Canberra’s CBR Cyber is a young company, but its founder and general manager Andrew Weir has decades of experience, including at Correct Communications, which earned fifth place in the 2016 Fast50.
Since 2020, Weir and the CBR Cyber team have been building a name for the business in federal government, with work ranging from cybersecurity products and services to networking and professional services.
The firm more than tripled its sales to $15.4 million in the 2023 financial year, making it the second-fastest growing 2023 Fast50 company.
CRN Australia spoke to Weir about the firm’s growth.
“We started a little bit slowly last financial year; we had a change in management team. We reset our focus and direction and set some goals that, we knew if we hit those, then we would have a good year,” Weir said.
“We had financial goals, efficiency goals and some cultural goals, which kind of led to retention goals, so were a lot more focused on looking after our staff and looking after our customers.”
“We asked our customers what business issues they're trying to fix and what their requirements are, and we would tailor a solution that would meet that but was also obviously value for money.”
“That approach, setting some goals and hiring the right people and listening to our customers and giving them solutions that made sense, it worked well for us.”
A vendor-agnostic approach also helped.
“We didn’t particularly lead with any vendors, we dealt with what they wanted first [which] meant that we got the trust of customers that knew we were working for them and not necessarily trying to give them pre-canned solutions with whatever vendors,” Weir said.
“The expertise we have in the business, especially around some of the new technologies like SD-WAN and SASE; in the Canberra marketplace there were a lot of organisations that were ready to go down that path.”
“The multivendor expertise we have in that space, and also gateway migrations, meant that they really appreciated the consulting we did, and as we did one piece of work that led to more pieces of work and also other agencies and departments hearing about us.”
“The quality of our work and that word of mouth really led to us taking off, especially in the professional services space.”
CBR Cyber’s growth took place amid several challenges.
“We had a change in management team and the organisational change that comes with that, whilst we’re also growing very quickly and moving into a new office, so they were some big challenges,” Weir said.
“We also had to, as we grew, keep processes and systems improving, so there was a lot of emphasis put into that.”
“We were needing to maintain our culture throughout all that, so those altogether were quite a big challenge.”
“The external challenge that we can’t really influence is government procurement; so we’re still finding that government panel access to opportunities against the bigger companies in Canberra is something that we struggle with due to the inflexibility of the [Digital Transformation Agency] and their panels and the processes.”
“We would be a lot more successful if we were given even half the access that the larger companies seem to get.”
Weir explained which services generated the most business from government customers.
“We did a lot of work with customers and with some quite large ones as well around the next iteration of their network, the network and security architectures,” Weir said.
“A lot of our engagements started with looking at software-defined WAN architectures which then very quickly encompassed SSE as an adjacent technology that you should use with it, and then also a lot of work around what future gateway strategies should be.”
“There was of a lot of cybersecurity focus there, but…we’ve got a very strong secure networking practice, so the fact that we had that maybe differentiates ourselves from our competitors.”
“That's where it really took off for us last year, and that momentum is still rolling.”
CBR Cyber is now focusing on broadening its services to increase its federal government.
“As we mature the company, what we really want to do is build out our offerings and service catalogue to become a full-service cybersecurity company, such as our larger competitors say they are,” Weir said.
“We want to be all those services within the federal government market, expanding into some other states later on.”
“We want to be able to do the project-based work that we do at the moment, the cyber assurance stuff, and also do things like IRAP and penetration testing, and SecOps as a future goal.”
“It will take a little time to get there, so we're going to increase the breadth of what we do so that we can do what all the big guys say they can do, but we do it all in Canberra and all with one team.”
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