It can sometimes take a major upset to allow ambition to take flight.
“I was like, right, what am I going to do?” Sydney builder Mark Newman recalls when he suddenly lost his job just over ten years ago, “Go back and get another job or is now an opportunity to start something?”
Now 40 and a father of three, Mark decided to step out of his comfort zone and Newmark Constructions was born. The bold move didn’t phase him, despite the blow to his job security and income. In fact, it gave him the kick he needed to realise a long held dream.
“I’ve never felt scared of running my own business. There was always ambition there to execute a plan but exactly what the plan was, I don’t think I necessarily had defined," he remembers. "My apprenticeship was with an award-winning luxury houses company and I always imagined when I was sitting there watching them winning that that might be me one day, doing my own thing.”
He puts his confidence partly down to his entrepreneurial father, who would have conversations about his small business at the dinner table and drop in on remote suppliers during family holidays. It’s possibly why, from the word go, he’s had a sense of what Newmark could achieve - and how, along the way, he could do things a little differently.
Investing everything from work back into the business, the early years were about focusing on getting through the start-up phase and to a point where he could manage residential building projects from his Chatswood office. But what sets Newmark apart, Mark believes, is that he has embraced technology and is now a leader in the growing field of sustainable cross-laminated timber technology, which adds value to timber that might otherwise go to waste. Mark and his team made the effort to visit the Victorian factory where the product is manufactured and built the 15th ever Australian CLT project. As one of Australia’s first builders to master working with the ‘it’ material, he has been able to push boundaries creatively and environmentally.