A new chapter in Barrett’s 25-year history

When I founded Barrett 25 years ago in January 1995, my goal was to create a different type of business consultancy; one that specialised in all things sales but from the perspective of being collaborative, team oriented, personally reflective, self-aware and human centric; a business with heart where people were at the centre of everything we did.

It’s been exciting ever since, and now we are taking the next step in our journey.

But first things first. Back when we started we first focussed on salespeople, helping them overcome any self-limiting beliefs and negative behaviours that show up as Call Reluctance® and keep them from performing at their best. We also focused on specific skills training and development, in particular, how to prospect and generate new businesses, as well as do effective solution selling. Very soon we became the 3^rd largest distributor in the world for SPQ*Gold, an assessment to measure Call Reluctance® and I was often known as ‘SPQ Sue’ given the amount of assessments we processed and the training we did in this space.

So it made sense that in late 1997, when I was pregnant with my first child Josh, we moved our office from the two little rooms we had in Kings Arcade in Armadale, to a much bigger space in Caulfield South, that allowed us to grow the team, and offer facilities for people to complete their assessments, get in-person feedback, and at the same time have somewhere to train our clients’ sales teams. It was also close to home, so I could work fulltime and still be close to my children as I was within walking distance to home and school and had flexibility.   

Always family friendly, we have grown and adapted with the times. We’ve created new tools, educational programs, assessments, frameworks, online resources, systems and even a philosophy, and evolved into the business we are today: a business consultancy and education firm specialised in human centred sales; selling with heart, with purpose and with people and the planet at the centre of everything we do.

We, like many businesses, have been challenged too, but this has never deterred us from staying the course and pioneering better ways to lead honourable sales careers, lead and educate sales teams, and manage better sales operations. Through our pioneering work we now, as many of you know, focus on sales systems as the pathway to sustainable sales success. Much of our work is now delivered through online resources and remotely, reaching customers around the globe.

So two years ago, we started the process of looking for a new space to work, more suited to the kind of business we have become – a business that is leading the way in Sales Systems and works with organisations around the world – no boundaries. However, like many before us, we found we ‘never’ had the time and emotional bandwidth to properly look for options and consider a move -sorting, packing, emptying drawers, etc-. Then COVID happened and it acted as the catalyst that we needed to make major positive change; it forced us to finally and literally clean and clear our desks to be able to work from home, and from that it was clear we could go all the way and clear the whole space.

I know it’s not for everyone but working remotely since March 2020 has worked for us. We do miss seeing each other in person, of course, but we have found, as a team and business, we already had everything we needed to do this with some tweaks and the dedicated effort from our miracle IT man Jobst.

In fact, clearing out the office, was already liberating even though we haven’t found a new place yet. It might take us a while, but we are excited about this new chapter in our history.

*Spoilers*: the new place will allow for the flexibility we already had of working together or from home, with the tech to deliver work locally and globally. One thing is for sure, it will be near a train station and coffee shops, we are Melbournians after all.

Remember, everybody lives by selling something.

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