From the sticks to the big-time - One sparkies wild ride

It could all have turned out so differently for the farm-kid from the tiny South Australian town of Naracoorte. 

After being let go from his first job and left flat broke, Brendan Marshall was forced to start his own business, Supreme Electrical, out of necessity.

Nowhere near ready to take on the massive responsibility of running a business, Brendan did what was needed to put food on the table for himself, and his wife of three months. 

He says it was “baptism by fire”.

At one point, he’d hit rock-bottom; tens of thousands of dollars in debt, sleepless nights, screening the calls of nightmare clients, all while a young family relied on him - everything he’d worked towards his whole life hung in the balance. 

When the wholesalers cancelled his account, it left him unable to even buy the materials he needed to continue working.

“There are times you wonder why you’re doing it, and you want to give up,” he admits.

It looked like the dream was over for the farm-kid who’d only ever wanted to work with his hands. The only thing left to do was to go to his builder with his tail between his legs and admit he couldn’t do this anymore. 

But the young sparkie wouldn’t go down without a fight - and thanks to his resolve, today he’s living the dream; he’s got a booming business, financial security, a happy, healthy family, a strong mindset and personal freedom - he’s even being sent tools for free because retailers want him to promote their products. 

He didn’t know it at the time, but the wild ride had only just begun.

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Brendan grew up in a quiet beachside town where everyone was either a fisherman or a farmer. As a kid, he spent a lot of his spare time motorbiking and camping. 

“As a farm-kid the only thing you want to do is live in town with all your friends, but all your friends in town want to live out of town with motorbikes,” he says.

Life on the farm could be unpredictable, and brutal. Often, the locals were at the mercy of droughts and wildfires and whatever disaster was thrown at them. They had no choice but to take nature’s outbursts on the chin and find ways to adapt. Brendan credits his upbringing and particularly his dad for instilling him with the determination needed to get through challenging times. 

“That’s where a bit of the work ethic came from. Things are always going to be hard, so you just have to push through it. There’s always going to be a way through it, you just have to push through until you find that way,” he says.

Brendan might’ve learnt how to fight through adversity thanks to life on the farm, but a chaotic day one of his apprenticeship at Qantas airport in Townsville had to have helped. 

Fresh-faced, keen, but without a solid electrical education behind him, on his very first day Brendan found himself in the thick of the action after a major breakdown on the conveyor belt.

It was all hands on deck.

“I was being yelled at to grab tools I’d never heard of before. I didn’t even know what a multimeter was,” he recalls.

In the fourth year of his apprenticeship, Brendan met a girl in his hometown while on holiday, fell in love with her, and transferred his apprenticeship back home to Naracoorte. 

He switched from city back to country, and from a luxury airport to the domestic end of electrical work. It was a massive shock, and it helped him realise how much more there was still to learn. Shortly after that, he was made redundant, and thrown into the deep end when he started Supreme Electrical. 

“I had to feed myself, look after myself, and look after my partner at the time as well. So as soon as I got made redundant I registered my business, went and bought a builder’s trailer, and bought the minimum tools,” he says.

Brendan was saddled with debt when he started his business - he’d paid for a wedding and honeymoon just a few months earlier. He didn’t really have the right experience or business acumen at the time either - but he had the right attitude.

He immediately messaged everyone he knew and did everything he could to pick up work - but he found himself bamboozled by the financial end of running an electrical business and for the first twelve months, grossly undercharged for his services. Even though he was finding work, he was being run out of business.

That’s when he made the decision to join the Electricians Success Academy - from that point, it was onward and upward for Brendan’s business and personal growth.

“The Academy is my rock now - whether it’s technical, whether it’s personal. I never thought I would’ve bought a brand new car, and now I’ve got two. I’m on the verge of buying a third. I never thought I’d build a house, I’m building my first now and planning the next one. It’s not only business development it’s personal development as well. It’s realising the life I want to live isn’t going to be done by chucking a powerpoint on for 50 bucks cash. The difference the Academy has made to my business has been incredible”.

Brendan has been in business for four and a half years, and now has three tradies working for him. He’s able to work on his business, instead of for it. Now, he only worries about how to get work, not how to do work. He’s enjoying much more freedom and better mental health as a result - and these days, he loves what he does.

“Seeing something come together from the ground up, and handing it over to a customer and seeing a massive smile on their face, I fell in love with that. Just seeing the reaction of your customer when you do a wicked job and they get what they want and their dreams come to life for them,” he says.

Brendan says being able to take a step back from the business side of things was a huge weight lifted off his shoulders.

“I wasn’t sleeping at night for so long, now I feel so much more rested and getting so much more sleep because I get that mental break,” he says.

By his own admission, Brendan has become a better father and a better husband - he now sets aside time in his schedule to spend quality time with his kids and his wife.

Brendan’s cutting edge social media game also landed him a strategic partnership with Bosch Blue Electrical tools, and now he gets tools for free - not bad. 

The ride has been wild for Brendan, but with the newfound confidence and business knowledge he enjoys today, he’s starting to sense it’s only just the beginning. 

“In the last six months, I’ve put two guys on and I’ve increased my turnover by ten grand each month, so if that keeps up by the end of 2021 I’m going to be franchised, I’m going to have people working for me all over Australia”

He was half-kidding - but you never know. 

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