How Virta Health Saved 32% on Quarterly Offsites for 1,000+ employees

About the Company

Virta Health is the leader in reversing metabolic disease with a nutrition-first approach.

As a distributed, high-growth company, Virta knows that in-person connection is critical to how teams operate, and how their culture is built.
‍

Virta views offsites as operating forums: a chance to align, make decisions, and build the trust that makes distributed teams actually work.

As Amy says “Teams that trust one another work faster and better together.”

Challenge

When we met Amy and Maddie, Virta’s events and community team, they were looking for a scalable group travel solution.

In the past, each team at Virta was responsible for planning their own offsites: sourcing venues, event planning, building out content.

This pulled team leaders away from their actual priorities and OKRs, and the results were inconsistent.

‍
To support its growth, Virta established a centralized Events & Community function.
‍

As Amy began building the team, she identified an opportunity to streamline planning and drive greater efficiency. She introduced a quarterly offsite model - four structured team offsites per year - replacing the previous mix of ad hoc team-led events and a single annual all-company retreat.

As Virta continues to scale, its offsites will scale alongside it. This model positions the company for continued success while enabling a lean, team to operate efficiently and deliver high impact.

Solution

Virta runs lean by design.

This year, the company doubled down on operational efficiency.

The team wanted to cut unnecessary work and find the right partners so small teams can punch above their weight.

Event planning was no exception.

Rather than throwing headcount at growing event needs, Amy's team looked for partners who could handle the heavy lifting on sourcing and negotiation.

This freed them up to focus on the things that actually make offsites great.

Amy discovered Marco Instant Offsites at an HR professionals webinar, and was drawn to Marco's AI-powered platform coupled with a collaborative team.

Key elements included:

• Venue options in hours, not weeks: Instead of sending requests and waiting days for hotel responses, Amy used Marco's platform to get venue options and pricing for multiple cities within hours, across Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Diego simultaneously.
• Not a generic shortlist: Marco filtered for Virta's actual requirements across three cities; capacity for 800+, meeting space, budget range. Amy reviewed options that actually fit Virta’s needs.
• Platform + people: In addition to Marco’s platfrom, the Marco team helped handle negotiations and booking. Amy got sourcing support without adding headcount or losing control.