Their story is an odyssey…
From heartbreak and divorce to deep, profound love.
From depression and lost hope to boundless happiness.
From terminal illness to robust health and vitality.
From enormous business growth to retirement.
And from retirement to a new, billion-dollar multinational business.
Along the way they’ve created a close-knit, love-filled family united by their passion for what they do.
Quantum Orange has been there for it all…
Bob Kent - Founder of Mont Marte - Quantum Orange Client for over 30 years
Bob
Carol
Cheyne
Second Generation
Ryan
Third Generation
Introducing
Bob Kent
When Bob Kent was first introduced to Paul Blackburn and Quantum Orange, he was married with two young children and running a retail business with 20 stores and hundreds of staff. In his own words, he was “…struggling both personally and professionally.”
After speaking with Mary Blackburn Bob, attended a Quantum Orange weekend workshop, which he describes as a “completely transformative” experience.
When he returned to work his business partner was so impressed by the changes in Bob that they immediately gathered their top tier staff for a two-day workshop with Quantum Orange. Sales increased, stores ran more smoothly and problems simply disappeared, so they implemented a company wide initiative that saw Paul and his team working with the staff on a monthly basis.
Bob says, “The impact of my work with Paul was so profound for me, and I wanted the same for my team.”
The Quantum Orange coaching program was universally loved by the business owners, the staff and even their families. It ran for eight years, during which the annual turnover of the business grew from $20 million to $50 million.
Everything looked golden….until one day Bob returned home from the school pickup run with his kids to find a letter on the kitchen table from his wife. She’d had an affair and run off with her lover, leaving no contact information.
What followed was an incredibly traumatic time for Bob and his two children. Once again Bob found himself in need of Paul’s help, but this time on a much deeper, far more personal level. He remembers feeling like he would never recover.
“How am I going to keep it together, let alone run a large business and raise two kids alone?”, Bob recalls asking himself.
He was facing monumental challenges - the kind that can alter the trajectory of a life dramatically - but Bob wanted to make sure he did everything he could to make the shift a positive one.
Over the course of the next year, Bob put in countless hours of gruelling personal growth work with Paul. He overcame limiting beliefs and healed decades old personal trauma, which set him free to realise his true potential. The business was sold as part of the divorce proceedings and, now retired, Bob refocused on his lifelong passion for horses. He even trained for months with his son so they could climb Mount Everest together.
Calling it a ‘complete overhaul’ of Bob’s life would not be an exaggeration.
Then along came Carol...
Introducing
Carol Kent
When Carol discovered Quantum Orange, she was recently out of a bad relationship and battling major issues with money and her mother. In describing that time, she says, “I had virtually given up on living - my zest for life was completely gone.” She spent time in Quantum Orange workshops and healed several deep, old wounds.
“I learned that I really am good enough and gained the strength I needed to live life on my own terms,” Carol shares.
Then Bob turned up in a Quantum Orange workshop she was participating in. By the end of the weekend they were dating. Two months later Bob asked Carol to take a chance on a big move and a relationship with him.
Twenty-two years on, they’re still madly in love.
Bob says, “It’s just another example of the way work with Quantum Orange can be transformative. When Paul told me that love would turn up again when I could truly be happy on my own, I didn’t really believe him. But our story puts it right there in black and white - I went from completely shattered and feeling a loss of hope about my future to being ecstatically happy and deeply in love. I didn’t know this depth of love was possible, and now I get to feel it on a daily basis.”
Carol adds, “I never would have been ready for Bob had I not done the work on myself with Quantum Orange in the years prior. I can honestly say I haven’t been to bed unhappy in years - there hasn’t been a single night we’ve gone to bed without holding hands since we got together. We’re genuinely happy and in love decades after getting together. I believe that’s a result of what we’ve learned from Paul and Mary about how to run a healthy relationship.”
And so Bob and Carol set about enjoying their farm, horses and travelling together - off into the sunset, so to speak.
But this story doesn’t end there…
A few years passed before Bob and Carol came to the realisation that they were happy, but quite literally mowing the grass on the farm to fill in time. They knew a fresh challenge was what they needed, but weren’t entirely sure what it was.
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Introducing
Cheyne Kent
MONT MARTE IS BORN
Around that time Bob’s son Cheyne, who was first introduced to Quantum Orange as a ten-year-old sitting in the back of Paul’s workshops, had become a father himself. He phoned Bob and said, “Dad, I want you to teach me about business.”
That was the genesis of Mont Marte, the global art supply company they’re still running as a family 20 years later.
When they started the business, Bob did what he describes as “taking out a huge insurance policy” by bringing Quantum Orange in to work with the Mont Marte team. Despite the size of the company, the Kents have very intentionally built a business culture in which everyone who works for them is a part of their family. They have a huge volume of long term staff, some of whom even have kids working in the business now. That family oriented approach even extends to the people who work in the manufacturing side of the business in China - when the Kents visit, people bring uncles and cousins in to meet them and say, “We’re Mont Marte family!”
Bob directly credits the flow on impact of their open, inclusive approach to Paul and his work with both the business and family over the last few decades. “All of that comes from you Paul,” he says, smiling as he talks about how many lives they’ve been able to positively impact together.
Cheyne, who has himself undergone a remarkable transformation - from a twenty-year-old learning about business and doing whatever needed doing, to the switched-on CEO of a massive multinational company - adds that Quantum Orange’s ongoing presence in Mont Marte has extraordinary benefit for everyone. “No matter what Paul and his team are doing with the staff - personal or professional - it is time and money well spent.”
Cheyne still uses some of the concepts he picked up from that first workshop he sat in on as a young boy. He says even back then, he found the principles Paul was teaching really interesting. “I could see how uplifting it was for the adults in the room and remember thinking it must be a good thing, so I was receptive despite it being conceptually fairly big for a young kid. It taught me how to be open as a person, to look within myself and to practice self-reflection regularly.”
He adds that being exposed to the work so young made it possible for him to reap its benefits throughout his life - to grow personally, pass it on to his kids and also make it accessible for the Mont Marte staff. “I’d credit a good deal of my success so far - both personal and professional - to the mindset practices I learned from Quantum Orange, and I’m still using the tools and techniques on a weekly basis,” Cheyne says.
Quantum Orange founders Paul and Mary share they feel “incredibly blessed” to be able watch as their work continues to impact positively on the third generation of the Kent family and the Mont Marte family.
the quantum
orange impact
It’s difficult to accurately quantify the ripple effect created by Bob’s commitment to personal growth - not just for himself and his own family, but for the thousands of employees and family members he has so generously supported with the implementation of Quantum Orange programs in the last few decades.
We salute you Bob - so many people say they want to leave the world a better place than they found it, but you’re actually doing it.
