This is a guest contribution by John O’Reilly, the new non-executive chairman at Grand Parade. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

In my near 30 years working in the gambling industry, and even longer as a punter, it has always struck me as being strange that bookmakers spend so much time and energy trying to sell customers stuff they don’t want and don’t do very well at giving customers what they do want.

When I first headed up the marketing function for Ladbrokes in the early 1990s the chairman, Cyril Stein taught me that bookmaking is about detail and sharing in the passion for sport and sports-betting with the customer. On one occasion, Mr Stein called me having just seen the latest Derby promotional posters in the window of the Ladbrokes shop in Earls Court. “Which way do the horses run at Epsom, John?” he asked me.

The printer had transposed a negative in the production of the posters and the horses in the Derby were wrongly running right to left. I got the well-deserved rollicking. Everyone with a passion for betting on horses knows which way the horses run at Epsom. Working for Mr Stein was a good education and every lesson was well learnt, the most important of which is that good bookmakers are always in tune with their customers.