Something was wrong with real estate. Kyle Gregory knew it early. The Meta ads were converting, the leads were coming in, and yet every sale moved through weeks of viewings, negotiations, and slow-moving buyers before a commission appeared. For a 16-year-old running a marketing agency from the UK, that lag was a problem.
So he shut it down.
Gregory had launched RealThrive as an agency running Meta ads for property professionals in the US and UK. It had clients. The technical side worked. But the feedback loops were too long, and when a different kind of client came into view, he rebuilt the business for them instead. He was 18 when he made the move.
The new market was service-based businesses. Gregory found that these businesses could scale faster and offered the kind of feedback loop he was looking for. When a campaign worked, the results could be visible in days rather than months. He also describes himself as simply more interested in that world, a preference he states plainly on the company’s About page, and one that has shaped how RealThrive operates today.
How He Got There
Before the agency, there were shoes. Gregory started buying and reselling footwear at 15, a side operation he picked up from a friend who was already doing it. No salary, just arbitrage and logistics. It didn’t produce a great deal of money, but it produced something he kept: a taste for building things without a safety net.
Born and raised in the UK to a family he says gave a great deal for him, Gregory was 16 when he registered RealThrive and began running paid social campaigns for real estate clients. Most people at that age are still figuring out what comes after school. He was already running a business and learning, through direct experience, which clients he didn’t want.
Real estate taught him one thing well: the market you choose shapes everything that follows. A long sales cycle means slow feedback, slow learning, and slow iteration. The service-based business market offered the opposite.
What RealThrive Builds
RealThrive today works with service-based businesses across four areas: paid funnels, cold outbound, AI workflows and automation, and reporting and attribution. Most client engagements involve some combination of two or three of those.
The paid funnel work covers Meta ads, registration and opt-in pages, email sequences, and the SMS follow-up running behind them. One emphasis the firm makes on its website is that attribution setup comes before anything else. Most funnels, the site notes, leak somewhere between ad and booked call, and without the right tracking in place, no one can say where. Setting up measurement before launching a campaign makes the question of which ad produced which bookings answerable rather than a matter of guesswork.
Cold outbound at RealThrive goes well past building a list. The firm handles lead scraping, email verification, inbox setup, the outreach copy, and the sending infrastructure that routes replies into a CRM with context attached. Gregory’s own account is that most operations already do the list-building part. The follow-up sequence is what determines whether any of it goes anywhere.
The automation work is the least dramatic of the four. Lead routing and software integrations between tools that were never set up to communicate with each other. Reports rebuilt by hand each Monday are one of the most common examples clients recognize when they talk through what they actually do each week. The argument for fixing these is arithmetic: the hours add up, and once a system handles them, they stop adding up.
Reporting and attribution ties the rest together. One dashboard showing what each channel costs and what it returns, updated without manual intervention, so the next budget decision isn’t driven by instinct.
What the Work Has Produced
RealThrive publishes several case studies on its homepage. A full webinar funnel built for a UK property mentoring business is reported to have contributed to one workshop that generated £88,000 in signed deals, with payments arriving in stages. Cold outbound work for a marketing company is described as producing more than 50 booked appointments and over $160,000 in closed revenue in a single month. A webinar rebuild and marketing systems engagement for a fractional CMO and coaching business owner is noted as coinciding with what that client described as her first $50,000 month. A separate funnel and backend engagement is attributed with supporting a month of $93,600 in gross volume, up 54 percent on the month before.
These engagements reflect the range of service-based businesses Gregory has worked with, while his current focus is on helping established service-based businesses operating at the six- and seven-figure level build more predictable systems for growth.
RealThrive’s own About page is clear about context: a client’s numbers depend on their offer and market, not on the firm’s. These are individual results from specific engagements.
Gregory has also built a track record on Upwork, where he currently holds a Top Rated designation. His profile on the platform shows a 5.0 rating from 18 client reviews across 37 completed contracts. He runs a YouTube channel as a parallel form of transparency, posting daily on the grounds that what he does for clients is otherwise invisible from the outside, and that making it visible lets people assess the fit before they book anything.
According to RealThrive’s own account, the firm now generates around $30,000 a month. Gregory is 19. He says his motivation is reaching a position where he can improve the quality of life of the people around him, a goal he connects directly to his family and to what they gave him growing up.
