Full Tilt chatter containment thread
08-25-2011
, 10:10 PM
After reading the 'solongdue' description of conditions within Pocket Kings, I gave it a lot of thought. I have seen a lot of companies w disfunctional managements and the scenes described about food, hostile HR exec, & incompetent CFO is a classic description of what you have when a badly managed company is going down in flames.
Only an idiot serves the executive suite lobster & steak while the cafeteria serves lasagna.
Given the financial meltdown and lack of player account data to effect reimbursement, even if the CFO is your brother ... he gets fired.
In these sort of extreme conditions realists understand that the management has to be changed, if only for the fact that the new management has to make a deal with the DOJ and only a "new team" will get any kind of a break, if at all. The entire old management are toast. If the old management wants to stay, like the captain on a sinking ship, .... the ship will sink, never to reappear.
This is not unique to Pocket Kings. Bad management and iconoclastic behaviour where management believe they are more important than the investors is classic in American corporate behaviour and increasingly continental (Britain included) corporate behaviour. I am dismayed, but not surprised, that the established management is trying to cut a deal where they keep their positions. To anyone with normal business acumen, there is no way the current management can stay on, if only for the U.S. DOJ negotiations that are next on the menu for anyone buying Pocket Kings.
This is why there is no deal for buying FullTilt. The old management is clinging to the idea they are something special. They are right, ... they ARE something special, but not in a good way. Even if they were the best management team on the planet, new investors mean a new team and any deal insisting on the old team will never fly.
As the Full Tilt carcass rots on the beach, eventually an investor will buy the remains (without the management team who have finally left the ship for dry land) and with hard work could well revive the brand to a portion of its former glory.
Bad management is nothing special ... it happens every day ... but in this case the deal is being stalled by personal interests taking precedence over good business sense.
Only an idiot serves the executive suite lobster & steak while the cafeteria serves lasagna.
Given the financial meltdown and lack of player account data to effect reimbursement, even if the CFO is your brother ... he gets fired.
In these sort of extreme conditions realists understand that the management has to be changed, if only for the fact that the new management has to make a deal with the DOJ and only a "new team" will get any kind of a break, if at all. The entire old management are toast. If the old management wants to stay, like the captain on a sinking ship, .... the ship will sink, never to reappear.
This is not unique to Pocket Kings. Bad management and iconoclastic behaviour where management believe they are more important than the investors is classic in American corporate behaviour and increasingly continental (Britain included) corporate behaviour. I am dismayed, but not surprised, that the established management is trying to cut a deal where they keep their positions. To anyone with normal business acumen, there is no way the current management can stay on, if only for the U.S. DOJ negotiations that are next on the menu for anyone buying Pocket Kings.
This is why there is no deal for buying FullTilt. The old management is clinging to the idea they are something special. They are right, ... they ARE something special, but not in a good way. Even if they were the best management team on the planet, new investors mean a new team and any deal insisting on the old team will never fly.
As the Full Tilt carcass rots on the beach, eventually an investor will buy the remains (without the management team who have finally left the ship for dry land) and with hard work could well revive the brand to a portion of its former glory.
Bad management is nothing special ... it happens every day ... but in this case the deal is being stalled by personal interests taking precedence over good business sense.
08-25-2011
, 10:19 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:20 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:21 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:23 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:42 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:45 PM
08-25-2011
, 10:59 PM
Naw, for the first time they are paying someone $500/hr for customer service - at those rates the usual response time should go from the old 7 days to 24hrs!
08-25-2011
, 11:22 PM
In cases like this, really the only buyer that can handle these issues effectively is a competitor and their team who absorbs the entire business under their operation. Given that, the ideal strategy would envolve a smaller but growing poker site, who together with a large round of PE funding to acquire the assets and rebrand the business, but given the long period of closure, that strategy is likely hard to achieve now as many investors will be skeptical that players will return to a newly branded FTP. This way you keep the experienced senior management of the old business and can more easily remove the top end of PK. It would still be risky, but this minimizes the risk slightly. People wonder why investors dont see FTP as being worth all this money - but they fail to understand all the complexities of acquiring someone else's company and having to toss out the entire senior management team and this combined with all the other myriad of issues facing the company - it really diminishes the value of the business significantly when you have these sorts of problems.
