On Christmas Eve, J Barrey Williams will lock up the CEO’s office at the Western Australian Club for the final time.
With his five-year contract concluding, Mr Williams will be turning his efforts to completing the work Keith Mattingley, who recently died, started at the Catalina Foundation, taking the chairmanship of the foundation.
One of the key roles of that foundation is to raise funds to build the Catalina Discovery Centre as a memorial to a long-hidden part of WA’s second world war past.
Mr Williams will also be returning to his former life as a consultant and assessing any company directorships that may come his way.
While he will no longer be in an executive role at 101 St Georges Terrace, it will not mean his involvement with the 110 year old club is at an end.
While the terms of his future role have not yet fully been decided, Mr Williams said his new role would be an ambassadorial and marketing one, playing on the business contacts he has built throughout his career.
His career started as a props boy at Channel 9 in Adelaide, a station then owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Williams came to Perth in 1982 to run TVW7. By the end of the decade he was chief executive of the WA office of eastern States advertising agency Mojos.
With the heady 1980s over and Mojos having retreated east to lick its wounds, Mr Williams launched marketing consultancy JBW Enterprises which he ran until taking on the WA Club role.
His five years at the helm of the club were spent trying to ensure it remained relevant while retaining its sense of tradition.
This included watering down the dress requirements at the club’s downstairs bar, then called Diggers and Dealers. For the first time visitors to the bar did not have to wear a jacket and tie, something unheard of in such a club.
The Diggers and Dealers bar is no more, replaced instead by Gallery 101 and decorated with the work of WA artists, but the relaxed dress code remains.
Mr Williams’ most notable legacy at the club, however, will probably be the Churchills and Churchills Cellar bars at the rear of the club.
Club lore has it that Mr Williams was poking around in the club’s storeroom and decided the space would serve better as bars, in particular a cigar bar.
Out went the boxes and in came the billiard table, humidor, copper tables and bar.
Mr Williams said some new members had joined the WA Club solely for the cigar bar.
Indeed, anything that builds membership is vital to an organisation such as the WA Club.
Mr Williams said the club’s membership was at 1,900 and the target was 2,800.
"With any organisation that’s food and beverage oriented it’s about bums on seats," he said.
The club has launched a membership drive to help it reach that target.
Another thing Mr Williams oversaw at the club was the change of its management structure into one more redolent of a hotel.
It instituted a line manager type structure, bringing in a food and beverage manager, functions manager and an executive chef.
Brad Bowles was recently appointed general manager and will have a finance, systems and staffing oversight brief.