Bulking Up The Bottom Line:
How Gold’s Gym Saves On Labor Costs By Offshoring To The Philippines
Gold’s Gym is one of the best-known names in the health club industry. Their brand is so iconic, ESPN considers the original Venice Beach location to be a national sports landmark. In fact, they rank it #39 on their list of America’s 100 most important sports venues.
Despite all their success and venerable reputation as a mecca for strength training, Gold’s Gym SoCal (a franchisee) found it challenging to recruit new team members to the corporate office and retain them without paying above-market salaries in the competitive LA-area job market.
COO Willy Banos states “In the health club business you can only control two things – payroll & marketing. Everything else is generally fixed. You can negotiate things down a little bit. You can buy a little bit less. You can control your office supplies. But at the end of the day, payroll & marketing are really the only two major moving parts you have 100% command over.”
That’s where Elite Virtual Employment Solutions (EVES) provided some assistance.
EVES, a Philippines-based offshoring provider with offices in the US, specializes in recruiting high quality talent from a budget-friendly Filipino labor pool.
EVES partnered with Gold’s Gym to help fill an opening in their marketing department by sourcing a graphic artist from the Philippines. Because the offshoring price was so reasonable, Gold’s decided to lease two graphic designers, given marketing’s workload. After about 8-months, Gold’s Gym realized they could make do with just one graphic designer, thanks to the high quality of work and rapid turnaround time on deliverables. The graphic artist placement worked out so well, Willy turned to EVES again for help finding an accounts payable auditor to work with Gold’s Gym’s accounting department. The accounts payable auditor proved themselves to be another successful placement.
When comparing Filipino base salary, bonuses, benefits, payroll taxes, etc. to American standards, Willy concluded that EVES had saved Gold’s Gym about $75,000 per year just on these two positions alone, without sacrificing anything in quality of work.
“What also made it compelling,” says Willy, “was that EVES offered a 90-day guarantee period, making it a very reasonable & low-risk proposition. It was actually much less expensive than trying somebody out in the US, where we were struggling to find people because of the employment market. Unemployment is still historically low, and we’ve lost people in droves to Uber. To working at home. To ‘we don’t want to come in and deal with whatever you want us to deal with’. So the pool of available employee candidates has really shrunk.”
Willy continues to say “It’s difficult to find people that do what they say and say what they do. So for that reason I love using EVES because I can make a quick shift if a person isn’t working out for the company. I give notice to EVES, and they start looking for somebody else. They do the work. They find me the candidates. We get to interview them and we move on. No questions asked. There’s no concern about lawsuits if somebody feels they’re wrongfully terminated, because that’s another big challenge in our world today, everybody’s wrongfully terminated.”
Over the course of their first year, the staff members EVES placed for Gold’s Gym demonstrated the legendary Filipino work ethic. As dedicated, efficient, detail‐oriented, & quality conscious professionals, they always came to work with positive attitudes and a commitment to meeting deadlines without compromising on deliverables.
That reliability created peace of mind for US staff who developed new-found confidence that deliverables would always arrive on time, eliminating the issue of workflow disruption due to employee churn.
Willy states “With EVES providing a conduit to the Filipino labor pool and its much lower cost base, that gives us the ability to borrow less in order to keep our growth going. EVES has really provided Gold’s Gym dependable support at an affordable price.”
