Maddy Avery

I've been building things on computers since I was a kid and studying why people buy since university. Birdcage is what happens when you refuse to pick one.

We build custom software for local businesses and run the marketing that grows them. Not a website and a logo. The actual system a business runs on, and the campaigns that fill it.

Most owners I meet are running a real business on spreadsheets, screenshots and memory. They don't need a transformation strategy. They need the three things they do every day to stop taking four hours.

I started Birdcage in 2015, at 25, with one client. It became Birdcage Group in 2018 and now runs as three arms. Birdcage Studios builds. Birdcage Business Builders grows. Birdcage School teaches the owners who'd rather do it themselves.

Somewhere along the way we stopped setting hours. My team choose their own days and their own start times, and profit went up four times over. Yahoo Finance covered it twice. People still tell me it shouldn't work.

I guest lecture business and MBA students at James Cook University, write for Inside Small Business, and work as a creative strategist for TikTok, Adobe, HP, Framer and Similarweb. In 2022 Birdcage was named a Queensland state finalist in the Telstra Best of Business Awards.

I'm based in regional Queensland, which is the point. The businesses I build for are the ones nobody flies out to see.