Rags to riches: How Tammy Barton created a multi-million dollar company
Mum-of-three Tammy Barton shares the five words she repeated to herself when launching a business that’s now used by over 130,000 Australians.
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She’s made her name counting dollars and cents for tens of thousands of Australians, helping to manage their budgets and change their lives.
But in her own life, it’s blessings that MyBudget entrepreneur Tammy Barton says she’s counting – for her little brother, Josh, and the richness he’s brought to her family.
At the age of six, Josh was diagnosed with Angelman’s Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes delayed motor development. He doesn’t speak and needs 24-hour care.
That made life more complex and hectic as she was growing up – but it also made Barton grateful for the lessons that chaos taught her.
“There were so many blessings in having Josh as part of our lives, I truly believe I wouldn’t be the person I am today without those experiences,” says the 46-year-old, who has built her multimillion-dollar business helping her customers manage their money.
“I just learnt so much from him, even though when I was younger I used to think how unlucky we were to have Josh in our family when all the other kids could just do things.
“It wasn’t until I hit my early 20s and I realised ‘wow, I learnt so much from him about patience, gratitude and kindness, coping with stress and under pressure’.
“Growing up with a highly intellectually disabled brother, really made you grateful for everything you have in life.”
From those treasured times and challenges, Barton forged her life’s motto: “How hard can it be?” That optimistic mantra – used to start her $55m business from her kitchen table nearly 25 years ago – has been the driving force for her runaway success with MyBudget, which she manages from its Frome St headquarters.
The company now has offices in every state of Australia and offshore in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. It has 130,000 customers on its books, managing their daily budgets, paying their bills, providing weekly spending money – and, in many cases, saving their lives.
“To see the relief when I sit there and say ‘it’s going to be completely fine, look at your budget, you’re going to have savings, we’re going to pay all your bills for you, you don’t have to worry about a thing, you’re going to get your living money every week’,” says Barton.
“It took me a little while to work out the value I was delivering. I thought I was helping people with their financial difficulties, which I was. But the value I was delivering was actually changing their lives. I’ve had people tell me that I’ve saved their marriage or they were suicidal before they came to us.”
The story of Barton’s success begins in Morphett Vale in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, where she grew up the eldest of four siblings in a young family.
Her mum, Janet Cannizzaro, a daughter of Irish Protestant immigrants, was just 16 when she gave birth to Barton. Her Catholic dad, Grant Monaghan, was 19. It caused a bit of a scandal for the families, who had fled the Troubles in Belfast. The teens were married in a Uniting Church before Barton was born.
Barton’s sister, Kelly, arrived five years later. Josh was born when she was eight, followed by youngest sister Lisa-Marie. That family dynamic – being so much older than her brother and sisters – made Barton an independent, mature thinker with a sharp focus on her future.
At 15, a year before she could legally drive, she bought her first car, a blue Mitsubishi Gallant. She finished Year 12 at Cardijn College in Noarlunga when she was still only 16 and immediately set her sights on making money.
“My parents let me make all my decisions in my life, including what was I going to do when I finished school. Because they were younger, it sort of meant we were on the same page. And the first thing I could think was I need to get a job because I need to be financially independent, look after myself, and I can study at night, which is what I went and did,” says Barton, who did accounting at TAFE while working as a trust accountant and helping in debt collection for Norwood legal firm Nicholls Gervasi and Co.
“Because they were so preoccupied with Josh and my siblings, it allowed me to have the freedom I needed to tread my own path. I had discipline but certainly they felt confident and comfortable with me making life decisions.”
The financially driven Barton bought her first house – a deceased estate in Black Forest – at 20. It was a stretch, one she managed by eating baked beans and two-minute noodles and sticking to a scrupulously kept weekly budget.
During the day, she was dealing with people who had found themselves in debt after failing to appreciate the value of a budget – and she felt compelled to help them.
“What I quickly worked out was that a lot of people didn’t know what they could afford, even though they had good jobs, good salaries – they were certainly earning a lot more than I was,” she says. “I realised it wasn’t about income, it was about how you manage your money.”
And that’s how MyBudget was born.
Barton started seeing clients in their homes, creating budgets that would help them pay down debts and still have a liveable income.
“And I realised very quickly the way to make that work was I had to do it all for them, pay their bills and write their cheques,” she says. “And so I thought ‘how hard can that be?’.”
Before long, Barton had to quit her day job to keep up with referrals from banks, accountants and finance brokers. She managed everything by hand, writing cheques at her kitchen table
“I thought ‘I can’t continue to grow the business without automating some of this’. I needed a system that was going to help me become more efficient. There was nothing off the shelf ... and again, I thought, ‘how hard can it be, I’ll just build something’,” she says.
With a $60,000 loan financed by the equity in her first home, Barton’s software engineers created Activ, which has lasted more than two decades.
The company is only now in the process of spending $30m on new, AI-capable software to embrace the future.
With helpful tech, the business grew rapidly – and so did Barton’s family. At 23, she married finance broker Eddie May and their daughter Maddie, was born in November 2002.
It forced a huge change that helped MyBudget’s rapid trajectory.
“I had to step out of the business for a while so I had to work out how to make sure the business ran when I wasn’t there,” says Barton. “When I came back, I was able to work on the business, not in it ... and that’s when the business started to grow.”
When son Seth was born two years later, she was back in the office after a fortnight, putting in three or four-day weeks until he started school.
In the late 2000s, MyBudget moved interstate, starting with a Melbourne office that went “gang busters”and spreading to NSW, Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland. Its Sri Lankan arm employs 45 staff to work on the new technology and its Philippines support centre has a team of 45.
Privately, Barton used her growing wealth to building a property portfolio, adding – and then selling – homes in Davoren Park, investing with her dad in commercial holdings and buying a holiday home south of Adelaide.
After 10 years, Barton’s marriage to May came to an end but they remained friendly co-parents. “I would say out of all my friends who have had divorces, Eddie and I came through the best,” she says. “We didn’t call each other names or get lawyers, we realised we both want to be the best parents we can, we’re going to be in each other’s lives so just get on with it.”
Eighteen months later, she fell for tradesman Nathan Barton, who she met through mutual friends. They welcomed their “whoopsie” baby, Ellie, in 2013 and married two years later.
Nathan is now driving MyHomeBuild, a construction offshoot of MyBudget selling custom houses. Work is a family affair, with Maddie joining MyBudget as a team leader.
Today, MyBudget has clients that have been with the company for 23 years. They have had children, put them through their education and are now looking at retirement.
“I take it very seriously and I also think it’s a privilege,” says the 2017 Telstra South Australian Businesswoman of the Year.
She’s focused on the future, with long-held plans to open offices in the US and UK, where she predicts her model will strike a big chord.
But Barton also relishes the past – and pays homage to it every fortnight, when she has Josh, now 39, for dinner. It’s a regular reminder of how grateful she is to have him in her life. “I think most definitely childhood still shapes who I am today. That gratitude and empathy ... that shaped me and definitely helped me build that success.”
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