Les Watson made life member of Commerce Torquay

COMMERCE Torquay has honoured long-time member Les Watson with life membership of the organisation.

Mr Watson received the award at the Torquay group’s annual general meeting and Christmas celebration, held at the Torquay Wine Store last month.

His invovlvment with the organisation dates to July 2011, when he was invited to a committee meeting of what was then known as Torquay Commerce and Tourism.

The president at the time, Martin Duke, invited Mr Watson to run a customer service session for the businesses of Torquay, which was attended by more than 80 people.

Mr Watson later joined the committee and has served under then-president Barry Sutherland and incumbent president Jeff Crow ever since, running the Business Breakfast events and After Surf networking events.

Mr Watson said the life membership was a total surprise to him.

“I think one of the vice-presidents said to me the year before ‘You know you’re next in line’, but it was just a throwaway line.

“I do what I do, and I’m going to do what I do, and the rest just happened.

“When I first started, I didn’t have a business in Torquay; hilarious!

“People would ask ‘But why are you doing this?’ Because of the love of the people, the town, the whole shebang – it was just what I wanted to do to help, and here we are a decade later.

“I like community, I like the opportunity to put people together, and bring people together, the networking opportunities.”

Mr Watson is well known in Torquay as the MC of the Business Breakfast and After Surf events, which have pulled crowds of more than 100 people at their pre-COVID peak.

“Because I’ve done very large gatherings in Sydney, I said to myself ‘We can do that here in Torquay; it’s not hard’,” he said.

“We did the first one, and it was so successful… it literally was ‘We’ve done this one, who’d like to put their hand up to be the next venue?’ and someone in the crowd said ‘Oh, we’ll do that’ and it just continued to snowball from there.”

Mr Watson has two existing businesses, Get More Time and Creating Sucess Coaching, and will launch a third, Surf Coast PD – which stands for both “personal development” and “professional development” – in February.

The AGM saw Jeff Crow re-elected as Commerce Torquay president, with the rest of the board for 2024 comprising vice-presidents Robert Skehan and Sarah Minter, treasurer Anthony Santilli, secretary Carmen Clifford, and committee members Les Watson and Will Hamilton.