Every strategic conversation about private club transformation eventually runs into the same obstacle, though it's rarely the one boards want to discuss. Not capital constraints. Not member resistance. Not competitive pressure. The obstacle is people—or more precisely, the growing difficulty of finding, developing, and retaining the talented staff who translate strategy into the experiences members actually receive.
The private club industry is facing a talent crisis that predates the pandemic but has been dramatically accelerated by it. Hospitality workers discovered during lockdowns that other industries offered better pay, more predictable schedules, and less physically demanding work. Many never returned. Those who remained in hospitality found they had options—and private clubs, with their traditional compensation structures and sometimes outdated workplace cultures, often aren't the most attractive choice.
This matters for club strategy because no amount of facility investment, programming innovation, or marketing sophistication can overcome poor execution at the point of member contact. The server who doesn't know a member's name, the front desk staff who seems inconvenienced by requests, the maintenance team that lets details slip—these moments of truth determine member satisfaction far more than any capital improvement. The staff experience is the member experience.
The True Cost of Turnover
Most clubs dramatically underestimate what turnover actually costs them. They see the obvious expenses—recruiting, onboarding, training—but miss the larger impact on member experience and organizational capability.
Consider what's lost when an experienced server leaves. They carry institutional knowledge about member preferences that no database fully captures: the couple who always wants the corner booth, the member with undisclosed allergies, the family whose children have specific favorites. They have relationships—members who request them specifically, who tip generously because they feel known, who might dine less frequently when their familiar face disappears. They have mastery of systems and rhythms that new hires take months to develop.
Industry estimates suggest that replacing a frontline hospitality employee costs 50-75% of their annual salary when accounting for recruiting, training, productivity loss during ramp-up, and increased error rates. For management positions, the figure can exceed 150%. A club with 100 employees and 40% annual turnover—not unusual in hospitality—might be spending the equivalent of 20-30 full-time salaries just maintaining their workforce, let alone improving it.
But the member experience cost may be even higher than the financial cost. Every new employee represents a period of degraded service while they learn. Members who valued relationships with departed staff feel the loss, sometimes consciously but often as a vague sense that the club isn't quite what it used to be. The consistency that defines great hospitality—knowing what to expect, feeling known—becomes impossible when the faces keep changing.
The Compensation Reality
The uncomfortable truth is that many clubs don't pay competitively. They benchmark against other clubs rather than against the full range of options available to workers, ignoring that their talent pool is also pursued by restaurants, hotels, healthcare, retail, and increasingly, non-hospitality sectors that offer comparable pay with better conditions.
A line cook considering club employment weighs the offer not just against other club kitchens but against restaurant groups offering similar pay with tips, healthcare facilities with better benefits, or food service companies with more predictable hours. A front desk candidate compares the club role to hotel positions, medical office reception, or corporate administrative jobs. The club that pays “market rate for clubs” may be significantly below market rate for the actual labor market.
Some clubs have recognized this and made significant compensation adjustments. They've implemented substantial base pay increases, added or improved health benefits, created retirement contributions that compete with corporate employers, and restructured tip pools to ensure more equitable distribution. The financial impact is real—labor costs at these clubs have increased 15-25% over pre-pandemic levels. But they're able to recruit and retain talent that struggling clubs cannot attract at any price.
The business case for higher compensation is stronger than intuition suggests. If turnover costs 50-75% of salary and higher wages reduce turnover by even 20%, much of the increased compensation pays for itself. Add the service quality improvement from experienced staff, and the return often exceeds the investment. The clubs that can't afford to pay more often can't afford not to.
Beyond Pay: What Workers Actually Want
Compensation matters, but it's not the only factor—and for some roles, it's not even the primary one. Research on employee motivation consistently shows that after basic financial needs are met, factors like schedule predictability, advancement opportunity, workplace respect, and job meaning become increasingly important.
Schedule predictability is particularly valued and particularly scarce in hospitality. The parent who needs to arrange childcare, the student pursuing education, the person with health conditions requiring regular appointments—all struggle with the last-minute schedule changes that many clubs consider normal. Clubs that commit to publishing schedules further in advance, honoring time-off requests, and respecting work-life boundaries gain significant recruiting advantage, especially among workers with the stability and responsibility that often correlate with quality.
Advancement opportunity matters more than many clubs realize. Talented people want to grow. A server who sees no path beyond serving will eventually leave for an opportunity elsewhere. Clubs that create visible career paths—server to captain to dining room manager to F&B director—retain ambitious employees and benefit from their growing capabilities. Those that treat frontline roles as dead-ends get workers who treat them the same way.
Workplace culture and respect may matter most of all. The way managers speak to staff, how member complaints are handled, whether employees feel valued or disposable—these daily experiences determine whether people stay or start looking. Clubs where staff feel proud to work develop waiting lists of applicants. Clubs known for poor treatment struggle to fill positions at any wage.
The Management Gap
While frontline staffing challenges get the most attention, the more consequential talent crisis may be at the management level. The pipeline of future general managers, department heads, and senior leaders has thinned dramatically, and the implications will unfold over the coming decade.
The traditional path to club leadership—rising through operational roles over fifteen to twenty years—has broken down. Fewer young people enter hospitality with long-term career intentions. Those who do often find faster advancement in hotels, restaurants, or corporate food service. The club industry's reputation for slower career progression, older leadership teams, and resistance to new ideas discourages ambitious talent from committing.
The result is a looming succession crisis. Many clubs are led by general managers within ten years of retirement, with no clear internal successor and a shrinking pool of qualified external candidates. When these leaders depart, clubs will compete intensely for a limited number of experienced replacements—or be forced to take chances on candidates with less preparation than the role demands.
Addressing this requires intentional talent development that most clubs haven't prioritized. Identifying high-potential employees early. Creating rotational programs that build broad experience. Providing mentorship and executive education. Perhaps most importantly, giving emerging leaders meaningful authority and responsibility before they have the title—so they're ready when the opportunity arrives and so they don't leave for organizations that offer growth sooner.
Culture as Competitive Advantage
In a tight labor market, workplace culture becomes a genuine competitive advantage—not a soft nicety but a hard business factor that determines whether you can attract and retain the people needed to execute your strategy.
Strong club cultures share certain characteristics. They have clear values that are actually lived, not just laminated. They treat employees as whole people with lives outside work, not just resources to be deployed. They celebrate success publicly and address problems privately. They create psychological safety where staff can raise concerns without fear of retaliation. They invest in employee development as a genuine priority, not an afterthought when budgets allow.
Perhaps most importantly, strong cultures maintain consistency between how members are treated and how staff are treated. A club cannot credibly promise members a welcoming, respectful environment while treating employees dismissively. Staff who don't feel valued struggle to make members feel valued—the inauthenticity shows through. Conversely, staff who genuinely feel appreciated naturally extend that appreciation to the members they serve.
Building culture is leadership work that can't be delegated or programmed. It starts with how the GM treats the department heads, how they treat their teams, and how those teams treat each other. It's reinforced or undermined by every hiring decision, every response to problems, every allocation of recognition and resources. Culture isn't what you say it is—it's what employees experience every day.
The Training Investment
When talent is scarce, development becomes essential. Clubs can't simply recruit their way to a skilled workforce—they have to build capabilities in the people they have. Yet training is often the first budget cut when finances tighten, treated as a discretionary expense rather than an essential investment.
Effective training goes far beyond orientation checklists and annual compliance requirements. It includes ongoing skill development that keeps pace with evolving member expectations. It includes cross-training that builds flexibility and broader understanding. It includes leadership development for those with potential to advance. And critically, it includes the soft skills—emotional intelligence, communication, problem-solving—that distinguish adequate service from exceptional hospitality.
The clubs investing seriously in training typically allocate 2-4% of payroll to development activities, including external programs, internal training staff, and the labor cost of time spent learning rather than producing. This investment pays returns through improved service quality, reduced errors, increased retention (employees value employers who develop them), and a deeper bench of internal candidates for advancement.
Technology is changing how training can be delivered. Video-based learning allows consistent instruction across shifts and locations. Mobile platforms enable micro-learning in small doses that fit into busy workdays. Simulation and scenario-based training develops judgment that traditional instruction struggles to build. Clubs that leverage these tools can develop staff more efficiently than those relying solely on traditional classroom and shadowing approaches.
Hiring Differently
When qualified candidates are scarce, clubs must reconsider what “qualified” means. The traditional hiring approach—seeking candidates with specific hospitality experience, preferably at comparable clubs—dramatically limits the talent pool and often screens out people who could excel with appropriate training.
The most important hospitality capabilities—warmth, attentiveness, genuine care for others' experiences—aren't taught in hospitality programs. They're personality characteristics and values that some people have regardless of background. The server who spent years in healthcare may have more genuine empathy than one who worked at three restaurants. The front desk candidate from retail may have better service instincts than one from hotels. Skills can be trained; character is much harder to develop.
This suggests hiring for attributes like emotional intelligence, reliability, genuine warmth, and learning ability—then training for specific skills. It means looking beyond hospitality for candidates and being willing to invest more in onboarding and development. It means structured interviews that assess fit rather than just experience, and trial periods that reveal how candidates actually perform rather than just how they interview.
Some clubs have found success recruiting from adjacent fields: healthcare workers who want less intensity, teachers seeking summer employment that might become permanent, retirees looking for part-time engagement, and career changers seeking more meaningful work. These candidates often bring maturity, reliability, and genuine hospitality orientation that younger workers with hospitality degrees may lack.
Member Expectations and Staff Reality
An uncomfortable conversation needs to happen at many clubs: member expectations may need to adjust to staff reality. The service levels that members remember from decades past often depended on labor conditions that no longer exist—abundant workers willing to accept low wages and difficult schedules because they had few alternatives.
This doesn't mean accepting poor service. It means honest conversation about tradeoffs. If members want extensive personal service, that requires staffing levels that require compensation that requires dues or prices that members may resist paying. If members want to maintain current pricing, service may need to become more efficient in ways that feel less personal. Pretending these tradeoffs don't exist leads to frustrated members receiving service that doesn't meet expectations from exhausted staff who can't possibly deliver what's promised.
Some clubs are being explicit about this, communicating to members that labor market changes require service model evolution. They're redesigning experiences to deliver high-touch service at key moments while accepting more self-service or technology-assisted service at others. They're adjusting pricing to fund the compensation needed to attract quality staff. And they're asking for member patience and grace as staff learn and systems evolve.
The clubs that navigate this transition successfully will be those that maintain honest dialogue with members about what's possible, rather than promising experiences they can no longer consistently deliver.
The People Strategy
Every club strategy is ultimately a people strategy. The vision of accessible exclusivity, personalized experiences, authentic community, and generational engagement depends entirely on having staff capable of delivering it. Without the talent, the strategy is just aspiration.
This means elevating workforce planning to strategic priority rather than operational afterthought. It means investing in compensation, culture, and development as essential business expenses rather than costs to minimize. It means boards and members understanding that service quality is directly tied to how the club treats the people providing it.
The clubs that thrive in 2026 and beyond won't just be those with the best facilities or programs. They'll be those that become employers of choice in their markets—places where talented people want to work, grow, and build careers. In a labor market that has fundamentally shifted, that capability may be the most important competitive advantage of all.
