The Man Behind Lisbon’s Million-Euro Match, With SBC’s Rasmus Sojmark

[00:00]  1. Intro: the man behind SBC Events

Host:  Welcome to Bet It Drives, the show that drives you into the unexpected corners of iGaming. SBC is a big name in iGaming, and today we’re joined by the man behind it all, Rasmus Sojmark, CEO and founder. Buckle up. From affiliate marketing to global summits and non-stop news, he’s always ahead of the game. Let’s hear his insights.

[00:34]  2. Preparing for SBC Summit Lisbon: 30,000+ attendees

Host:  Rasmus, welcome to Bet It Drives. Rasmus heads the entire SBC show, events and media, a legend within our iGaming community, and we’re proud to have you. Today we’ll talk about some behind-the-scenes things our audience may never have heard before.

Guest:  It will be smooth. We’ve been working on this for a long time. It takes place here Monday to Thursday, the weather is amazing, the setup is amazing, and we’ve got about 30,000 people coming. It’s going to be a great week.

Host:  These couple of days are going to be hectic for you.

Guest:  I’m not even talking about the previous 100 days of nightmares. We spend an entire year preparing for this, and as much as you prepare, build the teams, project-manage and plan it out, there’s always something coming on top. A few months back we started working on the Legends charity game to add into the mix, an amazing event raising one million euros.

[02:06]  3. The idea behind the SBC Legends Charity Match

Host:  Speaking of this Legends charity match, how did the idea come about?

Guest:  I’ve always had a great passion for football. I looked at Lisbon, where we have our biggest show, and asked what more we could do that makes sense here. Lisbon is part of the 2030 World Cup, so I thought: what if, the day before the summit, we create a charity event bringing footballers together, a world legends team against a Portugal team, in the build-up to the World Cup? That was the initial idea. Then, besides the road to 2030, we asked what else we could add to give it more purpose, and that became the one-million-euro charity fundraising target. When you look at the Portugal legends we put together, Figo, Pepe, Deco, Nani, it’s an amazing team, the golden generation. I reckon it’s a wonderful social contribution to the city and the country, just to bring these famous stars together.

Host:  Absolute champions.

[03:24]  4. Feel the Beat

Host:  Music time. What’s the one melody that comes across multiple events?

Guest:  Let’s say “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses. It’s my son’s favourite, by the way. In comparison, SBC events are the jungle you want to be in: it delivers, but it also does crazy stuff.

Host:  Shifting from the high energy to something more creative, what’s the guilty-pleasure song when you’re planning new events?

Guest:  There could be a lot, but let’s stick with one. I’ve always liked Def Leppard. I’d put on “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” It’s got a good beat, a bit of sweet hard rock, back from the old days. This week we’ve got Timmy Trumpet and some of the best DJs in the world coming to the SBC Summit. I’ve always been a hard-rock guy but I’ve moved more into the DJs now too, David Guetta, Afrojack, so many versions of old music coming back, mixed by the DJs. But Def Leppard has always been an interesting one.

[05:07]  5. How SBC prioritises partners and builds long-term growth

Host:  We’re a couple of days before the event, and events are a core business for your team. You speak with many business owners and marketing teams, all competing for the best, shiniest spots. How do you prioritise?

Guest:  It comes down to who supported you early on, who continued and grew their booth and asked for more space as the event grew. You’ll see companies like GR8 Tech, SoftConstruct and others, because they’ve been very continuous in their support. You prioritise that, because they put the money behind their products and help you build the business. Without these companies we’d be nothing, because how can we grow without the revenue to grow? People trust us with the money to put it back into the event. We’re one of the few organisers in our industry that reinvests fully back into the event: we created the Legends charity game, we provide food, drinks and everything around it.

[06:45]  6. From EveryMatrix to SBC: tech to events

Guest:  Back in the day I was part of the founding team of EveryMatrix. I left them in 2012, and that’s when I moved more full-time into SBC and started growing the events, realising people were willing to put money into events. In technology, the sale takes a lot longer: you need a contract, a service level agreement, testing, and the client might find an issue and not sign, then you’ve got cost for service and tech. With an event, you take a venue, put things in, tell someone “take a space here,” agree the sponsorship, and they give you 20 or 30k, done. It felt like a revelation, not having to wait for those tedious long-term contracts. So we asked how to build more around that, and that’s how we scaled the events step by step, year on year.

[07:48]  7. When crazy marketing goes too far

Host:  Budgets aren’t always well spent, and you don’t always know what idea will work. Talking about the crazy ideas, years back the industry did some wild stuff.

Guest:  Very true. Years back it was a less regulated business, and some of the marketing was absolutely insane. But the industry has grown up. You don’t look at crazy marketing in terms of stepping over regulatory boundaries, because you’ll be due-diligenced at some point, and any marketing done the wrong way will come back and bite you. So now we’re talking more about creativity in how you promote a product.

[08:39]  8. The truth about awards: thousands of nominations

Host:  Awards are a narrow space, you can’t recognise everybody. Have you seen growing importance in these nominations, and some frustration from people who expected something but got nothing?

Guest:  We get thousands of nominations. Some categories can have 100-plus nominees. You go to a short list, narrowing it down to maybe 10 to 20 companies, and that’s very hard. The issues start there: people complain about not being on the short list, but you can’t keep everyone on it. Then at the awards evening you celebrate the winners, and afterwards three or four people walk up and say “I’m going to cut my budget next year because you didn’t give me an award.” And I’m like, okay, but it doesn’t work like that. Every award has about 8 to 10 judges on a very objective level. It’s not me deciding, it’s the committee.

[10:06]  9. Why awards still matter

Guest:  It’s a tough one, and you just have to take it on the chin, because the thing is, next year people want the same. They want the awards rather than not having them. I’d be ready to cut the awards to avoid some of this nonsense sometimes, but they’re so ingrained now and so important for many companies, and for us, that we continue. There’s a fine line, though, where you think: come on, does this make sense, if people get that upset over not winning?

[10:40]  10. Network or Not Work

Host:  Some simple ones. Network or not work. Somebody asks you to push a headline because they just paid you.

Guest:  Network.

Host:  Will you create a new awards category if a VIP or a good sponsor asks?

Guest:  To be honest, if it’s a good idea, we’ll consider it. So it’s in between.

[11:21]  11. The wildest headline: announcing Oleksandr Usyk for SBC Legends

Host:  What’s the craziest headline you remember out of the hundreds you post?

Guest:  If I tie it in with the cool stuff we’ve done, it’s only a few days ago, when I managed to work with our great partner at GR8 Tech to get Usyk to come and play in the Legends charity game. We issued the press release announcing Oleksandr Usyk himself, the heavyweight boxing champion, an idol of mine and many others, joining the world legends team to play with some of the best footballers in the world against Portugal. That headline, sorry for my language, is insane. How would I ever think I’d create something like that and put it out into the media? Let’s go with that one.

Host:  It raises the benchmark, who could do better than that?

Guest:  Exactly. And it’s happening tomorrow.

[12:18]  12. Confession Lane

Host:  Is there a confession or story you’d like to share, something you’ve known but never could share before?

Guest:  I’ll address it back to our discussion about being a champion. I’ve always been a bit torn about how you deal with perfectionism, and my perfectionism often caused me to not seek the limelight and to shy away from things. For many years I found excuses not to do stuff, because I didn’t like it if I didn’t feel very prepared. There’s a degree of not feeling comfortable and not doing something because you don’t want to fail, and that’s what perfectionism is. So I worked a lot on turning it in my favour, getting the better side of it, but I often stepped away from the limelight because I like to be private in some cases and focus on my work and deliver. I rarely do podcasts like this, because unless I come prepared I worry about the outcome. So I’m a little bit nervous to be here, even if it doesn’t look like it. I do a lot of talking to myself before I go, it’s just a habit. It’s been a struggle for years, finding ways of not making excuses for yourself. People probably think I’m always ahead of things, but it’s not always like that. You do have your struggles.

[14:27]  13. Military lessons in leadership and composure

Host:  I know you have a bit of a military background, and I believe you bring some of that training into your daily life.

Guest:  Absolutely. I was a sergeant back in 1998-99. I wasn’t more than 18 or 19, an early age. I didn’t actually want to be a sergeant, but I was told I could serve a couple of extra years instead if I didn’t go to sergeant school. What I learned, training privates and working with people around live machine guns, pistols and hand grenades, isn’t the most straightforward thing, it’s a lot of responsibility. Dealing with the psychology side taught me about leadership, and it’s the only real leadership training I ever had. I never trained to be a CEO. I’ve done a lot of sales, like you, and marketing is my background. Now you end up managing a lot of people, constantly dealing with risk, politics, finance and banks, and you realise what you learned back then gives you composure and a foundation that probably made it possible to do what I do. I give a lot of credit to the military for defining parts of me and my understanding of leadership.

Host:  And relating to the champion mode: never give up, relentless consistency.

Guest:  Absolutely.

[16:14]  14. Wrap-up

Host:  On that positive note, Rasmus, thank you for hosting SBC and for accepting our invitation, and our audience will thank you for this wonderful conversation.

Guest:  Of course. Can we go and get a pastel de nata now?

Host:  Yes, let’s do that. Rasmus isn’t made for the passenger seat, he drives iGaming forward. See you soon on the Bet It Drives Show.