Career development
Should you do an MBA? What senior iGaming leaders choose instead
The question keeps coming up on suitability calls. Here's the honest answer, including the cases where the MBA wins.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader
Published 27 Jul 2026 · Updated 26 Aug 2026
The MBA question usually arrives around year fifteen. You're running a P&L, a function, maybe the whole company. The next role is bigger than anything you've done. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a list of people who moved past you with letters after their name.
I hear a version of it on suitability calls all the time. Should I go back and study? It deserves a straight answer, not a business school brochure, and not a sales pitch from me either.
What an MBA is genuinely good for
If you want the credential, nothing else provides it. Some boards still care about the letters, and if the role you're chasing sits behind one of those boards, that settles it.
If you're moving from a specialist seat into general management, the structured grounding in finance, strategy and operations is real. It's taught properly, examined properly, and it fills gaps you might not know you have.
And an MBA resets your network. Two years alongside ambitious people from other industries opens doors that iGaming can't. If you're planning a move out of gaming altogether, that alone can justify the fees.
Earlier in a career, it's often exactly the right call. I'd tell a thirty-year-old asking me this to seriously consider it.
What it costs at fifteen years in
The fees are the visible part. Depending on the school, an executive MBA costs somewhere between a good car and a small flat. Fine. You can afford it.
The real price is eighteen months to two years of your evenings and weekends, at the exact point in your career when your time has never been worth more. That time comes out of your family, your health, or your business. Usually all three.
And the return arrives late. A credential pays off at the next role, or the one after. It does nothing for the restructure sitting on your desk this quarter.
The gap a classroom doesn't close
Most of the senior people I speak to don't lack management theory. They've taken teams through licence changes, market exits and acquisitions. Handing them a strategy framework isn't the unlock.
What's missing is context. Decisions in this industry are shaped by regulation, compliance and markets that open and close under you. A case study about a US retailer doesn't carry that context. Peers who've made the same call in this industry do.
The other gap is accountability. By the time you're senior enough to be asking the MBA question, nobody above you checks whether you did what you said you'd do. A classroom doesn't fix that. A small group of peers who ask you about it next week does.
The alternatives senior operators actually use
Short executive programmes
A one or two week programme at a serious school gives you the sharpest version of the theory without the two-year commitment. Good for a specific gap, finance for non-finance leaders being the classic. The limitation is that it ends when it ends. Nothing follows you home.
Executive coaching
A good coach works on how you lead rather than what you know, and for many leaders that's the more urgent problem. It's one perspective, though, and rarely one from inside your industry. Coaching pairs well with peer support; it doesn't replace it.
Peer advisory
A small, vetted group of people at your level, meeting on a fixed cadence, working on the decisions actually in front of you. Slower to join, because vetting takes time, and it asks for real commitment. In exchange it's the only option on this list built around your live decisions rather than someone else's case studies. I've written separately about how to judge peer groups in this industry, including the forms that don't work.
Where the Mastermind fits
The iGaming Leader Mastermind is the peer advisory option, built only for this industry. You're matched into an Inner Circle of five vetted peers, every member with 15+ years in iGaming, and you meet for one hour a week. Each session you present your biggest decision for two minutes and get eight minutes of feedback from people who've made it before. Quarterly 1:1 executive coaching is included, and every member is under NDA.
Members tend to run the same maths on it they'd run on a degree. As Ed Birkin, MD at H2 Gambling Capital, puts it: "Say you're doing a 40-hour week. It's one hour out of it. 2.5%. The ROI from that 2.5% is going to be better than the other 97.5% of your week."
It's a premium annual commitment, and we don't publish the figure. Once we've established there's a fit on both sides, we walk through the investment on your suitability call and make sure it's right for you and your business.
The return lands in a different place from a degree. Not on a CV in two years, but on the decisions in front of you now.
So, should you do it?
If you want the credential, the career switch, or the structured route into general management, do the MBA. Nothing else provides those things, and some of our members have one.
But if what's actually holding you back is context, perspective and accountability, recognise those for what they are. Peer problems, not curriculum problems. Solve them with peers.