James Wrest:
electrician first, marketer by necessity.

Five years on someone else's tools

James did his apprenticeship in Australia and then spent more than five years working for an electrical company — long weeks, hard deadlines, and the slow realisation that every hour of effort was building someone else's wealth. When he walked out the door, all he had was his tool bag and his trade experience, and neither of those paid him unless he was on a job.

The idea that stuck was simple: turn the skills of an electrician into an electrical business that could make a profit without him physically being on every job. An asset, not a job. (The E-Myth Revisited was the book that gave the idea a shape.)

Be Electrical, and the franchise

With a couple of mates from the trade he started a small company — Be Electrical, named after a B-movie they'd been watching — with a logo, some shirts and an old panel van. The problem was obvious within weeks: the only work came from family and friends. There was no marketing at all, and the competitors on Google were paying around $20 a click for a search they couldn't afford to compete with.

A newspaper ad for an electrical franchise offered a shortcut: an established brand, and customers already calling in. James bought in, quit his job and went full-time. The first job under the franchise banner — a brand-new wrapped van, one set of power tools, an inexperienced apprentice, charged by the hour with the customer watching — was a stressful, disorganised mess that ended with a complaint to the franchisor and a lesson that never left him: charge a fixed price up front.

What growing actually felt like

The franchise grew, but the problems just changed shape. Good electricians would come for a while, learn the operation, then leave to start their own business — he went through about ten to find one decent one. Work either piled up so much that jobs had to be dropped, or dried up and left the team idle. The bigger the business got, the more time James spent running around after other electricians and keeping customers happy. He bought a mate's self-built one-man electrical business and ran the two side by side, which was a useful education in what a franchise gives you and what a home-grown brand does better.

Europe, Airbnb, and the sales funnel

When he and his partner decided to move to Europe to be closer to her family, James sold both businesses — the franchise after five years of his life — because a business you can't be present for just loses money and sleep. In Europe, electricians were paid about the same as cleaners, so he did something different: he offered a turnkey management service to an Airbnb owner with a large house who only visited for a month or two a year. Marketing that property beyond Airbnb was how he first learned about sales funnels.

Looking around, he could see funnels driving seven-figure businesses in industry after industry — and nobody doing it for electricians. That gap is the reason this podcast exists.

The show

Between December 2019 and November 2020 James recorded fifty-six episodes, most of them ten to twenty minutes, on the marketing he wishes he'd understood before starting: making an offer instead of selling a commodity, building a website that actually gets the phone to ring, testing ads before spending on them, and knowing exactly who the dream customer is. He interviewed working electrical contractors and service-business owners along the way.

This site keeps every episode online with the audio, the original show notes and a full transcript, so the archive stays useful to the next electrician who is good at the trade and stuck on the marketing.