Shifting to a Retainer-Based Business: Scaling Success with Cian Brennan

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Cian: So, originally I wanted to help them in their post award with disputes and changes and delays. But they kept asking for help with contracts in the front end. Um, so as a business person, okay, well, I see there's an option there. So what we did, obviously, so with your help, Allan many years ago we changed the business model to be a retainer model.

Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib, and we're here to discuss strategies, tactics to help you grow your business fast by doing less marketing and getting bigger results. Today, I've got a very special guest. He's a former client. He's a very good friend Cian Brennan. Now he grew his business from zero to

very high growth. And he'll discuss some numbers with us in just a moment. We'll talk about his story, but it's a great success story of someone who went from idea to implementation to [00:01:00] very high growth. And now he runs a business that really runs without him and continues to grow and go from strength to strength.

So it's a story that I think is really interesting. Welcome Cian. How are you?

Cian: I'm very good, Allan. Great to chat.

Allan: Well, been really impressed by your, not only your start, but your trajectory. You've grown really fast. You've got a product that customers absolutely love and is really sticky. You're in an industry that many people think is boring not SaaS or Silicon Valley.

ValleySo you're essentially in what objectively most people would think is a boring business, which is in the construction sector. and maybe you'll give us a little bit more context in a moment, but I think from multiple different angles, your story is unique and really interesting.

So maybe give us the high level overview of where you started, what you're doing now, who you're doing it for.

Cian: Yep, so, construction is in my blood, so my grandfather. [00:02:00] company in the West of Ireland called Brennan Construction. I've actually got a really cool little business card from 1942 with his details on it, very cool. He was head of the Irish Contractors Association back in Ireland and they went out of business.

He handed it over to my uncle and my whole family works and they went out of businessand the advice they gave to me was in construction, contractors, subcontractors, it's a tough game. You're better off going working for a big client. So go to university, go work for a big client.

And, you know, you have a lot more job security, which is exactly what I did. And did that in Ireland, came to Australia, did that for a long time, went to the Middle East, worked in Iraq, worked in Saudi Qatar basically all, all over the world.

My job was a contract specialist, right?

So I, helped these big companies form strategies to put themselves in the best [00:03:00] position contractually with their subcontractors, contractors. when stuff goes wrong. They come out on top and they make us, you know, they don't have to pay as much money as they need to pay all of that sort of stuff.

So the contract itself is a very tricky thing. And then what I found over the years was subcontractors, civil companies, scaffolding companies, just family run business, going out of business, losing money over and over again, needlessly. And. I was in Iraq on site one day and I just saw another contractor walk off site and I was a bit upset about it because they were just talking to me the previous week saying, you know, we're struggling to pay our guys.

All of this sort of stuff. And it could have been avoided if they knew. How to manage the paperwork and the contracts side of stuff. But most of these companies don't, and the bigger companies do. And there's this kind of imbalance of power and they get given these terrible contracts to sign, they sign them, stuff goes wrong.

They don't know how to manage them to go out of business.

So eventually I [00:04:00] had enough, decided I wanted to start my own business. And so quantum helps. Contractors, subcontractors basically negotiate better terms in their contracts before they win their project. And when they win their project, make sure that they do all the paperwork, have all the right advice so that if anything goes wrong they're covered, but also they're in a position to get changes and delays approved, which gives them better cashflow and better margins.

So that's kind of how the business started six years ago now.

Allan: so just for context, so you were working for the big companies I mean, if we, if this was a Hollywood movie, you'd be the bad guy initially who was kind of, you know, setting up, These, you know, terms to make sure that the big guys were all covered and often that meant that the small subcontractors might end up screwed over or whatever, because they just didn't understand the legal paperwork, right?

Cian: so the game is we like the big companies have these huge, terrible contracts, right? And they [00:05:00] give you the worst possible contract and you're expecting people to negotiate.

Allan: And give us, for people who are not in this space, who don't really understand it well, like, give an example, like, what's a bad contract? what's something that would make somebody go out of business or whatever, because of a bad contract or bad term in a contract?

Cian: So some contracts will ask you to put up your personal assets. Some contracts will say if you don't complete the work on time, you're going to be hit with what's called a liquidated damage. Which is a certain amount of money you have to pay every single day that you are late on a project.. Um, Now if that figure is astronomical or if the way the way that clause is written, if that happens, you could get yourself in big trouble.

There can be stuff that should never be in there about loss of profit by the owner. You get hit with liquidated damages, which I explained as well, but you also get hit with loss of profit. And the companies that you're working for are often huge. Their loss of profit could just wipe you out as a company.

So there's lots of little things like that can happen. Like there could be [00:06:00] term issues with your termination clause. You won't be able to get out of the contract if they don't pay you. You have to keep working stuff like that.

Allan: Wow. Okay. So you were working for these big guys. You saw a lot of people kind of going outta business, struggling, all of that. And so you saw that there's a gap in the market.

They need help, so what options were available to them and why weren't they taking options to kind of, or getting legal help would you classify yourself as a law firm or legal

Cian: No we're,contract specialists. So Everyone has a background of being on site, understanding what happens, how things play out, rather than being lawyers, if that makes sense. So we understand how the contract plays out on site.

Allan: Yeah. So why don't the contractors get legal help or have an advisor to advise them, Hey, this is a terrible clause in the contract. Don't sign it or whatever it was at cost. What's their roadblock?

Cian: Yeah, so it's,cost, to be frank. To hire someone to do all of your [00:07:00] contract's paperwork in that post award phase is very expensive, and it's also hard to find good people to do that. A lot of times with lawyers they understand the risks, but they don't understand how to negotiate.

They will go through a contract, they'll say, here are all the risks, there's tons and tons of risks, but Some of the stuff you're like, well, that doesn't apply to me as my type of company. That doesn't really matter. what's the point in trying to negotiate that? And so the outcome oftentimes isn't, isn't very good, but ultimately the big issue is cost.

So a lot of times they'll bid five or six times before they win a project. Which means five or six times, they'll have to pay for the contract to be reviewed at three, four or 5, 000 a pop, which means that it's very expensive to do. And they can't do that. So I think when I first started, I wanted to do, you know, consultancy model, which was.

I'll go in and I'll help you and I'll fix all your problems. You'd pay me to and that was very hard because you would have to charge them enough money or undercut yourself in which [00:08:00] case you wouldn't be able to run a good business to be able to help them. And it made that completely unfeasible as a business, but it also made it unfeasible for them to pay that level of money to come in to solve a problem.

Allan: Yeah. So their option was take a chance, sign the contract with these unfair terms. So next option is go to a lawyer, get it all checked out, but you might be paying 4, 000 or 5, 000 for a contract that you may not win. And you've got your bidding for many of them as well.

So it could be very expensive and you may not get any kind of return. So they're essentially the options that a subcontractor had, right?

Cian: Exactly.

Allan: and so you saw this gap in the market, you wanted to help them. What was your next step after that?

Cian: So, originally I wanted to help them in their post award with disputes and changes and delays. But they kept asking for help with contracts in the front end. So as a business person, okay, well, I see there's an option there. [00:09:00]

So what we did, obviously, so with your help, Allan many years ago we changed the business model to be a retainer model.

it wasn't very popular at the time at all. particularly in construction, people were not used to that way of, of working. However, I was then able to fractionalize the service and charge them a monthly retainer for reviewing X number of contracts and also doing their post awards support.

And so while I wouldn't be working with them all the time, every day, all day, they got everything that they needed. And at the same time, I was able to help a lot more companies So that change in business model to charging the retainer rather than the day rate was vital to our business success.

We wouldn't have had the success. We wouldn't have been able to scale if it wasn't for that.

Allan: Yeah, I remember the discussion you [00:10:00] and I had when you were first forming the business. We were talking about different, day rates or charging by the hour and all of that sort of thing. And I really felt that taking the model that IT managed service providers had used, which is essentially, hey, we're going to provide you a service for a fixed monthly fee, and

provide specific deliverables for that. So in the IT model, it's very common where, Hey, we're going to take care of your servers, your desktops, your IT stuff, all of that. We're going to charge you X number of dollars per desktop or whatever. You can submit a help desk ticket to us if you've got an issue.

And so what I like about that model is the incentives are aligned, right? the IT service provider in that case is incentivized so that no issues come up. So they can then charge the monthly fee. Whereas in the hourly model, you're incentivized to have issues crop up. Like, so

You get paid for more hours if, there's breakages and things go wrong And so I think that model was very clear where felt [00:11:00] that really applied to your industry as well, because in your industry, issues or whatever can be hugely expensive.

And so that's something that we want to avoid happening. and also the recurring monthly model is, the eighth wonder of the world, because, you know, you get to start every month, not at zero, and then have to figure out a feast and famine kind of cycle where, okay, where do we find our next client?

How do we build more hours? All of that sort of thing. So, I think that has been a game changer for yourself and for many businesses. and so how was that? Received in the industry because that was not a usual model in your industry, was it?

Cian: No, not at all.entirely online was also not a usual model at that period in time. So I got lucky. I think as well with COVID in that everything changed and strangely in construction as well, During COVID didn't really shut down in most countries.

so people were getting lots of projects and not able to [00:12:00] get people at the same time. And so needed to try something new and. That certainly helped and it was a catalyst to Quantum being such a success. I do, I just, be honest about it, I think that definitely helped. But how it was received by most people, even at the start, was pretty good. They were like, okay, right, hit me with the cost.

What's it gonna be? And then it's, oh, right, okay. That's okay. I can do that. And then when they got the cost there, they felt that what they're getting value wise was far in excess than what they would get any other way. And so we've had clients From 2019 that are still with us today I feel that as a person who wanted to help the industry and to help this model has worked to allow us to help the most amount of people. Give them the most value because there's pressure on us to be able to deliver, right? Because we need to be excellent [00:13:00] at what we do to be able to manage all of these contracts.

And then we just got better and better. We got better data and now, and I'm just being entirely honest. We have so much data. We know how to get the results. We're so fast that it's very hard to compete with us.

Allan: I love that.

So, the lifetime value is just huge. I mean, like you said, you've got retainer clients and these are not small retainers. What are your retainers? What do you charge?

Cian: It depends, on the client. So it's low end, smaller clients is about two and a bit, all the way up to 10, 000.

Allan: two to 10, 000 a month retainers. And so these are clients that have been with you from, in many cases from 2019. And so if you had have been on a hourly or, you know, whatever model, someone would be watching your back all the time saying, Oh, is that really how many hours you worked? Let's maybe see how we can cut this down or whatever.

But because they're on retainer, that's fine. Like you're taking care of us from a contract basis [00:14:00] for whatever it is, 5, 000 a month or 10, 000 a month. And we know that our contracts are all, you know, tight and taken care of.

Cian: Yep. And if anything, our clients, like this is what we want, like we really push for this to happen is we want our clients to overuse us. And so when their clients are overusing, they feel like they're getting a lot of value. It gives us an opportunity to upsell to a higher package. And it makes a big difference.

Allan: Often I've, I see so many entrepreneurs that it's their business model that's really letting them down. It's not necessarily how hard they work or even the problem that they're looking to solve. really reminds me, I mean, you and I both have been on a fitness journey for a while now.

Um, And one of the things I learned early on is the phrase was you can't out train a bad diet, you know? So if you're eating crap, right, very difficult to out train that. there's not enough time in the day and very similarly in business you can't outwork a bad business model, right?

So it's [00:15:00] very hard if you're on a, in a bad business model where, you know, you're exchanging time for money, selling an hour at a time or a day at a time. Very hard to scale with that. and Get Anywhere. So the business model you know, I would every single day I would choose a, an mediocre entrepreneur with a great business model versus an amazing entrepreneur with a crappy business model.

So you've had, very high growth. So do you mind sharing some numbers around what your growth trajectory looked like, you know, year one, year two up until now?

Cian: Yeah essentially the first three years was more than a double every year. And then now we're into a bit more 50 and then I think it was 40 growth. I think we're sitting just under 2 million in profit a year.

Allan: Wow. That's great. and so that's just from, you know, no investment, no special software, no whatever crazy stuff. You just started one day and added [00:16:00] client one, client two, client three uh, up until,

Cian: That's it. my first goal was five clients. Then it was to pay our bills at home. But that's it. Like, First thing was turn a profit, right? Turn a profit. Then just pay the bills. I know I'm still losing money, right? But now at least I'm not, like, you know, losing crazy money. It's just like home life is okay. Then it was okay. Replace my income.

Then it was 20 clients. Then it was hit a million. So now I think we're, yeah, we've got a lot more clients.

Allan: Amazing.

And the more impressive part, that you hardly work in the business at all. Like you've got it running, under management. So you've got a CEO who runs the business. You're pretty free.

It's not that you don't work at all in the business, but you know, it's very light for you. So you're not like one of those people who are like 80 hours a week, working crazy hours, just doing insane stuff. So talk about how you got to that stage.

Cian: I mean, everything I have to caveat, there's so many mistakes and so many wasted money.And in this [00:17:00] process as well, there's lots and lots of mistakes. I think that comes with it. And it was very simply there's stuff within the business I just didn't want to do. In the first place, I think there's a much better way to do this if you're strategically, you know, inclined.

But for me, I immediately didn't want to spend my days reading through contracts because it's very time consuming and quite repetitive. So, I hired someone to, do that work and create a procedure around that and then essentially continue to do that. That was it. So then we hired a bookkeeper to do all the invoicing.

And I was then basically I was only in sales. So then I hired someone to set calls and book calls. Then I hired a closer. So now the business kind of runs on itself. And as we grew in volume, I hired more of those people The hardest part about that was getting over myself and that [00:18:00] other people could do this and it didn't have to be me.

That was probably the most, but actually just going out and doing it was fine. The harder bit then was the management piece, getting good managers into the business. And so that piece took a while to get it right. But eventually we got someone who's in charge of acquisition so marketing and sales, someone who's in charge of delivery of our service and someone who's in charge of finance, HR, and then it was just me as CEO, then we needed someone to basically, operationally run the business.

Again, it just, it was like, I no longer want to run the business the day to day. I want to spend my time more on the marketing front end side. And so it's just the same process over and over again. For me, it was whenever I feel like I don't want to do something or my time would be best spent elsewhere, then I would hire someone to do that.

Create the system, create exactly the job description of exactly what I need them [00:19:00] to achieve the problem that they're solving. What I expect from them on a monthly basis, a weekly basis. I just made it as clear as day so that when they start, they're like, okay, I know exactly what's expected of me.

And there was loads, loads of issues, absolutely loads of issues, but honestly, that journey to where I am now, and even the journey I'm on now Is the biggest growth I've had as a person. So you can read all the books you want, but unless you actually experience it happening and, bad things happening, good things happening.

I didn't even know what leadership was. I remember talking to Dr Ben, a mutual friend, and he was like, okay, now your role is leadership. I'm like. What do you mean? Like, do I look like literally? I was like, what do you mean? I was like, Oh no, I don't even know. I just like, why can't these people just go and do the thing that I told them to do?

You know, it's just really a nice, you know, I was started off as pure military style leadership, which obviously is not great for organization. And then slowly, but surely, as you educate yourself you [00:20:00] get a lot better. And

Allan: So talk about some of those lessons that you learnt where you said you've made a lot of mistakes. what were some of those mistakes? How did you solve some of these issues? What did you learn about leadership in the whole process?

Cian: So I thinkI want to get this done. I want to hire someone quickly. A

nd so you need to fight that or the mistake I made was I hired too quickly. And not a good hiring process. And then when people came on, it wasn't exactly clear what they needed to do every day and what their accountabilities are, what they're responsible for, what I expect their output to be.

And so I just hired people quickly. I'm like, okay, I'll teach them on the go sort of thing. whenever I did that was a terrible idea. You really need to have it really spelled out so that it's a good start for them as well. when they start, they have the opportunity to succeed because they know exactly what you want from them.

So that was a definite mistake. Promoting from within this is so complicated really believe in promoting internally [00:21:00] from the company. But that isn't always the case, particularly in sales. So I think there's something called the Peter principle. A lot of times people are really good technicians and they don't want to be anything more than a technician. And I didn't likeme, I'm very ambitious and I just assumed that everybody was ambitious and that isn't the case. Some people like to clock in, do their work, clock home, make good money, spend time with their family, not put in extra hours, not have to manage people. whenever I promoted someone particularly from a salesperson who was really good at getting deals across the line to being a sales manager disaster, different type of person.

And you learn that over time but in different roles, that's okay. Someone from delivery who's great at their job. Like day to day tends to be pretty good as a delivery manager because they know exactly what it needs to do to achieve different. It's the same type of person, but just in a different role.

So and then again, the same issue for the top of the [00:22:00] operator person to see the CEO of the business. How do we get that person into the business? That's all of those are big challenges. You learn over time and you become a much better person yourself to see these traits in people.

Allan: a couple of things I really want to highlight there is I also firmly believe in promoting from within. And the point is that someone who's really good at their role, may not be a good manager in their role. They may not even want to be a manager in their role, and they may be only taking that because it pays more.

I heard a really good analogy, I think it was from Vern Harnish, and he was basically talking about this exact issue, because sometimes someone may be really good in sales, and so their only path to promotion looks like going to sales management, and then they're terrible at that job.

And so what Vern suggested is creating kind of gates, so a level one network. Setter or level one, closer, level two, level three. So having gates that you can pass [00:23:00] through, but still stay in that role, but make more money. It's kind of like he likened it tofootball. So the progression isn't necessarily to go from being a footballer to being a coach, it's to being a higher paid footballer and so on and so forth.

And so Progression, I think is important for team members, but sometimes the progression is not necessarily into management. It's just progressing in their role and figuring out, Hey, how can you make more money in your role as a sales manager, as an assistant, as whatever, and figuring that path out and creating levels within that role.

Cian: Yeah, I think it as a business owner and there's a really good book called Succession Thinking by a guy called Bill Witters and he's just analyzed lots and lots of small organizations like when we talk about SMEs, small to medium enterprise, we're still talking. You know, I think it's below 200 million a year and 200 employees or something.

It's but it's definitely 200 employees a year is still considered a small, medium sized business. And he looked at those and he goes, a lot of companies [00:24:00] try to turn themselves into like Publicly listed company and so they promote from within, they create a board and like just for just because they think that's the way to go about doing it, but apparently for small to medium sized business, that's not the way to do it.

And if you can create an organization where someone who is a technician still is part of a leadership team,

Allan: Yeah.

Cian: and so you can in this example, you could have someone who is a closer. It being with your company for five or six years remains a closer, but you have put him into the organization leadership time team.

And so he's progressed that way, but he's still in his, technician role. Cause we know that if we take him out of there, he's going to be terrible as a manager. So I think that was, useful.

From a leadership point of view, the thing that sat with me most was Did you know you can train cats, Allan?

Allan: I didn't uh,

Cian: you go. So,

Allan: I've got a new puppy, so I know I can train dogs, but I didn't know about cats.

Cian: So the analogy [00:25:00] that was given to me that really stuck with me is like, an organization is like a cat, right? It's not like a dog. A dog you can train with a carrot and a stick. Right.you give them food, you beat him over the head with a newspaper,

Right. And they're happy. But the military is like dogs, they don't have any other options. They won't go anywhere else. And so that's why that works in that scenario, but in a company, If you use the carrot and stick approach, which most people do, It's like a cat.

If you hit a cat over the head with a newspaper, he's gone. He's going to find someone else who's going to give him foods and gone instantly. And so how do you train cats? It's more about praise, not punishment. How can we give little gems of, or lollipop leadership as it's called, there's a TED talk called lollipop leadership, how do we give gems that inspire people to continue to work harder, to, you know, do their best, like love coming into [00:26:00] work every day and creating that sort of environment has been absolutely key to our success, and that's allowed me to be able to not work in the business because I trust all the people that are in the business to do a better job than me, My CEO now runs a much better ship than I ever did. And that's, that's what I want.

Allan: So you kind of mentioned something earlier that you had kind of a naive approach to like, Hey, why can't this person just do what I told them to do? So what's the answer to that? why can't this person I hired just do the thing that I want them to do? Like

Cian: Because they don't care. So you, as an entrepreneur is like, this is my everything, right? It's my babies, my family's on the line. I'm risking my money. I'm risking all of this. So you care deeply about the outcome. Their motivation is their family, their motivation is their life, their personal life, their Maslow hierarchy of needs, not your Maslow.

And so, first instance, you can't expect them to care as much as you do.

But you [00:27:00] can work it on the Maslow's hierarchy. You can get them to care about being amazing at their job, because that's a part of their life. How can we work on that little corner to be like, okay, let's you become amazing at your thing.

And you'll get amazing satisfaction about becoming an amazing technician, amazing at your job, great rewards for your job, so their job is just part of their life. And if that part of their life is amazing. Then that's all you can do, but job is not their life.

Yeah.

Allan: Because you said in the beginning, Hey, why isn't the person just doing what I'm doing? Things are falling apart. And then, you know, now you're at a stage where you can trust people. You have a lot of free time and autonomy.

What was the change in between?

Cian: So I spent all my time then on culture and leadership, right? So it's up to me to define the culture. And first of all, it's setting, what is our culture? Very clear. What is our culture? And is that shown to people on a regular basis? [00:28:00] Here's our core values.

Here are our culture statements. Here are the things we are the type of people who, Here's how we operate. And so what happens when you do that is you bring it in initially. And some people resonate with it. And because you know that's what you want, your high performance probably resonates.

And some people don't resonate with it. They're like, no, I don't like that. And they kind of, I call it shaking the culture tree. They kind of They fall away because you're showing this is how I want to be. This is who I want us to be. And you're demonstrating that all the time. It's front and center.

It's in every meeting you're giving, you know, you'd shown videos about a particular thing. You're talking about it as much as you possibly can. It's always there. so the people that are not that type of people fall away, and then you attract people who are that type of people, and then you have an organization that completely buys into this new culture, everyone acts that way, everyone does their work that way, and the leadership works that way, and then it all,the whole culture just changes because it's the type of people, [00:29:00] really, when we're talking about culture is if your company had a personality, what would they be and that's what you're defining and you have to make a huge amount of effort to say that this is what we are.

This is who we are. And you have to do it when you start hiring new people it's in the job ad, it's in their job description. Then as they're onboarded, it's talked about again in our weekly meetings is talk about againand everyone knows, okay, this is. You know, these guys, this isn't something that they have on their about page that, you know, we're best in class type person.

It's literally, this is who we are. You know, I'm either I need to play ball, or I need to find a different job.

Allan: So to play devil's advocate a bit, like, whenever someone talks about culture and values in a business and all of that sort of stuff you know, it makes me think of like when I walk into some corporate office and there's a, there's a line poster that says, you know, hard work, excellence, all of that sort of stuff.

Some, they had a one day off site and they worked with a consultant and they're, we're [00:30:00] about hard work. We're about excellence. We're about, you know, client focus or whatever. Right. And how much does that stuff really, like when, you know, the closer opens up his CRM system to call people that are going to be excellent today, I'm going to be client focused today or whatever, or is it more of just attracting talent that already has those kind of values inbuilt?

Cian: Yeah that was exactly how I felt like I just thought it was all willy nilly bullshit. Right. It was just, you know, Oh yeah, exactly what you said. Really facetious. Cause I've been in the corporate environment when they did exactly that.

So within our business. When you do it properly, it's, you know, there's some bad language in there. Potentially there's, you make it your own. this is the stuff that we do every day. And it's about behaviors.

Instead of saying like, we're great, right? It's like, no, we're not great. We're brilliant at the basics. we do the boring work because we know other companies won't do it. And we know that's what makes the [00:31:00] difference.

So that's one of our lines, right? Which means that I show for your cold caller, I do the boring work. Because I know others won't, you come in, you read that. You're like, Oh, I gotta make another call right now. I can do this. This is it. I can take solace in that. call. I'll do the call because I know this is part of the process.

If I do this bit, I'm going to get this bit over here. And so we have loads of those types of different ones, but that was just an example.

Allan: Yeah excellent, excellent.

And so, um,what's your journey now? So what are you doing day to day? Where are you going with the business? What's the goal?

Cian: Yeah. It's been 10 months since I haven't really worked in the business. So I'm part of what we call our navigation team. that is our organization leadership team. our navigation team formulates the future of the business, the operational leadership team.

Runs the day to day business. So I'm part of what we're doing in the future. strategy, and so I I get a quick update, once a week, a longer update once a month. quarter we do our strategy for the next quarter. And then once a [00:32:00] strategy for the next year.

So that's what I do day to day in the business. This year I've written a book for construction companies also had to deal with not working. So I'm sure you had this as well, Alan. So it's not all fun and games. I've come from like, I dunno, it's not like panic mode, but just go problem, fire, problem, fire, you know, just pure, just getting stuff done to silence.

And your life changes a little bit when that happens. And you think it's all like, you think but I actually very much struggled with that. And so it took me a while to figure out. new goals, new ways of doing things, like what am I going to do next? And so that was a process that I probably needed some time to be able to formulate that.

So books going to be launched in probably the next six months, I would imagine. And from theregrow at services, different businesses within quantum and try and, grow uh, a federation of companies.

Allan: I love it.

How exciting I mean, I think [00:33:00] it's the dream of every entrepreneur to get to a stage where business is running under management. There's no crazy fires happening. And your net, importantly very profitable, but also you're getting to work on cool projects, long term vision stuff.

You're not, in the day to day putting out fires, this customer's complaining, this person wants to leave, this whatever, all of this sort of stuff that's handled and be able to work on big picture, exciting projects, books, podcasts, personal brand, all of that sort of stuff, which many entrepreneurs just never ever get to just because they're too busy with the day to day, because they haven't set up this kind of infrastructure.

Cian: And to be candid as well, I did have an issue. So we've had companies try and buy us three times. And in that process two times I was in the business both times it kind of derailed the business a bit

Because it really took my focus away.

Even though I really didn't want to do it, it really did.

It took a lot of brain [00:34:00] power away. But the third time it was super easy for me. I was able to analyze it and I was like, no simply um, and that was much nicer. So, you know, when you're not working every day in the operation that you do get to work, you see bigger picture stuff and it makes it easier.

Allan: I love it. Cian you've been a real inspiration. I love that you're such an implementer. You know, youI mean, I gave similar advice to dozens of people. You went out and implemented. I'm not saying other people didn't implement, but you really implemented with extreme kind of enthusiasm and really put the focus in, you put the work in, you really did it well.

So you're a great implementer, which I really appreciate. And your trajectory has been incredibly impressive. Where can people find you, find more about you?

Cian: Well just if it's in business, quantumcontracts. com or just Google my name, Cian Brennan, C I A N Brennan. I'm sure I'll pop up somewhere on a podcast We have a [00:35:00] construction secrets podcast. We YouTube channel, all of this stuff, but Google's probably your friend, C I A N Brennan. Actually, I'll tell you one story just before we go, Allan, of about the implementation and kind of what clicked with me, I remember years ago.

with you and I had spent, I don't know, I must've spent three or four days working on a logo and you were like,Like just, it doesn't matter a damn, just pick any logo. And I was like, I was like, it really doesn't. Right. And then when I said, I was just like, well, when someone knows more than you in a particular area, just do that thing and then just move on.

So you can actually move on to the next thing, right? Otherwise you just get stuck in something useless. Right. So my logo is still the logo. I ended up paying like 5 for on Fiverr.

Allan: And I'm pretty sure none of your high paying 10, 000 client care about your

Cian: don't give a damn.They don't give a damn.

Allan: I love it. Thank [00:36:00] you so much, Cian. You've been very generous with your time and your knowledge. It's been a pleasure to know you and be a friend. And so thank you very much for being on.

Cian: Pleasure, Allan.

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