CEO’S REPORT

Hello Members,

I am proud of our Management Team and all our Staff for being at work each day and continuing to deliver great customer service, great experiences, valued products and community services to you, our Members, in what is easily described as one of the most challenging times we’ve ever seen in the Club, Hospitality and many other service-related industries.

You continue to join me in appreciating and thanking our staff for their efforts. This motivates us all to keep trying to exceed your expectations each day that we come to work in our Clubs and in our community. Our people are our backbone, and I am thankful to them for their commitment to you.

Following on from Kay Kelly’s report, the Board and I are immensely proud to deliver to you the long-awaited Independent Living Unit (ILU) development consent to allow your Club to build 480 ILU apartments and a 160-unit Residential Aged Care Facility under the now public banner of Parkside Lifestyle Community at Workers Sports.

Over 300 registrations of interest have been received to date. This confirms to us that the ILU development is valued in the community by our Members who look to us for opportunities to downsize into modern contemporary apartment living with services and products likened to a cruise ship that never leaves the dock, where you can do as little or as much as you want each day.

Building senior-living housing has been a gateway for us to review our Club Group with a wider lens of our Community and the services and facilities that we provide. This has helped us really appreciate that we have a long, proud history and tradition of being many things to many different Members. The Parkside Living Community is creating an opportunity for Members to live with us in their older years and be part of a new lifestyle as a result of being a Member of our Clubs.

I am very proud to let you know that to recognise and celebrate the generational changes in your Club Group, that we are rebranding from the ‘Blacktown Workers Club Group’ to the ‘Workers Lifestyle Group’. Workers Lifestyle Group will be the main business group name. Each venue will still retain their Workers identity as known in the community as Workers Blacktown, Workers Sports and Workers Hubertus. The red W has been modernised. However, our other traditional icons remain.

Our Mission, Vision and Values remain. Our Vision – to provide venues, activities and lifestyle options that enhance and benefit our community – is being vibrantly brought to life by these changes.

This rebranding is a lengthy process and we expect that this will take around 18 months. We have begun with changing the logos on our carpark signage and will eventually change all the logos on the uniforms of our summer and winter sporting bodies. We will reach out to the sporting bodies to give them a hand where they might need it in this process.

We are enormously proud of our brand and our identity - who we are and what we do. This update to our brand and logo is exciting and I’m looking forward to our future.

The renovations at Workers Blacktown are completing with the Blue Gum Café looking to open in early November. A new menu, furniture, carpet, tiles, and kitchen equipment amongst other new improvements will help make Blue Gum our primary convenience food offer, with a menu that offers fast, fresh, healthy and delicious club favourites and new CSIRO based menu items for anyone looking for a value offer every day or otherwise when time is short.

Plans progress at Workers Hubertus and I will provide more information on this in our next journal as our 25 acres at Luddenham have been recognised for uses associated with Registered Clubs. This leads us to draw comparisons on how we can replicate our existing products offers and land uses at Workers Sports such as the Club with Conference, Events, fuel, and food offers for example.

Health is very important to us all and we have begun to focus our attention onto the scourge of diabetes and its stronghold in Western Sydney, and the Blacktown Local Government Area particularly. We are working with Western Sydney Diabetes on this front and looking to increase ease of access to testing and linking into the GP network for consultation and assistance.

We believe that we can make a difference and your Club is happy to do what we can, where and when we can.

Our plans for the future of our Club Group are continuing ahead strongly, as you would expect. The Board and Executive Management will hold our strategic and legacy planning sessions in October, where we check milestones and progress of the plans underway while looking to creating a legacy for the future generation of our Members.

Morgan Stewart

Chief Executive Officer Workers Lifestyle Group