — We Own It, We Challenge Everything, We Win As One, We Care By Design, We Play Smart Long Games, and We Get Shit Done — it becomes substantially harder, because every candidate has to genuinely embody those principles, not just recite them. At the C-suite level, the difficulty multiplies again. Savvas wanted experienced, seasoned, relentless executives who also knew the difference between management and leadership, could delegate, and were still hungry. Both his CMO and COO were hired from outside iGaming — from fintech backgrounds — which brought a different challenge: convincing talented people to join an industry still carrying serious stigma. His approach to recruitment echoes his values: you want people who say no a few times before saying yes. Availability is a red flag. He references Steve Jobs recruiting the Burberry CEO for Apple Retail as proof that the right person, at the right time, with the right sell, will eventually come around. The framing throughout is consistent: a leader's job is to make people crave the mission, not to control the execution.

The hardest part of MrQ's growth — harder than building the product, harder than the pivot from tech to product-led thinking, harder than the tax shock — was the people decisions. Savvas traces the arc: the startup phase of doing everything yourself, then reaching 50-70 people and having to operationalise, then realising the problem had shifted from technology to product leadership. Mistakes were made in hiring; the biggest ones were always about fit, not competence. Then came the moment of reckoning: Savvas wanted to build a proper C-suite, but didn't want to promote heads-of based on loyalty alone. So he put the entire layer — and himself — through an executive competency benchmarking programme, with the explicit promise that if the data said he also shouldn't be CEO, he'd step aside. The result was stark: almost nobody in the existing team benchmarked at C-level. Savvas had to face that reality with people who had been on the journey with him for years. Not everyone stayed, but many did — partly because of how the conversation was handled: honestly, openly, with the acknowledgment that what got the business here would not get it to the next stage.

Amid the C-suite restructuring, Savvas made a specific error that became a defining lesson. Two people were competing for the same role; he gave it to one, handled the situation badly, and then — faced with better arguments — reversed the decision. Rather than manage the reversal quietly, he called the entire heads-of layer into a room and told them straight: 'Guys, I fucked up.' Cards on the table, no explanations, just an acknowledgment and a path forward. It was, by his own account, the first serious CEO-level conflict he had navigated, and reverting the decision in public was painful. But the outcome was instructive: when leaders are honest about their mistakes, people buy the mission more deeply, not less. Leo frames this as avoiding management debt — the compound interest on bad decisions that gets paid back over time, at exponentially greater cost the longer it's deferred. Savvas agrees, and adds that many of the people in that room that day are still at MrQ.

MrQ had scenario-planned the tax rise up to around 32%. When 40% landed, the first reaction was disbelief — not just at the number, but at the government's apparent failure to consult meaningfully or model consequences. The initial emotion was pure shock. Savvas describes a period of sitting with it, mourning, brainstorming, and then forcing the pivot to action. Very quickly, he was on an all-hands call: this happened, this is what it means, this is our mitigation plan. One of the most painful mitigations was reducing RTP — from 96p to approximately 94p per pound wagered — a move Savvas had deliberately avoided for years, holding it in reserve as a competitive ace. The tax change made it necessary. But framing matters: Savvas positioned the tax as a common enemy, one that would sort the industry into winners and losers, and MrQ's bootstrapped cost discipline and honest brand positioning made it more likely to land in the winner column. The government comes in for pointed criticism — not just for the policy but for the framing of it as 'just asking the industry to pay a little bit more.' A 90% revenue tax increase is not a little bit more.

Moving from MrQ's internal response to the wider industry picture, Savvas turns his frustration on the government directly. His argument is not just about business impact but about people: real players, real harm. The government, he says, explicitly accounted for £500,000 going into the black market as an acceptable consequence of the tax — and he finds that position incomprehensible. Unregulated sites don't have safer gambling tools, AML checks, or self-exclusion mechanisms. The assumption that the black market is only attracting GamStop-listed problem gamblers is, in his view, dangerously naive — there are far too many unlicensed sites for that number to hold. The regulated industry's job now is to give players genuinely compelling reasons to stay — not through promotional complexity, but through honesty, transparency, and a superior experience. The CMA's intervention on how promotional offers must be written is cited as a reminder of how far the industry had drifted from player-centric thinking before regulation forced its hand.

Asked about his vision for MrQ beyond the traditional casino format, Savvas opens up about the direction the product is heading — without giving specific details. The framing is ambitious: he wants to shift the paradigm of what real money entertainment means, not just iterate on the existing model. The inspiration is the intersection of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket with social, synchronous entertainment. During COVID, people turned to online poker and cocktail-making together — the shared element transformed what could have been an isolated activity into a communal experience. Savvas believes the same principle can be applied to real-money gaming. The behavioural economics angle is compelling: loss aversion means that losing £10 requires winning back £20 to feel psychologically whole. But what if playing with another person changes that dynamic? If the shared experience reduces the multiplier from 2x to 1.5x or 1.2x, it fundamentally alters the product's relationship with the player. The pizza analogy captures it perfectly: nobody says they 'lost money' on a pizza — they shared one, and it was good. That's the emotional register MrQ is trying to reach: entertain the world, win or lose.

Leo asks one final question: if Savvas could go back to the moment he started building the C-suite, what would he tell himself? The answer is unequivocal: focus entirely on that, drop everything else, and let whatever fires are burning elsewhere continue to burn — because nothing else is as existential. Had MrQ built that leadership layer even slightly faster, the business would have had more insulation against the 40% tax shock, could have grown harder through 2025, and would be in a stronger position today. Any slower, and they would have been collateral damage. It's a fitting close: a founder who has learned, through real cost, that leadership infrastructure is not an operational concern — it's survival infrastructure. Leo wraps with a direct pitch for iGaming Leader Mastermind, his vetted senior executive community for iGaming leaders making high-stakes decisions, and a final thanks to sponsor SumSub.