Kelley Stead got her massage license in 2013 and immediately began working in a casino. As a single mother, she was blown away by the amount of money she could make working minimal shifts, giving her plenty of time to spend with her son. In 2017, she began dating Coby Zherzhi, a poker dealer in the same casino.

Despite their love for working in casinos, both Kelley and Coby found an entrepreneurial spark between them, and began looking for ways to improve the industry they respected and admired.

They recognized the many challenges presented to the casino massage industry, including therapists and casinos relying on the honor system for calculating revenue, and the problems clients experience when trying to find a massage therapist while playing.

In 2019, they formed Winning Hands LLC with the hopes of creating an app that could solve these problems with technology.

With no experience in app development, Kelley and Coby were forced to reach out to developers on freelance websites and hope they could translate their needs into code. The first developer they hired ended up scamming them for over $7,000 and delivered junk code that was unusable.

Fearful of being taken advantage of again, Coby traveled to a Miami tech school, Wyncode Academy, and was able to pitch a class of soon-to-be graduates, offering them the chance to become a Chief Technology Officer when the business grew. This is where Livio Zanardo became part of the team.

It took over three years, a lot of tears, sweat and frustration for the Winning Hands team to build an app that:

• Gives players a convenient way to book a casino massage right to their chair

• Eases the burden on casino massage therapists

• Provides accurate time keeping for the casino massage company

• Grants transparency to casino management related to their profits

Although it took every dime Coby and Kelley made working in the casino, with Livio working basically for free, they had finally done it – created an app that casino massage companies all over the United States would want to use.

But that wasn’t the case.

Once the Winning Hands app Version 1.0 was completed, the team began meeting with casino massage companies in various states. Despite the obvious benefits the app provided to everyone associated with casino massage, the companies were not interested.

So, the Winning Hands team had no choice but to pivot and become a casino massage company themselves.

Then, in May of 2022, the Isle Casino, now Harrah’s Pompano Beach validated the company’s ideals and saw how much having the Winning Hands app could benefit their guests and their bottom line, and Winning Hands LLC became the official casino massage company for Harrah’s Pompano Beach.  Not only that, but within six months, the Winning Hands team, using Version 2.0 of the app, increased casino revenue from massage services by over 100%!

What happens next?  Winning Hands gets to implement the next phase of its unique business model.  Whereas Coby is the driving force in letting casinos know about the benefits of the app, Kelley has always dreamed of providing opportunities that she never had to massage therapists. That is why Winning Hands offers 50% commission to contracted casino massage therapists, as well as the chance to be promoted into managerial and executive roles.

Any casino massage therapist will tell you that management is a huge problem in the casino massage industry, and Kelley believes that the best way to remedy this is to promote therapists from within the company and give them a percentage of the profits. 

If you have ambition, integrity and a desire to control your own destiny, we invite you to learn more about our corporate structure and how you can essentially run your own casino massage operation and help make Winning Hands a self-sustaining business entity.

Coby Zherzhi (CEO) and Livio Zanardo (CTO)