Increasing labour costs: Outsourcing administration can help lower costs

Cover image courtesy of Apteum

Outsourcing labour globally into cheaper markets has long been a solution for Australian businesses grappling with the cost of labour here. Think call centres and IT staff, but there are more options that can be utilised for businesses in the racing and breeding industry here.

In our third piece discussing innovations around the cost of staff in the racing industry, TTR talks about solutions to the cost of administration and marketing staff.

According to Outsourcing Angel, nearly 80% of Australian businesses outsource some of their labour to external contractors, both local and overseas.

In Australia over 300 businesses do business with outsourcing companies based in the Philippines, with more than 44,000 Filipinos employed to do work in financial services, software development, and other sectors.

Apteum providing labour outsourcing to the Thoroughbred industry

One of those businesses is Apteum, run by former Inglis employee Bonnie Langdon.

“I worked in the racing industry for 20 years, in a couple of different roles, and my last role was at Inglis,” Langdon said.

“After that I took couple of months off to travel and figure out what my next role was going to be. I had a chance conversation with a friend from Melbourne who is the CEO of a tech company called Landchecker.”

Landchecker compiles property such as valuation, flood and fire risk, council zoning, document searching and other property related services into one handy location.

“We were talking tech because I’d worked for Ardex, and we had a general conversation about tech and the shortage of tech roles in Australia. Essentially (that conversation) led to us creating Apteum. Initially the business was to provide support and tech business for Landchecker who were really quickly growing.

“We set up the business in the Philippines and worked out how we'd be able to service Landchecker. We quickly realised we had a talent acquisition service that could benefit a really wide range of companies.”

Outsourcing labour to the Philippines has already been done by Australian companies such as ANZ Bank, Canva, Optus, and Macquarie Bank.

Moving into the equine space

“When I looked at it in parallel with my experience in the racing and breeding industry, I realised that time is the hardest commodity for a broad part of the industry. And there's also a really significant talent and resource shortage, especially in administration and marketing,” said Langdon.

With racing happening seven days a week, trainers, bloodstock agents, farms, and sales companies all need to do media releases and social media constantly.

“We had a good service that could provide time, and talent, at a lower cost. I realised that I had a good service to offer the racing industry, so I started to build that.

“Our staff will work any combination of seven days a week and any hours that are required. That's perfect for covering roles such as social media on race days. The kind of roles that we cover in the industry are video editing for social media, and other types of social media. We do video editing for races for trainer communications because that is a heavy lift for each of the trainers doing all of that editing. And we can upload into Prism and send to all the owners.”

Software programs like Ardex and Prism have made life a lot easier for trainers communicating with large groups of owners, but even so, someone needs to upload videos and photos from trackwork or jump-outs and explain which horse in the video belongs to the owners.

Helping out with National Thoroughbred Week

Apteum donated significant staff time to help promote National Thoroughbred Week held during the spring.

“We were quickly able to mobilise some staff for a project basis to do outreach for the month leading into National Thoroughbred Week,” said Langdon.

“Kick Collective are one of my clients for some of their project work, including TTR. When National Thoroughbred Week was announced, I contacted the team at Kick Collective because I thought it was such a fantastic initiative.

“I am still very passionate about the industry and I do own shares in horses, so I asked how I could help. Because they (Kick Collective) know my business, we talked about what I could contribute, and we ended up doing a lot of the outreach. For example, in the Southern Highlands area we reached out to the golf club, the local council, the local newspapers, to generate awareness and drive attendance at the events.

“Some of my staff here in Cebu made lists of local businesses around each event, doing all the research. Tai (Ryan) set up the processes and was fantastic, and then my team got to work at contacting all of those businesses on behalf of National Thoroughbred Week. We were able to contact thousands of businesses in short space of time via Facebook, email, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc to help drive engagement.

“And the staff loved it. They learned a lot about Australia through looking at the maps and Google Earth at the farms like Coolmore, Arrowfield, etc. They thought all of the events were incredible. I heard so often about how they wished they could have attended some of them.”

National Thoroughbred Week opened the doors of stables and farms across Australia and New Zealand in November 2025. More than 5000 people attended over 84 events and sites included 33 trainers, 26 stud and broodmare farms, 21 race clubs, as well as pre-training centres, veterinary clinics, education providers, syndicators, auction houses, and nine Off The Track and rehoming facilities.

On social media, 650,000 people were reached and 97.6% of attendees indicated they would attend a National Thoroughbred Week event again.

“Similarly to National Thoroughbred Week, we helped Kick Up with the few weeks leading into the Melbourne Cup.”

Kick Up’s highest traffic comes in the seven days leading in the G1 Melbourne Cup with the eyes of all the anti-racing activists on racing.

“We had some staff in Cebu that were monitoring social media and were able to quickly escalate or highlight anything (anti-horse racing). They had the Kick Up kit, and the standard FAQs so they could respond to small comments. For anything that needed a more extensive response or outreach from someone directly, we had a process where they were able to elevate those issues.”

“The good thing about those two initiatives is we've been able to respond quickly and with the right volume.”

TTR and Kick Collective’s Vicky Leonard was effusive in her praise for the Apteum team.

“We utilise their team members consistently in various roles. They were brilliant for National Thoroughbred Week and Kick Up, but we also utilise their skills for book keeping, administration and various creative tasks. Bonnie has taught them about horse racing and manages their HR requirements, they have been a wonderful addition to the team - especially in our very busy periods.”

Embedded talent model with no labour costs

A major benefit of any outsourcing model is that the business doesn’t have to pay all the associated costs of having an employee. No super, no payroll tax – it all comes in as one invoice and the contractor pays all those associated costs themselves.

“We call it a one-to-one embedded talent model. Apteum does it all from the recruitment and training and we employ the staff. We cover all the human resources side of it, we do their payroll, all of their Philippines government benefits. And they work exclusively for the client in Australia.

“The client just gets one invoice from me. There's no payroll tax for the Australian client. There's no superannuation. It's just a service invoice. The cost of a staff member is around 40% of what you would pay in Australia because the cost of living is so much lower in the Philippines.”

For businesses worried about dealing with people whose first language isn’t English, having strong English skills are a core part of Apteum’s recruitment process.

“Our team members all have good communication skills. That's probably one of the keys of success is that they're able to speak good English and communicate well back with Australia,” said Langdon.

“I have 90 staff now that work across various businesses. They all work from my office in Cebu, which is a one hour flight south of Manila. There's a great atmosphere in the office. They're all doing different jobs. We have racing industry clients, we've got Landchecker, a couple of other tech companies. We have some architects, we have people who do interior design, we have lawyers. It’s a great mix of staff.

“All of our staff have university degrees, and they're all paid above market rates for locals. We've got a great culture here. A lot of our staff love travelling internationally for their holidays to Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore. They're all upwardly mobile type young staff and our average age is 27.

“Cebu is a major university hub in the Philippines. There are eight universities here on the island of Cebu. There's a good international airport. It's new, it's clean, and there are direct flights from Australia and Hong Kong and Singapore. Our office is in an area called IT Park, which is a mini-CBD like Parramatta but for international businesses.”

Cebu is on the same time zone as Perth.

What can Apteum help with?

For a stud farm who's looking at saving on administration costs, or a trainer who needs social media help, what services does Apteum provide?

“A big part of our business is financial assistance for clients, doing accounts payable, accounts receivable, monthly reporting, and bank reconciliations. My staff are all trained on Xero, MYOB, Ardex, and Prism, and they can use all these programs remotely,” said Langdon.

“One of the big things in racing is the Racing Australia administration side of it. We can do management of horse registration, transfer of ownership forms, colours, movements of horses on the Racing Australia website, race acceptances, noms, etc. Our staff can nominate 2-year-olds for the feature races, and admin related to BOBS, VOBIS, sales, races. Our industry is pretty heavy on admin work.

“Equally, we can do stud administration work such as entering vet sheets. Basically, the stud takes a photo or scans the vet sheet to send it through to us and we enter it. Mare returns, foal ownership declarations, stallion contracts, and we have a couple of staff trained in the Racing Australia portal for naming.”

Racing in the Philippines

Philippine Jockey Club (PJC)’s new Padre Garcia race track and training centre is set to open soon and is located just outside Manilla. Currently the country has only one track, Manilla Metro Turf Club’s Malvar racecourse. Australia exported 44 horses to the nation in 2023/24 according to Racing Australia’s Fact Book.

With a small racing industry in the Philippines, Apteum’s clients aren’t talking to people from a country with no history of horse racing. But how much training did Apteum have to provide?

“We do have an inhouse training program for new recruits. I travel to the Philippines 6 to 8 times a year and we have invested heavily in training the staff. But the good thing is now we have a critical mass of people that work in the racing industry, so they help each other,” said Langdon.

“I'm so incredibly proud of the team over here. They all talk about Via Sistina and how much they love her, and they watch the races now from Australia. I bought the newspapers in the lead up to the Everest and the Herald Sun every day in Melbourne that had all the liftouts and all the Melbourne Cup stuff. For my current visit, I bought the print editions of TTR from Magic Millions.

“They've got all of that in the office and they love it. I've bought sales catalogues up here. We do extensive training, but as we have a group of staff that work for industry directly, the training is easier.”