The Number on Your Compensation Line Is Telling You Something — Are You Listening?

Walk into almost any board meeting right now and the conversation eventually lands in the same place: payroll. Not because anyone wants it there, but because compensation is the single largest controllable expense most clubs carry, and for the better part of two years it has refused to behave. RSM's annual private club compensation survey — built on salary data for 97 distinct roles across Florida clubs — frames the last cycle exactly the way most GMs experienced it: the dominant challenge running from 2024 into 2025 was labor, and the dollars attached to that challenge keep climbing. When your biggest controllable line is also your least predictable one, it stops being an accounting problem and becomes a strategy problem.

What the benchmarking data actually says

Here is what the benchmarking data actually says, and it is not what most finance committees assume. Club Benchmarking's own employee engagement work has found that across the industry, the statement "I am compensated fairly for my work" consistently earns the lowest average score of anything they measure. Read that twice. It is not that clubs are necessarily underpaying — it is that they are setting pay without a defensible framework, so neither the staff nor the board can tell whether the number is right. Compensation gets decided on last year's figure plus a percentage, a competing club's rumor, or whoever pushed hardest in the budget meeting. That is not a strategy. That is a series of reactions you are calling a strategy.

Benchmark position by position

The clubs getting this right are doing something deceptively simple: they are benchmarking position by position against a relevant comparison set, not against a vague sense of "the market." There is a real difference between knowing your superintendent is paid in the 60th percentile for clubs of your size and gross asset value, versus knowing you gave him a 4% bump because that is what the spreadsheet defaulted to. The first is a decision a board can stand behind when a member asks why labor is up. The second is the thing that gets a GM blindsided in October. When compensation is your largest controllable expense, the question is never just "what did we spend" — it is "can we explain it, defend it, and repeat it." If you cannot, you do not have a compensation plan. You have a compensation habit.

The answer is not to cut

None of this means the answer is to cut. The clubs that try to manage labor pressure purely by trimming heads or freezing wages tend to discover the same thing every time: the member experience erodes faster than the savings accumulate, and you spend the next three years rebuilding what you dismantled in one budget cycle. The smarter move is to treat compensation like the strategic line it is — fund it deliberately, benchmark it honestly, and present it to the board with enough context that "payroll is up 6%" becomes a sentence with a reason attached instead of a sentence that starts an argument. The number on your compensation line is telling you something. The clubs that are winning are the ones that have learned to read it.