In iGaming, everything revolves around profit: building processes, making tough calls, and sometimes letting go of people you once thought untouchable. For PIN-UP Partners, it became clear when profit flatlined, even though the KPIs looked strong on paper. Alex Riddick recognized that the old management model had stopped scaling and couldn’t keep up with new
In iGaming, everything revolves around profit: building processes, making tough calls, and sometimes letting go of people you once thought untouchable. For PIN-UP Partners, it became clear when profit flatlined, even though the KPIs looked strong on paper.
Alex Riddick recognized that the old management model had stopped scaling and couldn’t keep up with new challenges. The warning signs were in the numbers, the people, and the results. The solution? A full “team redesign”: rethinking goals, roles, processes, and structure to fit the business’s new reality.
With over 15 years of experience in traffic and scaling projects, Alex knew that every redesign is followed by profit. But it’s not about change for the sake of change; it’s about using the right lever at the right time to start growing.
How PIN-UP Partners got into team “redesigns”
Every team, just like any product, runs through a lifecycle: formation, growth, overload, transformation.
Initially, everything is driven by passion and motivation. Then it is all about experience. However, the team eventually stalls: goals become unclear, the structure no longer fits the tasks, and efficiency suffers. That’s when it’s time for a redesign.
In the last nine years, PIN-UP Partners has transitioned from a traditional linear structure to a hybrid approach that incorporates both cross-functional and centralized teams. This improvement makes it possible to handle complex processes at scale and respond quickly to changes.
In actuality, over 90% of companies could increase their profits by 1.5–2 times just by implementing smarter management practices. Why don’t they, then?
Too often, decisions get made based on gossip or what competitors are doing instead of solid data. A “family vibe” replaces a real working environment. At PIN-UP Partners, the word “team” is used deliberately, meaning that people are united by a common goal, not just by being friendly.
Leaders sometimes hold on to people who once delivered results, forgetting that what matters is the impact they bring today. Performance reviews are skipped, and the focus drifts to vanity numbers instead of real profit.
The solution? Understand that redesigning a team isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a constant process of adjustment, like calibration, not an emergency measure once things are already falling apart.
Team redesign as a continuous process
Management isn’t like software development: there’s no “final version.” What works today might hold a team back tomorrow. Alex has seen strong teams fade into irrelevance simply because they kept playing by outdated rules. Some stuck with KPIs that no longer mattered, while others clung to metrics that looked “right” but had little to do with the real state of the business.
So how do you know it’s time to make a change? For Alex, the signal is clear: any decline in profit or in the team’s energy.
That’s why at PIN-UP Partners, the team regularly reviews and resets:
- Their structure and management model.
- KPIs and performance metrics.
- Individual goals for everyone, from juniors to C-level executives.
Alex’s experience has proven a simple truth: performance drops for everyone, sooner or later. People’s goals shift and motivation changes, and while some are burn out, others are hungry for a new challenge. The leader’s job is to spot this in time and rebuild the system.
Up next, 3 stories from Alex Riddick’s practice where structural changes pushed their profit up:
Redesign #1: shifting traffic media buying priorities
In 2018, traffic acquisition at PIN-UP Partners was simple and almost routine. The team had three specialists running two main sources, Facebook and ASO, and that was more than enough.
Traffic was cheap, around $20-25 per FD, and paid back within two months. The setup was straightforward: a small pool of sources, little experimentation, and clear ROI. But golden ages in business never last. Comfort zones have a way of blinding teams to how quickly the market shifts, and that’s exactly what happened at PIN-UP Partners.
Within a year, it became clear that the whole approach needed a reset:
- For every new player, three old ones were churning out.
- The monobrand user pool had shrunk to one of the smallest in the market.
- Payback periods grew longer, driven by rising competition, weak BI that couldn’t track ROI, and the usual copy-paste bidding wars.
The paradox was obvious: the team was working harder than ever, but growth had stalled. The issue wasn’t the people, but the system, which no longer fit the scale and complexity of the business.
After discussions with the team, Alex Riddick made the call to launch a full redesign. At times, it felt counterintuitive, like breaking something that had worked for years. Not everyone agreed, but changes went ahead.
The first step was shifting from opportunistic media buying to a systematic approach, where every channel could be tracked and measured. The second was building the brand and branching out to new platforms. One early move was onto movie sites, where PIN-UP Partners quickly carved out a niche and secured long-term contracts.
Step by step, the redesign rolled out:
The outcome was excellent. Profit and key business metrics increased. The real victory, however, was greater: PIN-UP Partners discovered how to design departments and procedures on the demands of the company today rather than outdated habits.
It was at that moment that Alex realized the potential of a team “redesign” and how it could bring about entirely new opportunities for an affiliate program.
Redesign #2: optimizing in-house SEO
The traffic acquisition overhaul pushed PIN-UP Partners to look harder at unit economics. Applying the same lens to SEO exposed a major issue: one branded FD was costing over $100: four times the market average. Staying on the same path meant burning money.
At the time, branded SEO was fueled by gut instinct. Advertisers poured money into PPC and SEO without counting profit, while webmasters controlled the game. To fix this, Alex Riddick introduced a fixed bid on the brand across both SEO and PPC, a move competitors eventually copied.
Progress wasn’t smooth. Negotiations with webmasters stalled, so Alex published a case study on brand traffic volumes. Within six months, competition increased, PIN-UP Partners gained control of the SERPs, and cross-brand cannibalization eased.
Soon enough, cracks started appearing. The SEO team had grown to 120 people, operating like a separate company and drifting away from business goals. To realign, SEO was brought back under the PIN-UP Partners umbrella and restructured from the ground up.
The redesign focused on:
- Moving from classic white-hat SEO to market-driven methods.
- Spinning off part of the team as a separate unit.
- Tying bonuses to profit, based on GEO market rates.
Today, PIN-UP Partners’ in-house SEO holds strong positions in branded SERPs and is gaining share in key markets. By the end of the year, the goal is to capture up to 40% in several of them. The real achievement, though, is that SEO is no longer drifting and draining resources. It’s now managed as a profit center, made possible by a full redesign.
Redesign #3: retargeting
Alex Riddick’s fascination with retargeting began in the TraffLab days, when homepage traffic “pops” were pulling 3000% ROI. Back then, a single well-tuned stream could pay back dozens of times over.
In iGaming, though, things were more complicated: fragmented sources, unstable setups, and audiences collected piece by piece. For years, building retargeting at scale seemed impossible. The breakthrough came when new tools arrived and PIN-UP Partners developed analytics sharp enough to measure efficiency to the decimal. The data proved retargeting could become one of the most profitable player-return channels.
The team redesigned the process by:
- Integrating product analytics into Tableau for efficiency tracking.
- Building 10,000+ behavior-based audience segments.
- Aligning arbitrage, media buying, and product teams.
- Automating operations so one specialist could manage the entire system.
The results spoke for themselves: in one GEO, A/B tests showed a 30% GGR boost, while ROI consistently outperformed most acquisition channels.
Today, with unified processes, automation, and precise analytics, PIN-UP Partners know exactly which segments work best and how they scale. Retargeting has gone from a messy experiment to a reliable profit driver.
The takeaway
For Alex Riddick, a team redesign isn’t about buzzwords, but making business processes meaningful. His advice is to keep asking the hard questions: Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve? Who owns what? Answering them honestly and often leads to better results and higher profit.
Skip redesign, and a team risks growing by inertia. The outcome is predictable: more people, endless reports, shiny regulations, but no profit growth. Treated as a constant process, however, redesign brings the real multipliers, the “X’s” every business is after.