Your Social Voice

Kim Barrett spent 10 years working inside accounting firms, IT companies, and grain trading businesses, where he became obsessed with one thing: how to grow revenue through better marketing. He watched businesses struggle with visibility and lead generation, and realized there was a massive gap between the complexity of modern marketing and the tools available to service-based businesses. By his mid-twenties, he had the expertise but not yet the vehicle to scale it.

In 2013, Kim founded Your Social Voice with a simple thesis: if he could master Facebook ads and online lead generation, he could do it for others. Rather than build software, he built a service business. He created three tiered packages: Facebook Marketing Pro (AUD $4,400), Facebook Lead Gen Pro (AUD $6,600), and Marketing Partner (AUD $11k). The focus was ruthless—lead generation, content retargeting, and treating client businesses as his own. He kept the operation lean at first, relying on Podio as his project management backbone to track clients, leads, and KPIs. For three years, the business stayed small. Then in 2015, something shifted.

Starting around March 2015, Your Social Voice kicked into gear. Kim's own Facebook lead generation became the primary customer acquisition engine—99% of new clients came from ads he was running for his own agency. Word of mouth and referrals filled the remaining 1%. By the end of 2015, just 10 months into the growth phase, the agency had closed close to 450k-500k in total revenue with 25 active clients. Cash received ran at 50-60% of booked revenue due to payment terms. Retention was solid at 80% month-to-month, though the mix included one-off project clients who would churn after a single campaign.

What worked: Kim hired two full-time salespeople and compensated them aggressively—15% commission on first sale, 15% on each renewal month, plus a base salary of AUD $300-500 depending on tenure. When they hit targets, their base increased weekly. This structure kept his sales team's pipelines full and enabled him to selectively decline one-off project work in favor of long-term retainers. He also built a distributed team, hiring 10 staff in Perth and another five assistants across Philippines and Africa to keep costs lean while maintaining service quality.

What didn't: The 80% retention rate meant Kim couldn't rely on revenue stacking—he had to keep bringing in new customers. Some salespeople weren't incentivized by money alone, so he experimented with non-monetary rewards like trips and personal branding. He also had one experiment in publishing: a co-authored bestselling book called "Winning in Life and Work: New Beginnings" (2015) that sold 4,000 units on launch day across AU/UK/US and hit #3-4 on the US charts. But it generated no direct revenue for Kim personally and became more of a marketing play than a revenue driver.

As of March 2016, Your Social Voice was firing on all cylinders. In the first two months of 2016 alone, Kim booked $290k in sales (with $210k in cash received). His target was aggressive: hit $110k in recurring monthly revenue by October 2016. At 27 years old, he had scaled a 15-person team across two continents, built a repeatable acquisition machine powered by his own Facebook ads expertise, and proven that a service agency could grow 10x in a single year. The key was never forgetting that a service business wins on sales force excellence, not on passive revenue stacking—so he invested heavily in recruitment, incentives, and retention of high-performing salespeople while ruthlessly focusing his own marketing efforts on channels that worked.