Zach Doctor: “Prison was easier than working at Ladbrokes?”
David Carruthers: “Yeah.”
David Carruthers was born in Edinburgh and attended art college before joining Ladbrokes in 1976. He started as a janitor, working his way up through the business before becoming the company’s youngest betting shop manager at 19. Over the next twenty-four years, he built a career inside Britain’s largest retail bookmaker, earning an MBA from the University of Wolverhampton and rising to manage business development strategy for Ladbrokes shops across West England.
We met him on Monday, January 19 - the first day of the ICE Conference in Barcelona. It was raining. Inside Hall 1, the lights in the iGB studio shined bright on the hot seat of the Reverse Pitch Stage.
WagerWire CEO Zach Doctor was flanked by Philisiwe Bhengu, Founder of Research iGaming and Tony Keller, Founder of The Casino Factory opposite the legend David Carruthers for the newest edition of our Reverse Pitch series, where startups get to grill executives, in a format that can best be described as an inverted Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den. David was on the hot seat to sell us on why we'd be wise to hire David Carruthers Consulting Limited.
Here's a portion of that conversation ...
Zach: So I asked you your biggest challenge, and you said it was Ladbrokes.
David: Yes.
Zach: So was prison easier than working at Ladbrokes?
David: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah?
David: That's the short version.
Zach: Can you elaborate on that?
David: Prison was another MBA. It was almost a Doctorate. The learning that I absorbed from that terrible experience is phenomenal. And it, it went through stages. The first stage was the shock of what the bleep, bleep, bleep is happening to me? When the charges got unveiled and the education of the implications were euphoric, 'cause I was charged with four counts of RICO conspiracy. And in the United States, that means you can go to jail for 80 years. Eight-o years. The next stage was preparing a defense, and that took a long time because they didn't rush things. I was on house arrest for 42 months.
Zach: I saw that. You were living in a hotel for years, yeah?
David: Yeah. And when I acquiesced and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge... Well, actually it was one count of RICO conspiracy, with a limitation on the prison sentence. I then prepared myself to do that, because that was my punishment.
Tony: How long did it take you to bounce back? from that experience?
David: About 24 hours.
Philisiwe: Well, that was fast.
David: I never stopped doing what I needed to do. When I was on house arrest, I was preparing myself for the rest of my life. One of the principles I did was I started running. I got healthy. I lost 18 kilograms. I ran a marathon in under three hours. The motivation to do that was not to occupy time. The motivation was to replace the years that I'm losing at the end of my life by living longer. I also spent time preparing for entering prison. What was I gonna do? How was I gonna protect myself? How was I gonna make it productive? And I did that.
