My Mate Was the Best Sparky I Knew. Nobody Could Find Him.

Dan wired half the renovations on our street and most people never knew his name.

I've known Dan since high school here in Brissy. He did his apprenticeship through the back end of the GFC, when work was thin and you took whatever came. By his late twenties he was the bloke everyone in the family wanted. Reliable. Tidy. Turned up when he said he would, which if you've ever waited around a whole Saturday for a tradesman, you'll know is rarer than it should be. When my parents had their place at Annerley rewired, Dan did it in two days and swept up after himself. My old man still talks about it.

For years his phone did all his marketing. Someone's bathroom reno, a mate of a mate building a deck out at Wynnum, a real estate agent who needed a quick smoke-alarm job before a settlement. The work just came. He never advertised a thing in his life. Purely word of mouth.

Then around 2023 it started to dry up. Not all at once. Just a quiet, steady thinning out. The agent he'd done work for retired, a builder he leaned on went under, and people stopped spending money like they used to. Dan's a proud bloke, so I didn't hear any of this for months. I found out when he mentioned, as a joke I thought, that he'd picked up a couple of shifts driving for a mate's logistics company. To fill the gaps, he said.

The best sparky I knew was driving a van to make rent.

Here's the part that got me. One night I tried to find him the way a stranger would. I googled electricians in Holland Park, like anyone would, and he was nowhere. Plenty of sparkys named Dan, but not my mate Dan. No website, no reviews. I even googled his mobile number and got nothing. If you didn't have his number, he didn't exist.

We don't ask the neighbours anymore. We don't flip through a phone book. When the hot water carks it on a Sunday night, we grab the phone and we search, and whoever shows up gets the job. The decision takes 90 seconds. If you're not in those 90 seconds, you may as well not be a tradesman at all.

I'm not a marketing person and neither is Dan. But I'd come across a plain-English breakdown of why tradies need an online presence, and I sent it to him with a message that was basically "mate, this is you." It wasn't growth-hacking nonsense. It just laid out the obvious thing we'd both been ignoring: being good at the work and being possible to find are two completely different jobs. Most tradies are flat out brilliant at the first one and have never thought about the second.

What changed for Dan wasn't dramatic. He got himself a proper Google listing with photos of actual jobs he'd done. He asked the last handful of happy customers to leave a review, which felt deeply awkward to him and took about four texts to sort out. He got listed on a local directory, which I didn't think people even used anymore, so there was at least one more spot online that said, in plain terms, here is an electrician, here is the suburb he covers, here's his number. Took him a weekend, cost him nothing. He's not retired and rich off the back of it. That's not how it works. But the phone started up again. Slowly, then properly. A woman found him through a review and booked a full switchboard upgrade. A young couple who'd just bought their first place needed half the house sorted and went with him because, in her words, "you were the only one who actually came up when I looked." That sentence has stuck with me for a year. You were the only one who came up.

I think about Dan whenever someone tells me that local directories are dead, or that word of mouth is all a good tradie needs. Word of mouth is gold. It always was. But word of mouth in 2026 doesn't travel over a back fence anymore. It travels through a search bar, a review, and a listing that turns up when somebody's stuck and looking. The fence has moved online, that's all.

If you've got a mate like Dan, do him a favour. Type his trade and your suburb into your phone tonight, the way a stranger would, and see if he shows up. If he doesn't, you've just found the reason the phone's gone quiet. The fix isn't expensive and it isn't hard. Nobody ever told him it was part of his job too.

He's flat out booked these days, mostly off the back of maintenance work for property managers. He still sweeps up after himself, and he still won't advertise. But now, when you go looking, you can find him.