Mikael Pawlo remembers the lunch well. Well, reasonably well, since the lunch lasted quite a few hours and was accompanied by “well, perhaps a few drinks!”, he chuckled. He and two childhood friends were talking about their futures and he was mulling what to do since he had just sold his PR company. His friends, Henrik Bergquist and Fredrik Sidfalk, had founded another big i-gaming company but had left several years earlier.
“How about if we do something together? Would it be possible to create an i-gaming company with responsibility?” he said.
“But if we did it in a very different way... If we did it in a way we could feel good about, and we treated our customers well?”
One of his friends called him soon after to say he liked the idea and it was only from then just a hop, skip and a jump till he was sitting in a balcony looking out over Tower Road in Sliema and Mr Green was founded in 2008.
Mr Pawlo also liked the idea that the company would offer a “green” gaming concept, allowing punters to set their own personal gambling limits when registering, a player protection concept which was groundbreaking at the time and is still uncommon.
“My competitors had a real laugh at us as they felt that we were cutting back our own revenue. But we really believed in what we were doing; we wanted to feel good about giving people entertainment and it was a good way to create our own niche in the market which was already taken up by large companies,” he said.
“But it worked and we won a lot of loyal customers.”
In 2013, it made a profit of €6.5 million, almost double the 2012 figure, with revenue of €53 million.
Mr Green & Co. is running its business through subsidiary Mr Green Ltd in Malta, with Marcus Nylen as its CEO until recently, but it grew quickly and already employs 100 people here (in addition to 30 in Stockholm) from 16 different countries. In 2013, it made a profit of €6.5 million, almost double the 2012 figure, with revenue of €53 million.
The time had come for another initiative. This time, Mr Pawlo knew that there was an important niche that was being overlooked.
“If you ask people who the typical online player is, they would probably answer a man in his 30s. But the reality is that the average player is a female aged 43, probably because people only think of betting or action computer games and not social games,” he said.
But the female audience was clearly not being catered for. Mr Pawlo wanted another iconic name, one that – like Mr Green – kept well away from the usual ones that relied on the words ‘bet’, ‘casino’ and ‘poker’. It was, he admitted with a smile, his wife who came up with the name Garbo, inspired by Swedish actress Greta Garbo.
Garbo is short, easy to remember, iconic but accessible. We wanted something real and empowering to women
“I liked it immediately. It’s short, easy to remember, iconic but accessible. We wanted something real and empowering to women,” he explained.
The Garbo brand was launched in Sweden last October, with Mr Nylen as the CEO of the new company Dsrptiv Gaming Ventures and Sarah Psaila as its casino manager. It has already surpassed their expectations. The team is made up of only five people but that is more than enough at the moment as it relies entirely on the Mr Green infrastructure and customer care. They are now ready to expand into new markets “very quickly” he said, “certainly by the end of the year”.
Garbo has already made waves and has been nominated for three categories in the EGR Operator Marketing and Innovation Awards: Brand of the Year; Innovation in Mobile; and Innovative Start-Up.
In the meantime, Mr Green Ltd, with new CEO Bo Wanghammar, is also nominated in two categories: Brand of the Year and Casino Marketing.
“We want to stay on top – which you can only do by constant improvement. Take today, for example. One of the team made a suggestion which would improve customer experience and we got all those involved together and started introducing the change within hours,” he said.“It’s really fun.”
Perhaps this is what sets entrepreneurs apart from mere mortals. The fact that they still think of it as ‘fun’. The thrill means that they are constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and last week Mr Green acquired Malta-based Social Holdings, which offers a free-to-play casino game called Spin Tower Casino on Facebook.
“We bought it when it was still in the beta version! It hasn’t even been launched yet... But we think that it has a lot of potential. The competition in the US, such as Slot Mania, has some nine million users!”
It has been a manic six years but Mr Pawlo shows no sign of slowing down or resting on his laurels. He knows that he has an important decision to make: whether to keep the Spin Tower Casino brand or come up with a new name.
“Perhaps I need to ask my wife,” he laughed.