Darren Brehm remembers what it is like to look up at the corporate ladder and feel like even the bottom rung is out of reach from your wheelchair. In 2002, nine years after a rollover car accident made him a C4-5 quad, Brehm had adjusted, gotten married, started a business and graduated from college. Yet still, he didn’t see a way to start climbing.

“I had very low self-esteem regarding my spinal cord injury as far as how do I apply for a job,” he says. When do you tell employers you are in a wheelchair? What accommodations do you ask for? Are they really equal opportunity employers? What if my disability scares them away? The questions raced through his head. “I found myself wondering, ‘How am I going to be successful in a corporate environment?’”

He started his climb with a job at Boeing in 2002 and hasn’t looked back since. He went on to graduate from Harvard Business School, work at one of the world’s most demanding consulting firms and currently works for one of America’s largest grocery manufacturers, all while raising a family. He’s learned how to thrive in the corporate system while overcoming the obstacles a spinal cord injury can present. The philosophy that has helped him succeed is pretty straightforward. “I don’t identify myself as a quad or anything like that. I’m just Darren, a guy that had a spinal cord injury a long time ago … I’m going to work really hard and I’m going to try to be the same guy I was, just sitting down now.”

Finding His Niche, Making a Mark

Brehm’s injury in 1993 forced him to withdraw from San Diego State following his sophomore year, but it didn’t dampen his natural entrepreneurial tendencies. He mastered working with computers and got into building and repairing them and designing websites. He started a business buying pinball machines in Europe, shipping them back to the United States, refinishing them and reselling them. He even launched his own “.com” business. Around that time, his wife, Faith, who had been injured in the same accident with Brehm and whom he married in 1996, pointed out that he seemed to have rehabilitated himself and suggested maybe it was time to return to school.

Brehm quickly found confidence in his abilities at community college and transferred back to SDSU to finish his finance degree. He graduated as the Internet bubble burst and the economy tanked. He credits a mentor for helping him overcome his insecurities about applying for a job as a wheelchair user in a market where jobs were scarce. “He said, ‘Darren, you just need to get some job experience. It doesn’t matter where it is; you’ve just got to go get some experience.’” Brehm ended up applying “to every company I could” before landing a job on the finance team for Boeing’s defense program.

Immediately his concerns began to fade away. “I found that when I went to Boeing, there really weren’t any constraints — just like there hadn’t been any in school,” he says. “They said, ‘What do you need?’” Brehm got the height-adjustable table, trackball and Dragon software he needed and found the company had no problem with Faith checking in occasionally to help with food and restroom needs.

“I found that at Boeing I was able to leverage the same tools that made me successful at school and at home, which is technology,” says Brehm. “I became a pretty quick expert in tools like Excel, and the computer really became my enabler. I became an expert at Boeing and I went from being the guy that nobody wanted because I was a wheelchair guy to being [in demand].”

With a better understanding of the realities of the corporate workplace, a growingly confident Brehm quickly realized that his salary and California’s pricey economy weren’t a good match. Despite having lived his whole life in California and having all his family there, Brehm moved east to attend Harvard Business School. He got his degree while Faith finished hers at the University of Massachusetts – Boston. A happy Brehm found himself facing another dilemma upon graduating: return to Boeing, where the company would repay his student debt and he would be comfortable, or join McKinsey, one of the world’s largest and most demanding consulting firms.

Again, sage advice from a mentor helped him choose his path. Brehm approached a professor he respected with his dilemma. She drew a parallel between her experience as a lesbian in the workforce to his as a wheelchair user.

“She said, ‘You know Darren, the world’s not a fair place. You’re in a wheelchair and I’m a lesbian, the discrimination is real and we’re not going to change that overnight. But you’ve got this really pretty resume and a nice story. You go to work at McKinsey for a couple of years, nobody is going to question your disability ever again. You’ve only got to suck it up for two years and it would be really good for your career.’”

Brehm accepted McKinsey’s offer and he and Faith moved to Chicago for the next step in his education. Over the next three and a half years he worked 65-80 hours a week, often traveling up to four days a week. That’s a heavy load for anyone, much less a high quad.

A Family Man Rises to the Top

Early on at McKinsey, Brehm realized his previous setup, with Faith and attendants coming in to assist him, wouldn’t work for McKinsey’s rigorous schedule. “My friends were like, ‘What are you doing, dude? Why is your wife helping you at McKinsey?’ I thought, I don’t have a choice; the job is so good I don’t want to say anything. They said, ‘No, dummy, you should say something.’” Finally he did, and to his surprise McKinsey agreed to provide $50,000 per year so he could pay attendants. He hired his mom, and she moved to Chicago and spent the next two and a half years traveling with him and helping him. “That’s what private firms can do,” he says. “The unique thing about that experience was that they would just value the brain. The brain is doing what they want, and they’ll bend over backwards to accommodate that. They don’t answer to anybody but the partners, so they make the decisions.”

Despite the positive setup, with twins on the way, Darren and Faith knew the long hours and crazy travel wouldn’t work, and in 2011 Brehm took a job as an associate director with Kraft Foods in the Chicago area. The $50,000 budget was no more, and Brehm wasn’t senior enough for a personal assistant, but the company did agree to pay for travel assistants. In 2013, Brehm was promoted to director of procurement for North American ingredients. He manages a $950 million budget and a team of 13. “You don’t hear many people say, ‘When I grow up, I want to work in procurement,’ but I find it tremendously satisfying,” he said in a profile for SDSU.

Managing work and the growing demands of having a family is a continual challenge. Not being able to help Faith with many of the physical needs of their kids brought out Brehm’s insecurities and frustration. “My wife’s on her own completely. She’s a stay-at-home mom, and she’s got her hands full with our two kids plus having to take care of me at the house and doing all the work at the house that I can’t do as the partner on the team, right?” he says. “So it’s kind of like — I mean, unfortunately my wife has the burden of being a single parent of two kids and a kid with a disability, right?”

He says he tries to avoid the anger and provide what he can. “I try to be helpful, like I can still be like a machine that generates as much money as I can for all the stuff we’re trying to do,” he says. “So that’s one of the things I do is I work really hard and I’m always trying different angles to make money. I am a financial contributor, which is OK. And, I can support my wife to be helpful there, so that’s check number two.”

The mutual support the two provide for each other, coupled with the support — both physical and emotional — of friends and family, has been invaluable to Brehm’s success. “Whether it’s my wife, or whether it be a family member, you need to have that person there for logistics and everything else,” he says. “That’s the trick. I don’t think anybody with a spinal cord injury — maybe a small handful — is wealthy enough that you can buy all the support you need to do all this stuff without any kind of help, whether it’s a wife or family member doing it. You just can’t afford — I couldn’t afford — to orchestrate all this without her.”

In 2008, Brehm started and ran a website called Ability Trip that provided accessibility information for travelers. He also started and runs Pinball Armor, a manufacturer of custom covers for pinball machines. Additionally, Brehm  donates his time as a peer ambassador at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and he joined the United Spinal Association board of directors in March 2014.

That’s more than enough to keep anyone busy, so it’s easy to understand why right now Brehm says he is “kind of chilling out.”

“I imagine having two kids at age 4 is a pretty good sized project for a while,” he says.

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A Coworker’s View
Rob O’Brien has worked for Brehm the last two years at Kraft and says the secret to his colleague’s success is simple. “He’s a really smart guy who doesn’t micromanage. He sets a high level of direction and says, ‘Hey, get there,’ and he’s there for you if you need any help along the way.” Together, Brehm and O’Brien are part of Kraft’s ingredient procurement unit and are responsible for sourcing and purchasing the many ingredients Kraft needs to fuel its global enterprise.

O’Brien, like many Americans, had never worked with or for a wheelchair user prior to working for Brehm, but says his boss made him feel comfortable by the end of his initial interview. “He was very open and direct and told me about using a wheelchair and how he got injured. He addressed it up front and it just didn’t seem like a big deal.”

That openness also manifests in how Brehm works with his staff. “You can come to him with any idea or proposal — however crazy — and he’ll help you think through it,” says O’Brien. “He’ll tell you what he thinks and give you really good feedback. You always know where he stands on a subject.”

In addition to working closely together, Brehm and O’Brien have gotten to be good friends outside the workplace. Between trips to water parks with the Brehm family, after-work drinks and hours bonding over pinball, O’Brien has developed an appreciation of Brehm’s well-rounded approach.

“He’s just a really cool dude who happens to be in a wheelchair,” says O’Brien. “He hasn’t let being paralyzed get in the way of him being a cool person, a great dad and a successful businessman.”

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