Insights

7 signs you’ve outgrown your current network

Not “who do you know.” Who do you actually talk to.

Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader  ·  September 2026

You walk into another conference. Name, company, title. You do the round.

Somewhere in the back of your head, a switch flips: is this person worth my time, or not. Prospect or not. Within thirty seconds you’ve decided.

The conversation that follows is always the same script. How’s it going. Great conference this year. How was your flight. Nobody says the thing that’s actually keeping them up at night. Nobody asks the question that would change the other person’s business. It feels transactional. A bit icky, if you’re honest with yourself.

And somewhere in the middle of that small talk, a thought lands: who do I even talk to?

Not "who do I know." You know hundreds of people. Who do you actually talk to.

If that question landed for you, you’ve probably outgrown your network. Here’s how to know for sure.

1. You’ve been sitting on a big decision for over a week

You know the one. It’s been in your head for days, maybe weeks. You keep turning it over. You tell yourself you’re waiting for the right time, waiting to feel sure, waiting for more data.

Here’s the truth: you already know what you need to do. You’ve known for a while. What you’re actually waiting for is someone to push back on it, validate it, or hold you to it. Without that, the decision just sits there, unmade, while the business waits.

That’s not caution. That’s isolation with a better excuse.

2. You had a big win and no one to celebrate it with

You closed the deal. Hit the number. Made the call that paid off. And then what? You told your partner, who nodded politely. You mentioned it in passing to your team, who said "nice one" and moved on.

Nobody who actually understood what that win cost you was there to mark it.

3. There’s a problem at work eating at you and you can’t say it out loud

Not to your team, obviously. You can’t hand them your doubts about the direction of the company, that’s not fair on them and it’s not your job to unload on people who report to you.

But not to anyone else either. Because the people around you either don’t understand the specifics of your business, or they’re competitors, or they’re vendors with a reason to hear it and use it.

So it stays in your head. Which is exactly where problems get worse, not better.

4. What people bring to you feels small next to what you’re carrying

You listen to your team’s problems all day. You solve them, or coach through them, because that’s the job. But somewhere along the way you noticed the gap. What they bring you barely registers against what’s actually sitting on your desk. And there’s no one playing that role for you.

5. The things that keep you up at night, you don’t talk about, not because you don’t want to

This one’s different from the others. It’s not that you’re avoiding the conversation. You’d have it if you could.

The problem is nobody in your circle would get it. Not because they’re not smart, or not good people. They just haven’t run what you’ve run, at the scale you’ve run it, under the specific weight of this industry. So you carry it alone, quietly, because explaining the context would take longer than the conversation is worth.

6. Every industry conversation is a quiet check for "is this a prospect"

This is the one almost everyone recognises. You go to the events, you do the rounds, and somewhere underneath every conversation there’s a filter running. Worth my time or not. It’s efficient. It’s also exhausting, and it means real conversation almost never happens, because everyone’s running the same filter on you.

You know the other tell. Someone walks up, clearly knows you, clearly expects you to know them back, and you’ve completely blanked on their name. So you glance down at their badge, trying to be subtle about it. They catch you looking. Awkward half-second where you both pretend it didn’t happen. Or worse, you spot someone else you actually do know walking past, and you pull them into the conversation on purpose, just so they’ll say the first person’s name out loud and save you. That’s not networking. That’s damage control.

7. You’ve got industry friends you genuinely like, but wouldn’t trust with what actually matters

These are your conference friends. The ones you have a beer with every single event, year after year. You like them. You might even call them friends. But you wouldn’t hand them the thing that’s actually keeping you up. There’s a line, and it’s never been crossed, because underneath the friendship there’s still a business relationship, and everyone knows it.

What actually changes this

I felt most of these myself, twice.

The first time was when I got promoted to director, youngest in the company’s history. I felt completely out of my depth. Like I didn’t belong in the room. So I worked harder than everyone else to compensate, and I couldn’t play the political side of it at all. I took everything personally, got far too emotional about things that needed a level head, and I had no one to talk to about any of it. My old peers were now my employees. My new peers felt like they’d stab me in the back the moment it suited them.

The second time was when I started my own business. My friends were all in secure jobs with fixed pensions, and every one of them thought I was mad for walking away from something stable and well paid. What I needed wasn’t more support from people who thought I’d lost the plot. I needed people who stopped lowering the ceiling on what I thought was possible, and started removing it entirely.

That happened for me in a room of peers doing the same thing I was doing. Building the same kind of business, at the same stage, hitting the same walls. Defining the same avatar, wrestling with the same offer, choosing the same channels. Watching each other win and lose in real time. One of the people in that room was pulling in $40,000 a month and didn’t know how to use a spreadsheet. That single fact did more for my ceiling than any pep talk ever could. If she could do that without knowing Excel, I could do that and more.

That’s what a real network does. It doesn’t just support you. It resets what you think is normal.

Where to find that

This is exactly why I built The iGaming Leader. It’s a highly vetted group of four or five iGaming founders, CEOs and executives at your level, who you can actually talk to, and who have no other agenda but yours. Nobody’s selling you anything in that room. There’s no pitching, no performing, no masks. Just brutal honesty about the wins, and especially about the challenges and the lessons underneath them.

See how the Inner Circles work→

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