Insights
From firefighting to strategy: a framework for iGaming leaders buried in ops
You’re not failing at your job. You’re doing a different job than the one you actually need to be doing.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader · September 2026
If your mornings start with a WhatsApp full of overnight problems, and your days get eaten by whichever fire is loudest, you already know the feeling this article is about. You’re not alone in it, and you’re not failing at your job. You’re doing a different job than the one you actually need to be doing.
There’s a pattern I hear constantly from senior operators in this industry: roughly 80% of their time goes to fixing problems. Not planning. Not building. Fixing. That’s not leadership. That’s management wearing leadership’s job title.
Why this happens, even to good operators
It’s not laziness, and it’s not a lack of ambition. It’s usually the opposite. You’re good at solving problems, so problems find you. Your team brings you things because you’re reliably fast at unblocking them. Every fire you put out successfully trains the people around you to bring you the next one faster.
So the loop reinforces itself. You get better and faster at firefighting, which makes you more valuable in the fire, which keeps you standing in it.
A simple triage framework
The way out isn’t working harder inside the fires. It’s sorting what actually needs you from what doesn’t, ruthlessly, on a repeating basis. Three categories, applied weekly:
Needs you. The decision genuinely requires your judgement, your authority, or your relationships. Nobody else can make this call. This is the only category that should still be eating your calendar.
Needs delegation. Someone else on your team could handle this competently, they just haven’t been trusted to yet, or the process for handing it off hasn’t been built. Every time you solve one of these yourself, you’re quietly training your team to keep bringing you the next one.
Needs deletion. This "problem" isn’t actually a problem, it’s noise, a symptom of a process that should be fixed once so it stops generating fires, or a task that doesn’t need doing at all. This is usually the largest category, and the one people are slowest to admit.
Run every fire that lands on your desk through those three questions before you touch it: does this genuinely need me, does it need delegating, or does it need deleting at the root. Most of what feels urgent sorts itself out of your hands the moment you ask the question honestly.
Why this is hard to do alone
Here’s the catch. Sorting your own fires accurately requires the exact kind of outside perspective this whole industry structurally makes difficult to get. You’re too close to your own patterns to see which fires you’re keeping for yourself out of habit, or worse, out of the quiet comfort of feeling needed. That’s a blind spot, and blind spots, by definition, need someone else to point at them.
This is also where the shiny-object trap connects. Chasing a new tool or a new system to build often feels like strategic work. Sometimes it is. Just as often, it’s a more interesting way to avoid the boring, tedious triage that actually needs doing. The tell is the same either way: if you’re excited about something new instead of doing the hard, unglamorous sorting, that excitement is worth questioning before you follow it.
What changes when someone else holds you to it
Structured outside perspective doesn’t just help you make one better decision. It breaks the loop itself. Someone who isn’t inside your business, who has no stake in you staying the hero who fixes everything, can ask the question you won’t ask yourself: why is this still on your desk?
That’s not a one-off conversation. It’s a repeating check, week after week, from people who’ll actually hold you to delegating the things you keep quietly hoarding.
See how the Inner Circles workQuestions this usually raises
Isn’t firefighting sometimes just the reality of running a business?
Some of it, yes. The question isn’t whether fires exist, it’s whether 80% of your time is going to them when a smaller, better-sorted share should be.
How do I know if something genuinely needs me versus needs delegating?
Ask whether the decision requires your specific authority, judgement or relationships, or whether it’s simply landed on your desk out of habit because you’ve always handled it.
What if my team isn’t ready to take on delegated work yet?
That’s usually a sign the delegation itself needs building as a project, defining the process, setting the guardrails, rather than a reason to keep doing the work yourself indefinitely.
Why does this need outside perspective rather than just discipline?
Because the blind spot is which fires you’re keeping out of habit or comfort, not lack of will. You can’t see that pattern from inside it. Someone else, without a stake in your identity as the fixer, usually can.
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