It’s a story that’s been told a thousand times before. You invested a good deal of your time and energy searching the internet to find the best pay per head service. You asked all the questions and weighed all the options. With two services in final contention to win your business, both of them seem to be offering more or less the same features and then you looked at the bottom line. Ultimately your decision came down to price.
Shop A is the clear front runner, the differences between the two are subtle but they are definitely the complete package. Shop B isn’t bad but there are a few holes, however, their price is significantly lower. You put pencil to paper and work out the cost per player over a year and your decision seems obvious. There is a significant savings to be had by compromising and going with your 2nd choice. Unfortunately you have just committed the most common error in judgment made by bookmakers when they choose a pay per head service.
What you have failed to take into account when adding up the price you pay per player, per week, are the intangibles. Pay per head is a service business, there is no inventory to be stocked or stored. If you are not getting the service you are paying for, regardless of price, you are throwing money away.
What are the intangibles? If a company is offering a significantly reduced price then you know they are cutting corners in other areas of their service in order to maintain profits. One key area that often gets cut back is redundancy. After all, if internet and phone problems happen infrequently many PPH companies feel that it is a waste of their money to keep reliable backup systems running 24/7/365. Instead they just roll the dice and hope for the best when it comes to staying up and writing your business on a busy NFL Sunday.
Q: How much money will it cost you if your players can’t get down on the game or worse yet; stop betting with you altogether?
Who’s running the lines? Another area that low cost per head companies cut corners on is not hiring professional line managers. Do you really want to put some minimum wage clerk in charge of making sure your lines are sharp?
Q: How much money will it cost you over a football season when your players always get the edge over you?
Running a profitable pay per head sportsbook is a lot more difficult than many people think, unfortunately this means a lot of clueless operators have tried to cash in on PPH services at the expense of their agents. You get what you pay for and in the end a cheap service will cost you a lot more than you thought it would.
