Gaming Laboratories International is arguably one of the most influential companies in gaming. Founded in 1989 by James Maida and Paul Magno, GLI is now present in gaming jurisdictions across the globe and its name has become synonymous with a level of trust and integrity relied upon by regulators and equipment suppliers the world over.
Like so many others within the industry, Maida embarked upon a career in gaming, quite appropriately, by chance. While studying computer science at LeHigh University in Pennsylvania in 1985, a job posting on a campus bulletin board caught his eye and, rather than seeking a role with a big multinational computing firm like his peers, he took a job testing gaming machines for the State of New Jersey.
“I saw this ad, went down and got an interview and thought it would be a fun job,” he recalls. “It was my first job out of college. I was 22, I didn’t really know a lot about the gaming industry and pretty much hadn’t gambled. It’s what I did for a few years and then went on to law school thinking that I would never come back to gaming or testing slot machines again - it was just a job on the way to becoming a lawyer.”
Although he may have stumbled into gaming, Maida’s experience testing machines for the Atlantic City market meant he was in demand when the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act came into being in 1989. So, while still at law school, he foresaw that opening a testing lab in each new gaming jurisdiction would be a huge drain on state and industry resources and decided to open a small lab himself. Having earned a “little bit of extra spending money” while completing his law degree, Maida chose to put his legal career on hold to focus on providing testing services for the US gaming industry.
Boasting more than 650 employees across 18 offices globally, GLI now plays an integral role in the development of the commercial gaming industry. It is a truly international business, yet at its heart, Maida believes the company’s key focus continues to be the customer.
“I read a lot of management books and I don’t like to focus on milestones or goals because sometimes when you reach a milestone or a goal then there’s nothing to do beyond it,” he says. “I look at my career and our career at GLI as doing the right thing for customers and clients on a daily basis and really, if you take care of your customers and make small incremental steps with what you’re doing with the business, you might have the good fortune to look back after 25 years to say what a great time we’ve had or what a great business we built.”
Nevertheless, there have been some major steps in the evolution of GLI as an international company, such as the relocation from the company’s Toms River base in New Jersey to a 100,000sq.ft facility in Lakewood that enabled it to triple its staff there, and the decision to open the world’s first – and largest - interoperability centre in Las Vegas.
Another major step, says Maida, was GLI’s decision to begin offering its services overseas when it received a call from South Australia’s Commissioner for Liquor and Gambling, Bill Pryor, in the early 1990s.
“He called and asked me to come to South Australia because it really needed a suitable testing lab choice and he didn’t want to set up his own lab,” he says. “We flew down and made the decision to open our first international office in Adelaide, Australia. That was a big milestone because we’d never really thought about being international and Australia was when we decided we could take what we do and take it on the road.”
Now, the company has offices on every continent and is a truly global organisation. When it comes to regulation and compliance, GLI is invariably the first port-of-call for more than 450 regulators around the world.
“One of the things that’s really important about our company is that while over the years I have been someone who is visible, whether it’s speaking in the industry or meeting clients, the way we absolutely run our company is that it is really a team effort,” says Maida. “It’s not the James Maida company, it’s GLI and people need to know that there are something like 650 employees globally that get up every day in all these locations around the world and interact with hundreds of regulators and more than 400 suppliers in all kinds of businesses – and I know a fraction of those contacts.
“It’s about a superior team effort in customer service and I just hope that I have instilled that mantra of ‘do whatever it takes to get the job done for the customer’ in our team.”
Much has changed within the world of gaming since Maida and Magno founded GLI. Technology has changed and developed at a remarkable pace, the way people choose to gamble is also moving towards more electronic mediums and everything has been influenced in some way by the internet. Although GLI has been at the forefront of these industry trends, its role as an independent testing laboratory has remained constant.
“Our role in the industry today, oddly enough, is no different to what it was 25 years ago,” Maida explains. “It may be on a bigger scale and more people may know us – we do 90 per cent of the world’s testing – but we do today what we have always done: we test gambling equipment. Today it’s global so our role hasn’t changed but the scope of what we do has changed.
“We still like to think that we’re as independent as we were in 1989. We believe that independence is the most important thing and quality should never be sacrificed. We want to always make sure that our test reports are as correct as they should be and we don’t bend the rules, break the rules or play favourites. GLI is about being independent, accurate and giving the best possible product to the regulator.
“We just won’t compromise our integrity.”
These principles and the dedication of the GLI team has ensured that the company is actively involved in emerging markets, providing assistance to regulators formulating their own legislative framework for gaming. It has a team of people travelling the world in a development role, looking for those gaming boards that are thinking of introducing commercial gaming to their jurisdictions. There are few companies then that have a greater insight into the inner workings of regulatory bodies or the progress being made by new gaming markets.
“I understand that the stock markets like to think in quarters and the fiscal year,” says Maida, “but we’re in this for the long haul so some of these markets may happen in two, four and six years. We’re talking to these regulators and governments about what they want to do in two, four and six years’ time.”
Right now, Asia, with the possibility of Taiwan and Japan legalising gaming, is an area that is expected to see new opportunities for gaming companies, while South America is experiencing something of a “renaissance” at the moment. In Europe, too, there are likely areas of growth, particularly with the expansion of internet gaming and the raft of new technologies being developed by suppliers there, and in the US, states such a Massachusetts and Texas could be the next to balance their budgets with the opening of casinos.
Maida believes that between 2000 and 2003, the industry experienced its greatest period in terms of sales of equipment. In the last few years, the replacement cycle has expanded but there are fewer machine sales. However, things may steadily improve in the coming years.
“The industry has got a bit tighter and a little bit more intense in terms of sales and so some of the collegiality has been replaced by this really intense competition and sometimes that affects personal relationships. I believe that when the replacement cycle gets better, you’ll see that return. We’re a very small niche industry; there are a lot of people in the industry that will be in this industry in 20 years’ time from now and everybody has periods of time when it is collegial and everybody’s doing well and then there’s the darker times, like we’re in now.”
So does he ever think of what he might be doing if he had chosen a different career path?
“In gaming testing, we always talk about a random number generator, right? So my random number generator was walking across campus at LeHigh that day and walking into a building and seeing a posting up on a wall about this opportunity in Atlantic City. That one day, seeing that one job posting and taking that one job interview set off a chain reaction that put me where I am today. I could have gone two weeks later and seen a job for IBM and have done something different from there. As random as it is today, it could have taken on a whole other randomness f I hadn’t seen that poster. Who knows what you would have seen or done?
“The gaming industry, though, is like the song Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Once you start in gaming, you’ll always be in gaming. It’s what makes our industry so special.”
