Insights
The neutral board of directors you don’t have
The air is thin at the top.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader · September 2026
Two of our members, on two separate calls, months apart, describing two completely different businesses, used almost the exact same language to explain what our mastermind actually gives them.
One put it simply: “this industry doesn’t have boards, unless you’re listed.” Then, about his Inner Circle: “it is your board, right? That’s the whole point of it.”
The other called it his “private executive board.” He’d built something similar informally before ever finding us, an ad hoc group of directors he pulled together himself, explicitly modelled on underdog teams that had no business winning, because no formal structure like it existed for him to use. His phrase for what it gave him was blunt: “the air is thin at the top.” And the thing he valued most about the people in it was that “there’s no personal gain from them.” No agenda, no internal politics, no stake in the outcome except wanting him to make the right call.
Why “board” is the right word, not just a nice metaphor
Most senior executives in this industry aren’t running listed companies. They don’t have a formal board with independent directors, a chair who challenges their thinking, or a structure that forces them to defend a decision out loud to people who aren’t afraid of them and don’t need anything from them. What they have instead, usually, is a leadership team who report to them, and a founder or CEO title that means nobody internally is positioned to say “have you actually thought this through.”
That’s not a small gap. A real board exists specifically to catch blind spots, pressure-test decisions, and hold a CEO accountable to something other than their own conviction. Without it, senior executives in this industry are making board-level decisions with none of the structure a board would normally provide.
What it actually looks like in practice
One example makes the mechanism concrete. A member spent months debating whether to let go of a stalled integrations project, sinking more time and resource into something that had already cost far more than it should have. The group’s read was direct: the sunk cost wasn’t worth chasing any further. That’s exactly the kind of neutral, no-stake-in-the-outcome judgment a genuine board is meant to provide, and exactly what’s missing when the only voices in the room work for you.
Another member described a decision that had sat in her head, half-made, for months, the kind of restructuring choice that’s genuinely lonely to sit with because it affects real people and her own credibility as a leader. Within a week of properly engaging with her peer group, that decision converted from something she’d been circling into something she actually did. Not because anyone told her the answer. Because she finally had a structure that forced the decision out of her own head and into a room with people who had no reason to tell her what she wanted to hear.
Why this only works with the right people in the room
A neutral board only functions if it’s genuinely neutral. That means people at the same level, in the same industry, who understand the specific pressures without having anything to gain or lose from your decision. Internal reports have too much at stake to be fully honest. Friends outside the industry don’t understand the context well enough to be useful. A generic mastermind full of people from unrelated industries can be supportive, but it can’t replace someone who has actually lived through the exact regulatory, commercial or operational situation you’re facing.
That’s the specific gap this fills: the structural accountability of a board, built from people who’ve actually been where you are.
Where this changes
If you don’t have a board, you are the board. Every decision gets defended to an audience of one. The Inner Circles exist to give that decision a room to be defended in first.
See how the Inner Circles workQuestions this usually raises
Why can’t a CEO’s own leadership team act as their board?
Because a team has too much at stake in the outcome of any given decision to be fully neutral, and because there’s an inherent power imbalance that makes total honesty difficult, even with good intentions on both sides.
Is this the same as a formal board of directors?
Not legally or structurally, but functionally it serves the same purpose for executives who don’t have one: independent, informed challenge to a decision before it’s made, from people with nothing to gain from any particular outcome.
What kind of decisions does this actually help with?
Anything with real weight and no clean internal sounding board: restructuring calls, whether to keep funding a stalled project, market or personnel decisions where the CEO’s own judgment needs pressure-testing before it’s acted on.
Keep reading
Inside a vetted iGaming mastermind: what actually happens in the room
No performance, no pitching. Structured, rotating focus on whatever’s actually sitting on each person’s desk that week.
Read →Why your leadership team can’t be your sounding board
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Read →Peer advisory groups for iGaming executives: a buyer’s guide
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