Meet TEC Chairs
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Biography:
Career & Achievements: Bernard Eastman is a Chartered Accountant, with experience as a tax partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers (then Price Waterhouse) and as the CEO of a major Australian charge-card company in the retail motor industry. He is also the Chairperson and CEO of an unlisted public company in the musical theatre industry.
His career with PricewaterhouseCoopers preceded his CEO role with Motorcharge Limited, a company he founded in 1980 to commercialise the charge-card product he devised. Motorcharge provided an Australia wide charge-card service to its 100,000 cardholders through a network of some 15,000 merchants in the service station and retail motor industries.
The company developed and patented one of the world's first electronic point-of-sale terminals, and then successfully pioneered its own independent EFTPOS terminal network in the face of fierce competition from banks and oil companies. Under Eastman's stewardship, Motorcharge grew and prospered, and was enjoying a turnover of about $350m p.a., at the time it was taken over by a United Kingdom company in 2002.
Bernie established the musical entertainment company, Eastman Group Ltd in 1992 as a result of his belief that there has always been a demand internationally for tuneful musicals and light operas, and that established writers had not been meeting all of that demand. The Eastman Group was formed to be the parent company of a corporate group specialising in developing new musical works of integrity, and in commercialising globally the intellectual property rights contained within those musical works.
He founded the first TEC group in Perth in 2003, and was awarded the prestigious Phil Meddings Award at the TEC Downunder conference in 2005, along with the Chair Excellence Award from TEC International, also in 2005.
Personal: Bernie was born and bred in Perth. He comes from a musical family, and was for many years a violinist with the Western Australian Arts Orchestra. He describes himself as a person of vision who likes to focus on the big picture.