Colin O'Brien's Recipe for Success Beyond the Counter

Have you ever witnessed someone's evolution from a bustling cafe manager to an entrepreneurial force feeding thousands of children every day? That's the journey Colin O'Brien, the Dublin-born dynamo, takes us through, as he shares the pivotal moments and mindset shifts that propelled him from managing a Beulies Cafe franchise to launching a thriving school meals enterprise. His story isn't just about food; it's about feeding ambition and serving up success against the odds.

During our time with Colin, we peel back the layers of what it means to truly embrace the mantle of business owner after the sting of a failed venture. His openness about the influence of mentors, the guiding principles from Amway's educational tools, and the philosophical gems unearthed in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" shed light on the transformative power of resilience and resourcefulness. Colin's philosophy as the 'anti-hustle guy' challenges conventional thinking and invites us to question our own relationship with work and success.

But it's not all business talk; Colin draws a profound parallel between personal growth and the concept of leveling up in life's grand game. Setting ambitious yet achievable goals across all facets of one's life—health, wealth, relationships, spirit—Colin's insights are a compass for navigating the waters of self-improvement. He leaves us with a treasure chest of wisdom from his entrepreneurial voyage, reinforcing the courage to bet on oneself and the enduring value of seeking mentorship and continuous learning. Join us for this episode, and you might just find the inspiration to cook up your own recipe for success.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hi guys, so welcome back to the podcast. Today's guest on the podcast is Colin O'Brien. Colin, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Lovely to be here today. Thanks for taking the time to have a chat.

Speaker 1: 0:15

Likewise. Thank you for taking the time out, Colin. What I'd like to do is, for people that are listening in, people that don't know who you are, if you could give us a wee description of who you are, what you're involved in right now.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Great well, look. Lovely to meet you and thank you for the opportunity to have a chat. Colin O'Brien is my name. I'm from Dublin, originally living in beautiful County Claire, a place called Killaloo on the banks of the River Shannon, and moved down here 25 years ago. 26 years ago now, we moved to Limerick, originally took on a Beulies franchise. I used to manage Beulies Cafe and Graffs and Street in Dublin, which many of your listeners will be familiar with. The general manager there back in the day Settled my own Beulies franchise. It failed spectacularly around the turn of the century but it led to a wonderful opportunity, which is what I refer to as my day job. It's a school meals business. We started with feeding 27 children 21 years ago and delighted to say that at least this year we'd be feeding 30,000 children every day all around the South of Ireland. Wonderful team, 200 plus people. And then I got into coaching a roadbook all the stuff. I love business and I love people and I hate work. There you go.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Fantastic, I've got you down. I've seen you have it on your LinkedIn profile the anti-hustle guy. So fantastic, Colin, I'd like to take a break with guests and kind of get a wee bit of an understanding of how that actually shaped your early upbringing actually shaped who you are right now. So what was it like as a young Colin O'Brien growing up in Dublin?

Speaker 2: 1:49

That's a great question and very few people ask those questions same as well, don't you? You know I was born yeah, it's an interesting one I was born white in Dublin's north side, right to married parents. So there's only one possibility I was only coming Catholic, right, fact okay. And I always say to people religion is often based on initially at least on geography. If I was born in Baghdad in the same circumstances, the likelihood of me being Catholic would be very slim, right. So I think that's important to put out there.

Speaker 2: 2:25

Married parents. They never drank, never did drugs. There was no madness, no obvious madness in the family. Excuse me, there was no money. There was no money in the family.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Ma'am we lost her 20th of February last year. God rest her. You know she put up with five of us, said my dad, and my dad went out to work every day, had a job, never got paid, his worth, always got, you know, brought the bread home and all that sort of stuff. So I suppose that was my, there were my form for years when I got into work, the work. I never went to college. I got a job because that's what my upbringing suggested would be the next course of action, and then I began to study the principles of success. I couldn't really figure out how one guy or girl you know everybody worked hard, but I couldn't figure out how some got ahead. If we talk about getting ahead in the financial sense, I know those didn't. And we got to study those principles. 30 odd years ago I was 60 now turn 61 in a few weeks time and that led me on a path which has probably brought us here today Shane, to be honest.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Yeah, 100%. So give me a wee bit more context then, like growing up as a young guy and Dublin to parents who kind of had a good set of relationship Marge, I suppose. And then you've got four other Shublands as well too. You're the first, is that right, yeah?

Speaker 2: 3:44

Yeah, there are five of us. I'm the second eldest, but there are five of us.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Yeah, yeah okay, so what was it like in that area? What was it like Like? What were the things that you experienced that are even more inspired by that young age before you started taking that entrepreneurial journey? What was school like? Were you inspired by anything in school?

Speaker 2: 4:01

Yeah, good. Another good question. Do you know? What's interesting about that question, shane, is, if it may be so bold is all of our growing up was normal to us, whatever it was good, better and different. It was the norm and we fully expected everybody else's life was the same and you'd go to school, and only after a handful of years might you understand that maybe somebody else's life wasn't quite as good as mine or mine wasn't quite as good as theirs in whatever sense, and I refer to it as having been blessed. What do you call them? Warren Buffett calls it the ovarian lottery.

Speaker 2: 4:35

I think that's a great phrase because completely beyond your control and my control, where we're shot down to planet Earth into a particular set of circumstances that's unique to us. Even though I'm one of five. My growing up was unique to me because of my sensibilities and whatnot, but my dad we lost my dad last year, as I mentioned. Dad is still heartbroken, 61 years married, five years cartoned before that, and so they were one of those, I think, fairly relatively few couples who got together for all the right reasons, stayed together for all the right reasons for taking 10. And that formed a lot of what I you know, my backbone, if you like. I don't give up on things easily. It's probably a good way to say it, but you know there was this dynamic.

Speaker 2: 5:29

I remember as a kid going to school since we're talking at school, I remember seeing kids with wrangler genes right, we were getting our genes from Dawn Storce and that had an impact on a fellow like me. You know what I mean. So, as I said to you earlier, there was no money. There was lots of love in the cupboard and there was always food in the table. There was no money, you know, and of course and that has a formative influence on how one thinks but I do remember and we get hand-me-downs from the older cousin, you know in England, right, get a box of stuff that he did grow. And I remember also getting hand-me-downs from neighbors and friends and just feeling a little bit, oh, wish my life was different or better.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1: 6:15

I suppose the reason I'm asking Colin was because so much of our adulthood is formed, as we know, in our childhood and the voids that we experience a lot of the same are the things that actually really shape our values and what we do right now. And I had kind of similar experiences as well too. I'm the youngest of seven parents who stayed together their whole life until my father passed away 10 years ago. So a lot of the voids that we experience are the things that we want to fill, we want to actually achieve, we want to go out and do X, y and Z, and we want to actually have the things that we didn't think that we got a lot of times. So when you kind of left and transitioned out of school, then, colin, what was the next thought? What were you starting to study principles of success right then? How did you even lead on that? Because I know, growing up in my area and where I was brought up around, there was no really books around principles of success and nobody was talking about it.

Speaker 2: 7:05

So, yeah, when I was leaving school in 1980, I remember getting into that sixth year cycle, the last fifth and sixth year, the last two years of school, and watching all my buddies beginning to talk about what they wanted to do after school. They wanted to go to college, to be an engineer or a doctor or an accountant or whatever it might be, and I hadn't given them any thought. I must have been great crack, particularly second second grade, great fun. And Then I thought to myself what do I want to do? So I decided I want to be a primary school teacher. Shameless, right. But the only reason I wanted to be a primary school teacher was long holidays and short hours. Right, that was it. That was the motivation. I said OK, that's for me. Right, that looks good.

Speaker 2: 7:55

Well it seemed like a good idea. But I always say the man upstairs had a different plan, right, because that was a cup of it. For me, it turns out, looking back 40 odd years later, that would have been a cup of it. But so what happened instead? I didn't get the honor in the Irish language, the honor mark in the Irish language in the Levinsert exam, which meant I was precluded from going to teacher training college. Right, I didn't do the workshops. Bottom line was didn't do the work.

Speaker 2: 8:25

And so I thought to myself general, I get a job for a year to be grand, and back then at least you could study for one subject and add those points and whatnot. And I thought to myself I go to college the following year. Well, in the year that I went to work and I'll talk about that in a second I began to earn the fee ball right. And I was able to I used to smoke at the time be able to smoke 10 cigarettes a day and then 20 at the weekends and have a few beers and whatnot. Right, 17, 18-year-old youngster, clueless. And then, all of a sudden, the allure of going back to college was there anymore. And I also realized, it turns out, I'm a people person, I didn't know that at the time.

Speaker 2: 9:08

And hospitality I got a job in a restaurant and some of your listeners might remember, in Dublin City there was a very famous department store called Cleary's, a very large old world department store, and there was a restaurant at the top of that. My dad going back to my dad's work ethic, he was selling frozen foods at the time into the hospitality sector. So I met him in the city one day, I think in that summer, where I was finding my feet, and I met him and we went to this particular restaurant. He was doing my sales column. I met the guy who owned the license to run that restaurant and he said to me what are you doing, young man? And I said I won't go to be a school teacher, but I'm looking for a job for a year. And he said you can start here on Monday. I have a cashier leave if you want. Ok. So it did no plan.

Speaker 2: 9:55

But then I realized after a very short period of time I was around the field, bob, I'm also good at people, or I enjoy people. Not that I'm necessarily good at it, but I enjoy people. And you combine those two things and all of a sudden I began to get good at my job because I enjoyed it, and if you get good at your job, you tend to get on in your job. So my career in hospitality began to grow and I mentioned earlier, that sort of came to a pinnacle when I was working for somebody else managing bues and graphene streets, which is the biggest cafe on the island, if I'm not mistaken Certainly the biggest cafe on the island. So there you go, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:28

And then here you start, and from there then, colin, you made the transition into opening up your first cafe, because you've got it that you had opened up a million euro cafe and then it kind of failed miserably. Yeah, give me a wee bit more about that. Then. What was the incentive to actually go and do that? Then? What did you kind of face in terms of like going into the business for the first time? What were the things that you didn't actually realize? The things you didn't, because most people come from an environment where they may be working a job and they love it and they think I can do this, and then they go on and do something else, and then they get up with everything else and realize it's a different story.

Speaker 2: 11:09

It was very, very, very different, shane, very different. So remember, I mentioned earlier, I began to study business principles. I began to. I was curious as to why people didn't get ahead and others did, and I had two role models in my mind at the time. One was my dad and the other was a guy called Paddy Campbell. Paddy Campbell, the Campbell family, they owned the Beulys brand. And so I was looking at the two guys, both family men, both hardworking men, and I was thinking well, paddy Campbell is a multimillion-euro business and my dad works for a wage right, and I've had this conversation with my dad, so no difficulty putting it on record, you know. But I was curious, what is the difference? And then I stumbled across, I started reading books, I joined network marketing OK, stumbled across network marketing somewhere along the way and joined a group actually which started in the north, a group within the Amway business, and within that there was a program called Tape of the Week, book of the Month.

Speaker 2: 12:09

And I was about educating our thinking, because at the end of the day I think you probably agree with me in this show is it's our thinking that dictates where we are in life and where we're headed in life. 100% Right. 100%, sorry, go on. Yeah, 100% agree, yeah, yeah. So that began to reformulate my head, get my head screwed on straight and I realized it was success is an internal job, it's an inside job. 100% Right. And I learned over the years your business, my business, your career can never outgrow you. It's not possible for your career, your business to outgrow you. You've got to, I've got to do the deep inside work and my career, my business will follow suit if that makes sense. So that was all going on while I was working for the Bealease Company and I used to listen to it. I looked at your headphones so I used to. They're only the of the Walkman back in the day. You're probably too young to remember the Walkman.

Speaker 1: 13:03

I don't remember the Walkman yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:05

You can Google it later, but anyway, I used to listen to the Walkman going to work on the bus and the train, right, and I'd be studying all these principles. Then I came across a book and I'm sure you're familiar with it by a fellow called Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad, poor Dad, is it? Yeah, rich Dad, poor Dad, exactly. And the second one Rich Dad, poor Dad, cash Flow Quadrants. And it was the Cash Flow Quadrant, shane. That just that was the light bulb moment for me, because in that he describes very simply the four players in the world of business the world of commerce the employee, the self-employed, the business owner, the investor. They're all four different animals and they all operate differently, think differently, look at the world differently, et cetera. And I also learned in that that they're not mutually exclusive. So I could be an employee of Bealease, right. I could start my own part-time gig outside of that and start to build a business. I could watch Windows at the weekend as a self-employed individual if I wanted to. I could if I wanted to, and had the few bulb which I didn't invest in stocks and shares or property. So I began to just notice the differences and then I realized after a period of time, shane, is that I really didn't want to be employee. I didn't like trading my time for money, right, but that's what I'd been brought up to believe to be the norm. Does that make sense? Come back to the family right, that was the norm, but I realized I didn't want to do that ad infinitum to the day-to-day. The second thing I realized was that the self-employed individual, an employee, we sell our time for money, right, so we sell an hour, we get paid for an hour. Sell a week, get paid for a week. Self-employed, we sell our time in terms of we trade our time for money in a different way and that we do a job, get paid for the job. Right.

Speaker 2: 14:44

The business owner and the investor intrigued me because they used the big word for me was leverage. They use leverage usually other people's time, other people's money, to get ahead. That was the difference between Patty Campbell and my dad. My dad was putting in the time, putting in the time getting paid. Putting in the time getting paid. Putting in the time how do you put his time in differently and, as a result, build a very large business? That happened whether he was there or not. There's the difference right there. There's the difference right there and I often talk about Michael O'Leary and Ryanair or Richard Branson they get paid whether they go to the office or not. Now, the baggage handler or the pilot won't get paid if they don't turn up for a shift, right, but the business owner will.

Speaker 2: 15:30

And I realized I had no money so I couldn't be an investor. So I decided shame is to set out on the dark and difficult enough path of learning to be a business owner. It's relatively easy to become self-employed. If you fall off your horse, you get made redundant to say, well, I wash windows or I get involved in the gig economy. That's fairly easy to do. Right, deciding to take that and let go by. Involving other people in your business and allowing them make mistakes for which you get held accountable, that's a whole different kettle of fish. What I believed for me, it was the right journey for me, and so I'm delighted to be sitting here chatting to you.

Speaker 2: 16:08

How do we quarter past two on the 14th? Happy Valentine's Day, by the way. But I'm sitting here right, and I'm proud to say I haven't been to the office at all. I've been up hot on the way of different things for hours now. I'm a 5.36 AM guy, but our business has fed 25,000 kids today. That's awesome, and I didn't butter a slice of bread or created meals, so that's the difference. That's leverage right there. That's where my idea of freedom comes from.

Speaker 1: 16:44

And I think there's a lot of stuff there we can deep dive into and I love the book, which is that per dad, I've got my daughter on that book as well too. From a young age. I give her a lot of the books that I've read Because, again, just they weren't books that I was introduced to, and so that her age. But what do you feel, colin, from your own experience and from being around other business owners, from a business owner that is successful and doing what they do and doing what they love, compared to one that isn't what's going on internally? What do you feel the differences are between somebody that creates a business and makes a flourish and function from somebody that doesn't?

Speaker 2: 17:24

Okay, well, I think part of my response to that, seamus, is what was in your question. You're talking about people who love what they do, and that's absolutely key. If you don't love what you do, stop doing it. I remember a couple of friends of mine. They had a business. He was Australian, she was Irish and she set up this business and he was helping her. And he said to me one day he says you know, I've worked out. He says I can't think of a worse way to lose money than what it is we're doing. He hated their business, they folded it up and they went off to Australia and whatnot. So I think you got to love what you do. And if you don't love what you do, well, then you need to rethink. And the other aspect of it, if I may, seamus, is going back to.

Speaker 2: 18:10

Building a business in any field is very different from being self-employed or employed in the same field you mentioned earlier. Great observation. You get a fellow who's great at our job and they think right, I'll go step out and do this on my own. I think Seamus and I probably on the same page. We would encourage it, but take your time and do it properly and do it slowly. Don't burn bridges before you have to, because the pressure if there isn't a wage back in the end of the week that you've been used to for 25 years, that pressure can knock the joy out of whatever you want to do. So learn how to take those steps properly. Use coaches and mentors people who've been there before you to help you do that.

Speaker 2: 18:55

But I think, start with love what you do, and the other part of it then is there are parts of even what I do on a daily basis, although they're very infrequent, that I hate. I hate, I hate form. Philip Seamus. Oh, my God, we're going through tender process at the moment. You get a tender 42 pages long. Like you know, I prefer genuinely prefer not to tender and go through the pain of life's too short.

Speaker 1: 19:20

So a big part of that, then, is the art of delegation and learning what they delegate out to people that are probably better and actually really enjoy that stuff.

Speaker 2: 19:27

That's exactly it. And our daughter, by the way, who's our office manager. She loves form, filling, loves it. All right, so let her off, okay. And there's people who love driving vans, and there are people who love making sandwiches, and there are people who love looking at spreadsheets. And there are people who love everything that you dislike I'm talking to whoever is listening now Everything that you dislike, then that's a stumbling block for you to start in your own business.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Believe it or not, there are people out there who would love the opportunity to do that piece for you. So the only thing that I recommend people end up doing in their job by the way, when you start out in your own thing, you'd agree with me on the show is you have to do everything you want to do yourself, but everything start to finish and nine to five. The only nine to five, by the way, that we should encourage as entrepreneurs is bed time. Go to bed at nine, get up at five. There's no such thing as nine to five during the day or the entrepreneurial type, but you've got to do everything. But when you're doing everything, this is key. This is how I learned to do this stuff, and I go back to it. I didn't know how to do this stuff and I'm only using my story as an example. I'm not blown. I've been very blessed, made so many mistakes. It's not funny. We nearly went to the wall several more times through the journey, right, but we're still here, thank goodness. But the one thing I identified was every piece of the job of in our business, which is feeding kids. In fact, I wrote a book called Feeding Johnny, and if anybody wants the audio version recorded, anybody wants to send them to them free of charge, connect with me on LinkedIn, and so the whole idea here is that we must feed Johnny.

Speaker 2: 21:04

So I had to take the order, I had to order the food. I had to make the sandwich, let's say right. I had to package it up. I had to put it in the van. I had to deliver to school. I had to send it to the invoice. I had to bank the money.

Speaker 2: 21:15

We just follow that process, right, and I can do that. Any one of us could do that for a couple of hundred kids, right. Get into a couple of thousand kids. All of a sudden it's a different animal. Get into 25,000 of these now, and we've got confirmed orders which will bring us above 30,000 now from Easter. You know, yeah, just can't do that, you'll kill yourself, right? So you got to learn to delegate, and the way my way of delegating was, I would delegate absolutely everything, everything, and only hang on to the only thing in the business that I'm good at. And the only thing in my business where that I'm good at and I'm quite good at it, I've learned to be quite good at it is pulling people together. Everything else happens by somebody else who then is in their bliss our CFO, chief Financial Officer in Carambola. He loves it. He's in his little quiet office right Tapping away all day, every day.

Speaker 1: 22:10

How long did that take you call them then to develop that, because that just doesn't come automatically when you go in the business, because there's definitely a lot of internal issues there. There's gonna be trust. There's gonna be leadership skills in terms of can I actually do this, or trust people to come into my business and allow them to do this? Sometimes it's just like insecurities within people. Because they want to be the, they get it where it's all the hats and gets all the Plotts. So how long did that take you to kind of develop those things and realize I need to do this or else this isn't going to grow?

Speaker 2: 22:43

In a funny sort of way, showing us I was blessed with my career prior to stepping out to being in my business in business for myself, right, because my early I fell into that cashier job that I mentioned at 17. Very quickly. That company was growing very quickly. I became a trainee manager, so See, with no plan I all of a sudden found myself as 17, 18, 19 year old with people reporting to me, which was never part of the plan. So I suppose I Was blessed that I found myself in a coaching role. Didn't even know what that meant at the time. I found myself at a coaching role for all those years. The big change for me was in bullies and grafts and straights. So I took over there in 1998 as general manager Sorry, 1991, 1991 as general manager for four years and that was a huge step up. There were 200 staff in the premise at the time. There was a management team of 20 something and I was about 28 years of age. So that was a huge step up and I I busting a gut for that one. Right I was. I was working all the hours that God sent to hold the whole thing together, thinking it was all on me. Shames right Now great people, but I hadn't learned my delegation skills to the to the extent that I have now Until one day and this, by the way, also shows the difference between the manager and the employee I rank Patty Campbell one day famous.

Speaker 2: 24:00

Patty Campbell Because we used to close at six o'clock in the evening. Back in the day and summertime we would do no business because they'd all be open saying Steven's great at the top of the graph and straight eat their sandwiches during lunchtime, right, and then the evening time at six o'clock we're closing the cafe. They'd be all you know, place me thronged six lock of summer's evening in Dublin City. So around Patty one day one evening I said I've just looked at our business and we should really be opening till eight o'clock, you know if, to catch this market. So he comes back up at two days later. He says that was good thinking. He says tell you what we're gonna do. We're going to go to 1 am. Hang in myself, shames.

Speaker 2: 24:39

So I was already working all year that God gave me to hold the thing together till six o'clock in the evening. I wanted to go to eight and he wants to go to one o'clock in the morning. And that changed everything. All of a sudden I realized I had to let go and trust people. And the problem with trusting people is you make some mistakes and somebody's gonna fuck it up, as we say down here, right On you, and you're gonna be held responsible for. And many people are afraid of that. But I also say to people you're gonna have to swoop in and and and and clean up somebody else's mess for sure at some point for sure, but you might only have to do it once in a hundred, which means you get the 99 times free to be creative, to look for the next opportunity, to Naval, gaze to blue sky, sky think, or whatever.

Speaker 1: 25:22

Yeah, 100%. Well like with not Kathy and not business failed. Yeah, I'm calm, was the biggest lesson you learned around that.

Speaker 2: 25:32

Oh, um. So how it failed is important, I think. So go back to what. I had, huge experience with the brand. I took on a beauty's cafe franchise, so I managed the flagship stores with the company for 10 years. I was you know by way of my position the most experienced Brat manager of that brand in the country. Took my own Franchise down, a limerick, my own beauty's franchise, and they removed the family to limerick. They weren't happy with me at the time, right, but it's become our home, this, this neck of the woods, and. And then, after a few years of trail, but but it didn't fail because of lack of hard work.

Speaker 2: 26:07

And this is important for everybody to understand, circumstances can happen outside of your control. In there was a perfect storm, fought and mouth disease hit the island of Ireland you might remember that back around the turn of the century, and People were told to stop going into the cities. They were gonna spread the disease. So that bit like the pandemic. So they stopped coming in. At number one, number two, there were the. The beauty's brand became old very quickly. It has become a classic again. But the sexy brands.

Speaker 2: 26:35

The insomnia is that whatever, as Starbucks or whatever, began to come into the marketplace. So people began to vote with their feet, or so our business had started to slow decline. Then foot and mouth disease hit and it went flat. Then 9-11 happened. Now here's something interesting, right? How can something in New York City affect something lemuric? And the answer is Shannon Airport. The Americans stopped flying right. So our business had been going Okay, began a slow decline, dropped 20% because of foot and mouth disease and never recovered.

Speaker 2: 27:01

And then and you might have heard of this, the Celtic tiger, tiger's madness, the grips at least the south right, which said that your property has worked more today than it was yesterday and you work more again tomorrow. Absolute madness. Paper wealth was being created, all the shop and our rent went up. You know, this coffee shop, right, went up to a thousand euro a day. Shams, thousand euro a day in 2002. Okay, see the gray hair. Like I'm only 27, so so it was game over.

Speaker 2: 27:32

So those circumstances Conspired outside of our control, right? And we kept working hard, kept working hard, working hard, right? Well, at some point and this isn't to scare people, but you got to learn to bet on yourself, and I bet we've just met, I bet, shameless you bet yourself all day long, twice and Sundays, would you on the percent? Yeah, you'd hurry you in a heartbeat and I'd hire me in a heartbeat, except I'm not for her. I'm neither, are you Right. We're the only people to get to hire us. Okay, and so that's. That's what we need. We need, we need people to absolutely better themselves.

Speaker 2: 28:06

So there's also a phrase that a friend of mine here in in lemuric I said it's lovely phrase. He said the, the carp, the corporate job, particularly at managerial level, is a furlough and mousetrap. Right, it's warm, it's cozy, it's comfortable. That check keeps coming in. Right bit of a bonus. Here and there there's growth, there's plot. It's Very difficult to get out of a warm bed on a morning. Right, that's a huge thing that holds people back. Well, I think you probably agree, shameless and and I know I believe it to be the case I wouldn't swap it for the world, I wouldn't go back to the furlough. I'm a chance.

Speaker 1: 28:45

I think people get confused, that they think the comfort zone is comfortable. It's actually uncomfortable A lot of times. You know that you can be doing something else. You know that you have more potential to tap into and there's something a lot of times I know for me and I look in at where I want to go and the growth that I want to achieve. If I feel that I'm being comfortable, it's not a way out. I mean, I want to actually move forward and start to get into those uncomfortable zones. So I am pushing myself and test myself and I think most people think that that comfort zone is comfortable. But it's not because you're sitting questioning yourself a lot of times, do you agree?

Speaker 2: 29:18

I fully agree. I fully agree. And you know what? There are people listening to this, right, and they probably never verbalized it to their spouse or their family, but they've got that knowing thing and they're the pit of their stomach. They know they're, they know they're custom, right, and let's, let's call it out, let's name it. And they're afraid. And they're afraid, okay, and that's okay, that's 100% okay.

Speaker 2: 29:38

I was afraid to scared stiff, okay, scared stiff even. Actually, here's something interesting, right. So eventually, I told you, I jumped ship from beauty's, took on the really franchise. We took over on a Monday morning counter, remember sometime in June of 2003. And here's something really interesting shameless, so it was good. I was very, you know, nervous and, and it was a safe bet. This is important if you're gonna step out, you need to step out, and I was stepping into something that I'd been doing for nearly 20 years For other people, right, so it was fairly safe bet. And if we didn't make anyone who could eat the rush of sandwiches that we didn't sell and all the rest, right. So, and but here's something really freaked me out.

Speaker 2: 30:21

Day one was a Monday, and I remember the growing sense of dread as I turned the key in the door to open the cafe that we had bought from somebody else that had been trading for years. Right, for the first day, even though I've been doing this for other people for almost 20 years. Right, and I was brilliant at it. Not not long smoke, I was brilliant at it, right I'm. Or turn the key in my own cafe for that first day was so, so scary, it's not funny. And, as it happens, a friend of mine had driven down from Dublin to limber to be our First customer, just as a nice thing to do. I was delighted, right, because you know what did I was able to, I was able to avoid Starting shameless, right I?

Speaker 2: 31:05

was delighted, come on in job, let's have breakfast. And we sat there for 45 minutes or an hour. Well, I never forget, shameless, this knowing sense of your. Avoid no rhyme. You need to you to give yourself a shake and eventually said to you JB, john Barry, jb is I love you, man, but I gotta go. And then I start and I haven't looked back.

Speaker 1: 31:24

I think that's so important because because that's what a lot of people do and you've probably read the book eat that for Probably Brian Tracy and it's like doing the thing that you're a lot of the times avoiding. The thing that you want to avoid, the thing that you're trying to get away from, is the very thing that you actually need to lean into and go and face and overcome, because that's where most of your growth is going to be. Remember when I opened my first business everything that I had saved and cash and all the things that I had, I have just lumped it into this business and I remember opening the doors in the first day somewhere, going People better turn up, or I am absolutely hammered because everything has went on, this everything and I had gathered over the years and Thankfully it did. But you have to be able to. You have to be willing to take a chance. You have to have that.

Speaker 1: 32:07

I Don't know what. It's Something within. You have to be able to go. Do you know what? I'm gonna give it a go. Yeah, I'm a child, fantastic, and but doesn't at least have tried?

Speaker 2: 32:17

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And you know there's interesting one, shameless, that you just shared there. You, you put everything you had on the line for that one right, and is that something you would Advise your daughter to do, for example? Or should she be a little more cautious than daddy was?

Speaker 1: 32:34

Yes, she probably a wee bit more cautious. I think I've learned a lot of lessons from those days of doing that again and the burn. So you know yourself calm like straight those years in business. Then you start to yeah, with that experience that he doesn't have at the very start and you over it. Well, not do that again. Maybe I'll try this one again. And sometimes you lose that sense of Not, lose a sense of optimism, but you lose that sense of adventure. You just go play in your shelf all in because you've learned, you've got the battle scars through the years of things. It's went wrong.

Speaker 2: 33:04

Oh, fully, fully, fully agree, yeah, no, just put everything on the line. And again, you know we're talking to a varied audience here, I expect, right, so, and there are definitely people who are feeling the know and they're still not based in this conversations. They can, oh, shoot, I'm gonna have to do something now. And here's the thing you know, my mom passed away last year, right, and she always used to say you'd be a long-time debt. There's no money in shrouds, right. All these pearls of wisdom over the years. We will be a long time debt, right? So we only. There's only. There's no dress rehearsal on this planet. It's this, is it? Okay, so it was.

Speaker 2: 33:35

It was knowing away at me for years that I needed to step out and and Become a business owner. I didn't know how. That was the problem. So we got to study. That's the key. Learn from other people who've gone ahead of you. Read books, meet people, go to seminars, go on pod, take podcasts, whatever it is right, I'm learning the skill set. But then you have to beck yourself. You got to, you know, have the rubber, meet the road.

Speaker 2: 33:59

And I don't think shame is where I would say Mortgage the house and put it on your first business venture and here's the other one is come here. I don't know, I've never played golf, but you know this famous thing of a hole in one. The likelihood is you're not gonna score a hole in one, right? You know he or she who collects the most knows wins. That's the strongest businesses. The business I've got today came as a direct result of the failure of the first one. Nobody gets into business to fail. We all step into business. It's gonna be great. It's been great here to time in for some people, for many people, it's not working and you know, at that some point you may have to bite the bullet.

Speaker 2: 34:37

Yeah when we had to bite the bullet on our cafe show it's fun when we knew it was game over. And we knew it was game over took us, took us so that we got the rent review in 2002 thousand euro a day selling cups of coffee. In Limbic City the hour is third, third city. Not just wasn't doable, right, but it took us another till 2005 to get out of that mess. We were burying ourselves financially every single day at thousand euro. All it gave us was the upper per day Just allowed us turn the key in the door to go in and lose money. Right, that's all it gave us. So we started around, sorry.

Speaker 1: 35:13

And how much longer calm did you keep that going then? For, like when you knew that you were losing money and you were starting to gather death?

Speaker 2: 35:20

We have no choice but to keep going. You know we were in it and it. You know we were trying to trade our way out of it, which is where the school meals thing came from, by the way. I'll tell you a quick story in a moment. If I made about the man in the train, which is which is key. But we so we tried to trade our way out and then realized that wasn't possible and you know it went from a sort of search and rescue mission to a search and recovery mission. It was game over. We had to find an exit and thankfully we did.

Speaker 2: 35:49

But but I remember at some point somebody and I did try and I have to be honest, I did try and find a job in that period. I have to call us bait-a-spade, because we needed to cover the bills. We did put bread in the table and and I was having conversations with the brand, or what makes the brand and that had a presence in Ireland food brand and, and Then something changed those conversation shames and I could feel it at a good level. This promise of a, you know, franchise manager's type job wasn't going to happen and I thought, john, I'm gonna get stuck into this school meals thing as it was the time and see if I can make it go but and to like really did. And you know our business will do 20 million this year. So it's been some, it's been some transformation, you know, and I'm not blowing in that, I'm just saying that's, that's the parallel average. So, yes, the school meals business do 100 grand this year. To be delighted with us, right.

Speaker 1: 36:37

Yeah, but even at that I don't think that you're blowing your trumpet at all. So I'm to be really, really proud of, senator, what you're doing. But if you go back to like and here's a lot of the times where I think, and Just listen to what you've said already through the podcast column the information that you've taken on board from a young age, the books that you've read, what you've internalised, what you've fed your mind constantly, this is the difference between somebody that would have looked at that situation and went I'm done, I'm gonna back to get a job or I'm gonna create another business. I think that comes down to Not just the skill set, but then it has to be the mindset for sure 100% mindset.

Speaker 2: 37:13

100% mindset, right, skip. We can learn the skills right. If the, if the mind is, you know they had to screw it on straight. We can learn the skill set. And the other thing I think shame is you'd know, probably agree on is your success in life to find success for yourself. But your success in life is 15% dependent on your technical ability, whatever that might be. You're an accountant, you're a chef, you're a, you know, coach, I don't know whatever. Whatever might be right, a caver, and 85% your your people skills as your ability to get on with other people. That's it, five to one in terms of people skills, people, right. So learn. Don't don't don't be a, don't be a scorpion. Individual, right, learn how to get on with people.

Speaker 1: 37:56

Hmm.

Speaker 2: 37:56

Learn how to get people to trust you, to buy into your vision. You do that. You can do anything.

Speaker 1: 38:01

People buy people like and you know you've I don't know how many people you have working for you.

Speaker 2: 38:07

If you've got somebody in there that you just don't gel or you don't get along with you Like being around them doesn't matter what, how good they are, you just don't want that person around you 100% and we've had we've had loads over the years, by the way, we've about, I think, with 204 is the current count, but we're about to employ 50 more for this growth phase that we're going into over the next number of weeks. So it's a sizable enough enterprise, right, and we've got great leaders that have grown up with us. You know fellas who are, and girls who are making sandwiches or driving vans, and now they're managing the kitchen or managing the loading, or Operations manager was a van loader back in the day, and so these are people that we got to know, we got to like, got to trust. Loads of people have come in to our orbit and I always say Karen Bola is the name of the business here, or a mbo LA, and Karen Bola always self selects over time.

Speaker 2: 38:56

Somebody joins us for five years or ten years and then they fall out all over their vision or something changes for them and they leave and they must leave. They must leave for themselves and for us, okay, and we'd a guy reason, but we don't suffer for those either. Right, we know we've. We've a couple of people join us in recent times and we've a production meeting every morning at 9 and you know the kitchen supervisor came up and said look, I'm not happy. I'm happy with you, call him Johnny. Not happy with Johnny, like he's not, he's not here a wet week and these carbon problems. And then after a period of time they said you know, this isn't getting any better, he's got to go. And they make those call chance because it's dragging them down. It's probably you know I'm dragging their teammates down.

Speaker 1: 39:36

Yes.

Speaker 2: 39:36

You got. You got to let bring people in and then let them off. Give them guard rails, yeah, and then you know I. Somebody also said you can't hold people responsible for results if you supervise methods. That's an interesting one. So if I tell our kitchen manager to run the kitchen in the way I would run it and it goes wrong, shames, she's gonna blame me. You tell me to do that way if I simply say run the kitchen and here's the guard rails. This is the results we're looking for. Let her off. She does what she likes and I get.

Speaker 2: 40:08

Yeah, don't touch it. Yeah, 100%, and we screw it up, we will find people. By the way, this isn't to scare people, right? Bottom line is if you step out on your own, you're gonna make mistakes. There's gonna be failure along the way. 100%, what gets used to it, it's fine. I fail fast, fail forward, all right, get up and go again. And get up and go again more, what with greater wisdom, yeah, and then nothing can nothing to stop you shames, right, but where are some health or family, you know thing that knocks us? I'm the same for me, right, because we, because we've done the work in here and in here, right?

Speaker 1: 40:45

I spoke about that yesterday. I'm on social as well too. I think it's really, really important, and for you it's probably exactly the same column. You have to have some sort of vision for yourself, and you have to have some sort of idea of where you want to be. And you might not Be crystal clear on it, but you know that you want more for yourself. And it goes back that old proverb people without a vision parish. And it's so, so important, because if you don't think that there's something else better for you, then you just keep conforming to the same thing that you're getting over and over and over again, and a lot of times that doesn't actually what people want and it's not good either. So what did? What would you recommend for people to actually look at in terms of shifting their mindset and creating a bigger vision for themselves? Pretending to go fair shelf, what have you used over your years as a business owner?

Speaker 2: 41:30

I turned 60 last year. I learned this on social media at the Oracle, that is social media. I saw a Facebook post a couple of years ago and I thought it was great. It was this old biker right, long gray hair, big bushy beard, leather jacket on his big whatever bike right. And it said, instead of getting over, let's imagine we're graduating up through the levels of life like in a game. So, instead of being I'm 60, I'm level 60. Right now, level 60 is better than your property? Only level 45, looking at your right. But whatever you are. So 43, 43, 42, 43 in April 43. Okay, cool. So, but I'm level 60, which, which you know, puts me ahead of you if, because I choose to see it like that, that makes sense, right, and I'm looking forward to level 70, level 80, 90 and level 100. So we got to. You're absolutely right. We got to. We got to have a vision, and the vision has got to be for a point in the future.

Speaker 2: 42:30

And the way I've always learned not that it always I've learned to manage this is I pick my next big birthday right 30th of March, 30th of March 1963. So the 30th of March 2028, I'd be 65. That's my next big birthday. Big birthday has five or zero, zero, 43. So your next big birthday is 45, right? 2026 are there about? So, so 2026, you'd be 45. Yeah, yeah, cool, alright.

Speaker 2: 43:03

So what I recommend to people is pick your next big birthday, okay, write the day and the date down on a piece of paper and then describe the day for yourself. I'm waking up in such and such a house, I'm with such and such a person or persons, the car starts in the morning, right, whatever. The job's going great, or that business that I started is rocking, or whatever. I'm healthy, I'm happy. There are four areas shame, as I recommend people consider setting goals around. Only do all the time myself. Our health, our wealth, our relationships and our spirit and by spirit, not necessarily, but a spiritual, you know, walk with the higher power. I'm talking about our spirit, our personal spirit, our relationship with ourselves. So four goals. I set four goals every week and I'm the anti hustle guys. You said so. I don't. I hate these people say you need to push your rear end 24, seven towards some goal. You need a helicopter in your life, you need a jet in your life, you need a whatever. You don't. Yeah, absolutely don't. Okay. But I like being healthy. I have thankfully finally have a few Bob right and my relationships are getting stronger. I'm aware of them and my spirit is good. It's sort of indomitable, right. So I recommend people consider setting goals around those.

Speaker 2: 44:29

And then I use this thing for over seven. I play cash flow. We spoke with Robert Kiyosaki. He is a board game called cash flow. There's an online version and I play it four times a week Because if I do something positive like that, shameless, four days out of seven, I win the week. I win the week and the whole year is made up of 52 of those weeks. All I gotta do is win this week, Right, and I'll do it by Thursday, right, and then I take the weekend off and chill in that area and I come back and go out again. I let myself off the hook the whole time, right, but it works for me. 15 minutes, by the way, is one percent of your day. 14.4 minutes is the actual number, but the easiest one was 15 minutes. So I, when I go swimming I'm not all year round swimmer, so I'll go in the shower in here for 15 minutes, right, and that's it. Job done four times a week.

Speaker 1: 45:17

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 45:18

Right. So set goals around your health, your wealth, your relationships, in your spirit, whatever they are for you, and give them 15 minutes a day, four days a week and period of time. Your life will begin to change. Reading is huge. Within you need to read other people's. You got two choices here. You can jump ship and make all the mistakes and learn from them. I'll read about other people's mistakes right before you jump ship 100%.

Speaker 1: 45:47

I love that chunking it down and I love that the way that you've set your goals around different areas of life has done the same. Look at different areas of life financial, family, vocational, mental, all these different areas that we can apply ourselves to. And even that would you just say a column like, just basically chunking it down in the manageable steps. And because what happens a lot of times for people is they think about this big vision and the thing that they need to do, or they think about how am I going to change, they get here is there's going to be such a monumental change. But if you just go, I can do 15 minutes a day. I can do this action a day. I can do this habit every single day and it's a compound effect over time that gets you to where you want to go.

Speaker 2: 46:26

Absolutely. And then other people your right channel and other people will say, oh, but it's gonna take me 20 years. Now, here's the thing, right, you're gonna be 20 years older anyway, anyway. So your choice is take those slow and sometimes painful steps you know slow and steady wins the race and do it for 15 or 20 years to create. If that's what it's going to take for you to create the life that you want and deserve, or don't, your choice free will. Right and wake up 20 years from now and say, geez, shameless and column, they were right, yeah 100%.

Speaker 1: 47:01

As you said, the 20 years are going to go by and why not put 15 minutes a day on this? Yeah, that's the one that you want. What's the best book, then, and all of those books that you'd read around personal development, etc. What's been the standard one for you? That's kind of had the biggest influence on your, on your shelf, conor.

Speaker 2: 47:22

Interestingly, there's two books and I've read loads of books over the years, thankfully but the two that had the biggest influence. The first one was the first. I always got the first best book I ever read. It was given to me on my 21st, when I was clueless, absolutely clueless. It took me it was 30, by the way before I started on this journey that I'm on properly right, began to take it seriously.

Speaker 2: 47:45

But I, 21, was given this book and it's called Jonathan Livingston, segal, right. It's an old classic from way, way back right, and it talks about a seagull, jonathan, jonathan Livingston, and he is a bit like you and me, shams. He sort of says there's more to life here. What they all pecking around on the beach for, like, and you know what, if we learn to fly faster or higher, would not be fun, right? So he sets out on this journey and I remember I literally read that book on the night of my 21st party, came home from the party and read it until dawn. I was home to horrible phrase, but I was. I was jumping around with energy, not knowing where to apply it and of course it was a long time before I began to apply.

Speaker 2: 48:27

That was the first one. And then the second one was that book I mentioned earlier, cash flow quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki, because it answered for me Shams the questions that were rattling around my head. That doesn't mean it'll be the that book for somebody else. Every is going to this from a different perspective. What I've tended to do over the years is read a book and if the author refers to another author, I'd probably follow those breadcrumbs and pick up that book. And you know, success leaves clues breadcrumbs, and failure leaves clues red cocked cross right, honda, you need, you need those failures?

Speaker 1: 49:04

Yeah, you do. You do, For sure. I was listening to say probably listening to some of his work and material before as well to Jim Rowan, and he always says Jim, jim Rowan.

Speaker 2: 49:16

Yeah, of course yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:18

And he says stand guard at the door of your mind every single day and what you pour in your mental factory is essentially who you're going to become. And I love where he talks about the guy says that he wants to be a great leader. He says, okay, first we're going to his house and we check his library, because what you pour on your mental factory is who you're going to become. And so many people just don't do that. They just don't love that book. Or even now you can want an auto book, especially with YouTube. And that one principle, that one habit that you can create 15 minutes a day, listen to the book, reading a book or on your mental factor, the thing that you want to create and you want to actually achieve Come, create massive changes in your life.

Speaker 2: 49:56

Over time and, by the way, it's important, time is important right To give us those times. It's like it's like soaking in in water, if you like. You know the way cork would soak in water until it becomes sufficiently malleable or whatever, to be put into a wine bottle. And go back to the world we live in today, shameless. This influence our work right where people are taking photographs in front of a jet or a helicopter and pretending, in most cases, that their life is like that Bullshit, bullshit.

Speaker 2: 50:28

Okay, what they're trying to do is manifest that life. Fair enough, let them off, right, but let them, you know, do it their own time. And please don't tell me that I'm a loser if I decide to only do 15 minutes four times a week, because I'm absolutely not a loser. I'm winning at my life, okay, and you're winning at your life. So I think we've got to be careful who we listen to, but we've got to take. We've got to take our time, because that type of life that I just that influence that. I just used that example. It's a bit like a mahogany veer and a coffee veneer on a coffee table. You put into it and it's chipboard and it's going to crumble. That's the difference between somebody who soaks in, and they become mahogany all the way through. So that makes sense. That's what we're looking for.

Speaker 1: 51:11

Foundations.

Speaker 2: 51:12

Foundations. Gotta be, gotta be there. It's an inside job, okay, and once it's an inside job, nothing will rattles. Nothing we mentioned earlier. Perhaps you know health scare or whatever it might be, but, but I bet myself any day of the week and, like having met you, I know you bet yourself any day of the week, and that's the example that we can give to other people. And the question that I'd be asking your listeners to ask themselves would you bet on you any day of the week? And if the answer to that is yes, well then do so. If the answer to that is no, if you're honest with yourself, but then do something about that, right, do something about that.

Speaker 1: 51:48

Yeah, and that's so important. Man, do something about that. And for me, my job as a coach for the last 20 years has been that which has been helping people do something about that. And it takes a long time for people to actually realize I need to do something about that. I need to actually reach out and speak to somebody and he does the podcast and the hair coach. You get a mentor 100%. I love that column so sorry, excuse me. And wrapping up column, this cover podcast is called conversations. That matter. I always like to ask the guest if you were to go back at any time and have a conversation with yourself, maybe when you're getting challenged, maybe when you're younger, and you could tell yourself something, what would that be? What would the conversation be? Or what would you tell yourself?

Speaker 2: 52:35

I find myself smiling there and you're asking the question Be braver earlier For me. Everybody's got a different journey, but for me, if I was able to go back and go around again and there's no dress rehearsal, so this is it I'd like to believe I would be braver earlier. I was 30 when I began to study these principles that we're talking about now. I was 35 when I eventually bet on myself and took that scary leap out of the furloughed mousetrap and within five years that business had collapsed. Of course there's a statistic. They say 80% of all businesses fail in the first five years I'm textbook right and then 80% of those that survive fail the next five years. Failure is a part of this process, right, get used to it. Just learn to bet on yourself.

Speaker 2: 53:28

People see me and they see me in business, but they see me in the food business. I happen to be in the food business, but I'm a businessman first and foremost. I've learned to become a businessman. I wasn't born a businessman. I wasn't brought up as a businessman. I've learned to become a businessman. My kids see the world differently than I ever saw back in the day. The school meals business has been very good to us and we've been very good to it, but the next phase that I think they call it fell as my age. The third act is common right and I won't get into it today with you or your listeners, but we've just launched a business today, as it happens, another business in the coaching space. As it happens, I'll talk to you about it later. But I love business. I love business. I love people. I hate work. I'm hating work. Even though I work very hard and very long at my own pace. I always work at something where I'm able to offload it.

Speaker 2: 54:29

I'll start something and then hand it off to somebody else. That's the work I do, but if I've got to get up every day and repeat the same task, well then I have failed in terms of what I want out of my life.

Speaker 1: 54:42

And that's the thing. It's not that you hate work. It's you hate doing something that you're not really inspired to do and you don't love. And when you do something that you do love and you are inspired to do, as cliche as it sounds, it's not work. It's not to say that it doesn't have challenges. It's not to say that it's not hard. It's not to say that sometimes you're pulling your hair out, but I always love to use that quote. When you're doing something that you're really inspired to do and value, you're willing to pursue both pain and pleasure and as pursuit. That's how you know it's important.

Speaker 2: 55:09

Absolutely, absolutely. Shane, I couldn't say it better. No, you're right. I flippantly say I hate work, but I work very hard. The difference is I work very hard not at tasks that need me to repeat them, at setting up tasks that other people will happily repeat, day in, day out, forever.

Speaker 1: 55:27

Yeah, fantastic. I really, really enjoy this conversation. There's a lot of value and there's a lot of stuff to unpack in that conversation for people that are going to listen in the podcast, for people that want to know a little bit more about you, and especially, with this, new coaching business is being launched. Where's the best best they find you?

Speaker 2: 55:44

Yeah well, shane, thanks indeed for reaching out. I'm a real pleasure meeting you and I hope we get to meet for in real, as the fellow says, and have a coffee together. That'd be very cool. I search Colom O'Brien Motivation. I have a YouTube channel there. I do this coffee with Colom podcast that has been gone out since 2016 or something like that. Right, every week. Check that out on YouTube coffee with Colom, or Colom O'Brien Motivation. There's any amount of content out there, stuff that I think I'd learned a bit. I interview some people, et cetera. Not quite as organized a way as you do, shane. Well done you. So Colom O'Brien Motivation on LinkedIn. If somebody wants to check in, if they send me a link on LinkedIn, I will respond with a quick note, including a link to my audio book Feeding Johnny how to Build a Business Despite the Roblox, which Chronicles the Early Years of what we just spoke about.

Speaker 1: 56:42

Fantastic Colom. Thank you very much again for hopping on the podcast. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 56:47

My pleasure. My pleasure, Shane. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 56:49

Cheers, cheers.

Speaker 2: 56:58

Am I staying for?