The organisation
City Venue Management (CVM) is one of Australia's leading hospitality and venue management companies, operating 55 locations across multiple states. The portfolio spans pubs, clubs, restaurants, entertainment venues and managed services — each with its own brand identity, its own clientele, and its own team. With more than 2,000 team members, CVM is one of the largest employers in the Australian hospitality sector.
The scale of CVM's operations creates challenges that most hospitality businesses never face. A single-venue operator can walk the floor and know every team member by name. At 55 locations, the CEO, the COO, and the senior leadership team are physically separated from the vast majority of their workforce. The question that drove CVM to Prosper was deceptively simple: how do you build one culture across 55 venues when most of your people will never visit head office?
The challenge
CVM's operational complexity was matched by its communication challenges. With 55 locations operating across different time zones, different trading hours and different award structures, getting the right message to the right people at the right time was a daily struggle. Email reached head office and venue managers. WhatsApp reached whoever happened to be in the right group. Noticeboards reached whoever happened to walk past them. And critical policy updates — RSA compliance, gaming regulations, food safety standards, workplace health and safety — often reached no one with any certainty.
The compliance risk was significant. CVM operates in one of the most heavily regulated industries in Australia. Liquor licensing, gaming regulations, food safety, workplace health and safety — the obligations are extensive, the penalties for non-compliance are severe, and the expectation from regulators is that every team member, at every venue, has been informed of and has acknowledged the relevant policies. Under the previous system, proving that was nearly impossible.
Performance management was the domain of individual venue managers, and the quality varied enormously. Some managers ran excellent teams with regular feedback and development. Others managed by crisis — intervening only when something went wrong. There was no group-wide framework, no standard cadence, no visibility for the COO into whether performance conversations were happening at all, let alone what was being discussed.
Engagement was a black box. CVM's leadership team suspected that engagement varied significantly across the portfolio — that some venues had vibrant, committed teams while others were revolving doors — but they had no data to confirm this, no way to identify which venues needed support, and no mechanism to track whether interventions were working.
Nicky Sloan, CVM's Chief Operations Officer, had a clear mandate from the board: reduce turnover, improve compliance, and build a connected culture across the entire portfolio. The challenge was doing it without adding headcount to an already lean operations team.
The solution
CVM's implementation of Prosper was the most comprehensive in the platform's history. All 55 locations were onboarded in six weeks, with a phased approach that started with the largest venues and expanded outward. Every one of CVM's 2,000+ team members received access to the branded CVM app on their phone.
Company intranet and communications
This was the foundation. CVM needed every team member to have one place to find everything — company news, policies, operational updates, recognition, and links to their other workplace systems. Prosper became that place. The branded CVM hub was designed to feel like a consumer app, not an enterprise tool. News feed with likes and comments. Document library with search. Quick links to rosters, payslips and training. Targeted announcements that could reach a single venue, a region, a role type, or the entire organisation — with push notifications and read receipts.
The impact on operational efficiency was immediate. Instead of sending an email that venue managers were supposed to print and pin to a noticeboard, head office could push an announcement directly to every affected team member's phone and know within 24 hours exactly who had seen it and who had not.
Document acknowledgement and compliance
CVM built a comprehensive compliance framework inside Prosper. Every policy, every procedure, every regulatory update was pushed to the relevant team members with mandatory acknowledgement. RSA refreshers to bar staff. Gaming compliance to gaming floor team members. Food safety updates to kitchen and service teams. WHS procedures to everyone.
The compliance dashboard gave Nicky real-time visibility across all 55 locations. She could see, at a glance, which venues were at 100% compliance and which had outstanding documents. Automated reminders chased non-completions daily. When a regulator visited a venue, the manager could produce proof of compliance in seconds.
Engagement surveys
CVM runs quarterly engagement surveys and monthly pulse checks across all 55 locations. With 2,000+ team members, the volume of data is substantial — but Prosper's AI-powered comment analysis transforms thousands of individual responses into themed, prioritised insights that the leadership team can act on immediately.
The engagement dashboard became a core tool for the operations team. Nicky reviews engagement scores by venue every month, comparing performance against group benchmarks and tracking trends over time. Venues that score below benchmark trigger a structured support process — additional management attention, targeted pulse surveys, and follow-up action plans.
The data has also transformed board reporting. Instead of presenting anecdotal observations about team culture, Nicky presents data-driven engagement reports with trend lines, demographic breakdowns, and ROI calculations that link engagement investment to turnover reduction.
Performance management
CVM implemented a group-wide performance cadence through Prosper. Every team member — from the glassie to the general manager — receives a structured one-to-one every month. The templates are deliberately simple, the conversations are documented, and goals are tracked over time.
The visibility this created was transformative. For the first time, Nicky could see whether performance conversations were actually happening across all 55 venues. She could see which managers were investing in their teams and which were not. She could see which team members had development goals, which were on track, and which needed additional support.
Talent mapping across 2,000 people became possible. High-potential team members were identified, development pathways were documented, and succession planning — previously impossible at this scale — became a data-driven conversation rather than a gut-feel exercise.
Recognition and kudos
With 55 locations, the risk of team members feeling invisible is enormous. A bartender delivering exceptional service at a suburban pub has no way of knowing that the CEO appreciates their work — unless there is a system that makes recognition visible.
Prosper's kudos wall gave CVM exactly that. Peer-to-peer and manager-to-team recognition, tied to CVM's company values, visible across all 55 locations. When a team member at one venue received kudos, every team member across the entire group could see it. The cultural signal was powerful: your work matters, we see it, and we celebrate it.
In three years, CVM's team has sent more than 12,000 kudos messages — an average of more than 10 per day across the group. Recognition is no longer an occasional management gesture. It is a daily cultural practice.
The results
34% reduction in turnover. CVM's annual turnover has dropped from above 45% to under 30% across the portfolio. At 2,000 team members, this represents approximately 300 fewer departures per year.
100% performance cadence. Every team member across all 55 locations receives a monthly one-to-one. Before Prosper, fewer than 25% of team members reported regular development conversations. This is the single metric that Nicky Sloan is most proud of — because it represents a fundamental shift in how 55 venue managers operate.
96% compliance completion. Policy acknowledgement rates across all 55 locations consistently exceed 96%. Regulatory preparation time has been reduced from days to minutes per venue. Not a single compliance gap has been identified during a regulatory visit since Prosper was implemented.
Full engagement visibility. CVM's board receives quarterly engagement reports with trend data, demographic breakdowns, and venue-level comparison. Leadership decisions about investment, restructuring and management development are now informed by engagement data — not intuition.
12,000+ kudos in 3 years. Recognition is embedded in CVM's operating rhythm. The correlation between venues with high recognition activity and venues with low turnover is consistent and measurable.
"When you operate 55 venues with 2,000 people, you cannot be everywhere. Prosper gave me the visibility I needed without adding a single person to my team. I can see engagement scores, compliance rates and performance cadence across every location from one dashboard. But the thing that matters most is that our team members — the people pouring the drinks and greeting the guests — finally feel like they belong to something bigger than their individual venue. That is what changed the turnover numbers. That is what changed the culture."
— Nicky Sloan, Chief Operations Officer, City Venue Management
What made the difference
Nicky Sloan identifies three factors that drove CVM's success with Prosper. First, executive sponsorship. The decision to implement Prosper was not delegated to a project manager. It was owned by the COO, championed by the CEO, and reported to the board. Venue managers understood that this was not optional — it was how CVM was going to operate.
Second, consistency. Every venue, every team member, every month — the same cadence, the same expectations, the same tools. The platform did not flex by venue. It set a standard that the entire group was held to. This eliminated the "some managers are great and some are not" problem by giving every manager the same framework and holding them all accountable to the same data.
Third, the data closed the loop. Engagement surveys surfaced problems. Performance conversations addressed them. Recognition reinforced the behaviours that solved them. Compliance tracking ensured nothing was missed. Each module reinforced the others, creating a system that was greater than the sum of its parts.
After three years, Prosper is not a tool that CVM uses. It is how CVM operates. It is the digital infrastructure that connects 2,000 people across 55 locations into one team, with one culture, and one shared commitment to excellence.