Council & Business
16 June, 2026
Bounce Global celebrates 20 years since launch
Maryborough born employment coaching and training organisation Bounce Global is marking its 20 year anniversary this month, celebrating growth that has seen the business expand internationally.
Bounce Global is a training and coaching business, founded by now creative director Maria Smith in 2006 in response to the high rate of unemployment in the community at the time.
“We had the fourth highest unemployment rate in the country, and I saw a need for developing soft skills and human skills for unemployed or long term unemployed individuals,” she said.
“So, I developed the program which was specifically about job readiness and employability skills, developing emotional intelligence based on positive psychology, cognitive behavioural coaching, and a lot of those emotional intelligence skills as well.
“Back then I thought ‘if I can make it to 10 years, I’ll be really happy’, so it is still quite an achievement at 20 years, to have created and built something that is making a difference.”
The organisation started out as a program in a small training room hosting the ‘Bounce Back to Life’ program to assist local participants with those exact skills, and has since expanded to reach tens of thousands of people.
“It’s amazing to think of those humble beginnings down in High Street, where it was just me, doing promotion and delivery, all while I was the sole parent to my son,” Ms Smith said.
“At the time, I developed the train the trainer model. I had been delivering the training and getting results but I could only have an impact with 16 people at a time, so then I designed the train the trainer model to what it now is today. So now we licence the program, it took off across Victoria, across Australia, and then went into the US 14 years ago.
“We have been in New Zealand for 10 years. Out of all that, it has been growing into the skills of job coaching and we have programs specific to leadership skills.”
While Bounce Global has broadly expanded its services overseas, several local organisations still partner with them, a current one being Sonac. Bounce has also supported Havilah, Central Gold-fields Shire, and the Maryborough District Health Service in recent years.
The company has also worked in partnership with government, employment services, and organi-sations across multiple industries, focusing on ‘human skills’, being resilience, emotional intelligence and leadership.
Still delivering from their Sutton Road site, the business now operates largely online.
“Ever since COVID, we all worked from home and have sustained that model. I did six round the world trips last year, so the whole team work remotely, but any delivery that is done locally is done on that site of the business,” Ms Smith said.
“Having an online platform, an academy with all of our training online, so it can be done anywhere.”
As for Bounce Global’s future projects, Ms Smith is keen to partner with universities throughout Australia and as far as the US.
“The most exciting thing is our partnership coming up with Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology (MIT), that is an apex pinnacle moment, to have our human skills working within a model within MIT in their apprenticeship space, that for me is pretty cool,” she said.
“We have put forward a project with the University of Canberra working with Future Skills organisations, that’s pretty exciting.
“We also have a product we are launching into education, for educators to engage with more and more disengaged learners, now we are delivering that in the space of education, so universities, TAFEs, RTOs, its a space we know how to engage.”
Bounce CEO Kelly Mason is equally excited for Bounce’s future initiatives.
“We are looking at rolling out a retail hospitality project, probably kicking off in Bendigo, just providing some of those human skills across those sectors,” she said.
“Another one is our job coach navigator, it’s really a tool inside our job coach certification training, and outside of that, those who support job seekers to give them an AI based tool where they can get that real time support on how to actually work with others, from a coaching perspective.”
To mark the milestone, Bounce Global hosted a 20th-anniversary celebration in Melbourne, bringing together team members, partners and supporters to reflect on the journey so far and look ahead.
“We had a huge celebration last week that was incredibly moving for me, it was just a really beautiful moment to see friends, family, colleges and clients sharing that celebration,” Ms Smith said.
“It takes a village to do this. It’s so much about the people who have been around me from the beginning for family support and navigating the growth of Bounce, and if you take care of your people, they take care of you.”