You could be forgiven for thinking that offline casinos (land-based casinos) are as dead as fried chicken, given the amount of focus on their online cousins in the media, including this hallowed journal; but just because they make less noise, doesn’t mean there’s no potential.
While new countries (and US states) opening for online business are the centre of attention, there are some enormous opportunities in the offline world. With lead times in some cases into double digit years, between laws changing and doors opening for business, these projects tend to sit at the back of people’s minds but recall there are three territories headed towards the finish line, with vast buildings and inconceivable budgets – Japan, UAE and Thailand. The excitement is building, the financiers are forecasting saucy EBITDA numbers, and shareholders are looking forward to years of prosperity. But to us, one pretty large question is yet to be answered – offline casinos, even with plenty of online gaming, are immensely staff intensive – who’s going to man the tables?
My background is operational, and I’ve been involved in 11 UK casino launches and relaunches, so I’m familiar with the challenge. To be fair, our budgets might have been in the single to double-digit millions vs the big boys with their double-digit billions, but the basic challenge is the same – except all three of those territories have no (legal) gaming staff pool from which to draw. Most offline operators would be twitchy about opening with more than about 25% or 30% of their staff being pure trainees, so while no doubt in all three cases there will be some truly enormous training programmes, that’s only a quarter of the problem solved. In any case, even the best-organised casino launch, in a territory with casino experience, tends to be a bit of a mess at first (ideally just behind the scenes). Trying to deliver a functional gaming floor, with a Supervisory and Surveillance team still finding their feet is risky enough.
Add in too rich a proportion of zero experience staff and you’re asking to upgrade your potential cheat roster from just the professionals that’ll have booked your opening week as a feeding frenzy, to all the opportunist losers that spot an easy target on the tables. So, you’ve got 75% of your gaming team to find from overseas, assuming you have a way to get them permission to work in the first place. You could be in the teeth of a three-way competition to source these people too, if the timings of UAE / Japan / Thailand happen to coincide. What are you going to do? Well, you’ll be expecting the “talk to the specialists at GRS” line, but realistically there aren’t a whole lot of other options. In fact, we’ve been talking to one of our clients, MGM Resorts International, for three years now – they have an interest in all of the above territories. Those conversations have been all the wide-ranging pre-scoping you’d expect, with some salary benchmarking, geographical profiling and other early research – they’re an organised bunch!
Yes, these schemes are enormous and will generate a fair amount of interest organically, but if you’re trying to reach gaming staff en masse there aren’t many resources to do it through.
Social media is one option, but we know intimately all the Facebook groups that cater for gaming staff – the obvious easy route – and those that aren’t spam-filled hell holes are largely ones GRS have developed or have admin rights to.
Let’s leave access to one side for a moment – obviously you’re going to give us a call, there isn’t really anyone else with a 12,000-plus database of dealers and inspectors ready to access – and consider what you actually need. Of course, there are tens of thousands of trained casino staff all over the world, and many of them are adventurous enough to want to go halfway round the world for the same or less money – but most won’t be. That said, you can’t afford to be paying wildly over the odds when you’re looking for 3,000-plus gaming staff; so you need a strategy.
Part of that will be to recognise that maybe your overseas staffing is a temporary solution, until the whole machine cranks up, and you can feed more local trainees in as your initial cohort develop their skills. However, that doesn’t help you on day one, and you’ve got a mountain to climb.
First port of call will inevitably be Philippines, home to a huge number of resort casinos with staff who are well trained but aren’t particularly well rewarded. We have about 3,000 gaming staff on our books purely from this country, and it’s going to be a resource for any operator – perhaps until the staff drain on those casinos forces their wages up locally.
First port of call will inevitably be the Philippines, home to a huge number of casinos with staff who are well trained but aren’t particularly well rewarded. We have about 3,000 Philippines gaming staff on our books
After that, you’re into the rest of the world. Nepal, Goa (India) and South Africa are options for less well-rewarded staff – we’ve 1,000 or so people all set to go from this combination. From there you’re looking at countries with a far higher wage, who’ll be correspondingly more difficult to prise away from their current employers.
All is not lost, however. It’s not quite “if you build it, they will come” – dead baseball players aren’t much use in a casino anyway – but if the message goes wide enough, projects on this scale will attract attention. We bombed our social media channels and database for a new resort casino in the Mediterranean recently and had 3,300 applications, and just a couple of months ago had 1,300 applications for dealer roles in a Caribbean casino. Shame there were only a couple of jobs, really… There are also subtleties to consider when you’re trying to convert interested staff into immigrants to run your games. We’ve dealt with gaming staff for years now – I started in the business as a dealer myself – and it’s important to understand what you’re dealing with. In places like Vegas, you’re looking at career dealers, rewarded (and treated) well enough to make it a lifelong job, but those types of people aren’t your target.
Most staff who are going to start a new life thousands of miles from home will be at the younger end of the spectrum, and they need a bit of TLC. It’s no use, for example, just booking them a plane ticket and saying “report here on this date” – if you want them to turn up, it’s a sales job on your part. They’ll need initial accommodation provided and be able to see what they’ll be moving to before they commit to a 50% exciting / 50% scary new life. You’ll need a sense that it’s a genuine team, that cares about them, even a named person to meet them at the airport – that’s what’s going to make the difference and get them to make the leap. These and many other factors are key to importing the amount of skilled labour these resorts are going to need. Those factors, and a runway measured in years.
I’d argue if you’re planning on opening a resort casino in a region with no existing staff pool in, say, 2030, you’d better be a good way towards sorting your recruitment plan right now. If you aren’t, come find me on LinkedIn and we’ll get you started….
