Matt Ward 00:01
Hey everybody welcome to the Mass Business Podcast. My name is Matt Ward. We are happy to have you back for season two and Episode Five We’ve got a great guest for you. This week it is Jay small. Jay lives in Brighton, Massachusetts. He works with cinch IT and provides IT support for businesses all over the United States. Jay has been running the Woburn and Newton, Massachusetts locations since July of 2019. He grew up in Grafton, and there’s a theme here. It’s the Gs he grew up in Grafton. And here’s the trifecta. He’s all about the gym, the guitar, and golf. We’re gonna dig right in with Jay small. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Matt Ward 01:01
Welcome to the mass business podcast where small business owners, also known as risk takers, share their stories about the growth of their business and themselves. Our interviews, and our content is focused on growing a small business and understanding networking and referrals. I say it all the time. And I’ll say it again today. You never know where your next referral will come from.

Matt Ward 01:33
All right. Welcome to the show, Jay Small Good to have you here.

Jay Small 01:36
Thanks, Matt. Great to be here.

Matt Ward 01:38
Yeah, it’s exciting. I love that. Well, we played a little golf recently. Well, actually, I didn’t play a little golf. I ran a little golf event. You played a little golf, and we had a lot of fun. Which is I think the goal of golf. But interestingly enough, I love that you love the game of golf. You’re probably like me. Yeah. What do you shoot for game of golf?

Jay Small 01:57
If I break 100 it’s a great day.

Matt Ward 01:59
Yeah, so I shoot 72? Yeah. Oh, nine holes. So um, so yeah, so we had a good time out at the big event. That was exciting and fun. But the thing about golf that I love so much is about building relationships, right? And so where else can you spend five hours with someone? Like uninterrupted? Like, that just doesn’t happen? Right? You’re lucky to get a coffee meeting.

Jay Small 02:27
Exactly. I mean, people get so distracted. Nowadays, I think attention spans are short, everybody’s always busy. It’s nice to like be out there on the golf course, you don’t always get the best cell reception. So there’s really nothing to do but chat with the people that you’re playing with.

Matt Ward 02:39
And that’s the point of being there. Right? So, so speaking, the point of being here and under 30 seconds is so why don’t you tell our podcast listeners and those watching on YouTube what it is you do and cinch IT?

Jay Small 02:50
Sure. So we are what’s known as a managed service provider. So basically what we do is provide IT support to businesses, typically their small to medium sized businesses, and we act as their entire IT department. Maybe they don’t have the resources to build out an internal team, or maybe they have one or two people, but they’ve got a big enough workforce that they need help with the help desk support, the monitoring, all the backend stuff that goes into managing a business so really, we do everything that you would expect an internal IT department to do for typically a fraction of the cost.

Matt Ward 03:22
And so you know, like when I owned my website company, we are as such service providers for small business owners, but we’re also small business owners and growers ourselves, right. So we have the struggles in the trials and tribulations of growing a business that every other small business owner has. Talk to me about the biggest challenge for you in growing your business.

Jay Small 03:48
I would say the biggest challenge is honestly keeping the motivation and a positive attitude day in and day out. Because consistency is key, I think when you’re building anything, and staying consistent over a long period of time, is the ultimate road to success. But it’s harder than you know, it appears you know, there’s things that you run into that people don’t think about when you start a business you know, there’s client issues, there’s losing clients, there’s not getting the deal that you thought was a done deal. All those things can really sort of rip and tear your psyche a little bit and at your belief system and it gets tough so you got to constantly be reminding yourself that you know it’s a long term game. It’s a marathon, not a sprint and you got to expect that you know, there’s going to be trials and tribulations.

Matt Ward 04:34
So how much of this is mindset for you? Because you just brought that up like three times in that in that sentence in that answer. And how much of business ownership, trajectory, growth, management is mindset for you?

Jay Small 04:50
I think I’d say most of it, honestly, like everything starts in your mind. If you don’t envision it in your mind, you’re probably not going to get there in real life. You know you constantly but Gotta be thinking about what your goals are, and what you’re really striving towards. And if you’re not able to see it or envision it in your mind, and you’re not able to convince yourself that that’s possible, and that that’s where you’re going, the chances of you getting there are slim to none, in my opinion. I’ve found that I’ve never really ended up somewhere good by accident, when I’m really not thinking about it whatsoever, you know, you can end up all sorts of places, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else is what they say. But that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes there’s, you know, some divine intervention there, and you may have something good happen by happenstance. But if you’re really seeing your 5, 10 year plan in your head, the chances of you getting there in that time or less are way higher, I think.

Matt Ward 05:46
And you also mentioned too some of the things about the trials and tribulations like the done deal that didn’t get done, right, and the, and how that affects your psyche. You know, I talked, I wrote in my new book about imposter syndrome, and how we all think that we’re the only ones that have this problem. And in reality, everybody’s got this problem. But imposter syndrome is a huge issue in a small business, and trying to grow a small business and bounce back. How do you deal with this idea that I didn’t get this gig, I didn’t get this job, I didn’t get this client, or I didn’t have a sale this week, or this day, or this month, or whatever your business is? How do you deal with that mental approach that then leads into maybe I’m not good enough to be doing this?

Jay Small 06:34
Yeah, so I think that you’ve got to constantly be looking at your activities, right, so you can control the controllables. And then certain things are out of your control. So if I’m looking at my activities, and saying, This is what I set out to do, at the beginning of the week, I was going to make this many phone calls or go to this many events or whatever it may be, you just got to hold yourself accountable to those things and the rest falls into place, you’ve got to expect that you’re not going to get every sale, going to expect that things aren’t always going to go your way, unexpected things are going to pop up. And just be prepared for that. And sometimes things are going you know so well that you can’t even believe it. And you’ve got to remind yourself, hey, this isn’t always going to be this easy, or the smooth, we’re just having a you know, a good streak right now. But you know, it’s gonna go the other way at some point, and you’ve got to be ready for that. And that’s why you take advantage of everything you can when when times are easy, and things are good. And then when times get tough, you just got to keep looking at those metrics and holding yourself accountable to what you said you’re gonna do.

Matt Ward 07:37
I love that, that you look at the approach of what’s in front of you, what can you control. And that’s so important in small business, because you can’t control other people’s mindset. You can’t control other people’s actions, you can’t control other people’s decisions. But you can control how you react to those things. And if you let the negative thoughts get you down, then it’s going to put you in a space whereby the activities aren’t going to exist. And you mentioned a number of activities, whether it’s the calls, some people might be out there cold calling or door knocking, other people are going to be networking, other people are going to be, you know, doing email marketing and paid ads and all these things. What’s the big thing you use to grow your business is networking, a big component of that?

Jay Small 08:10
Networking is huge. You know, I always try to do some sort of introspection on where our clients are coming from. And even more importantly, where you know, our best clients are coming from, our most profitable clients, you know, whether it’s cold calls, or whether it’s networking, and I found by and far, like networking, and referrals are our best lead sources and lead to the most high value clients.

Matt Ward 08:51
And they’re more likely to sign right, because they’re hand delivered on a silver platter. They’re pre teed up for the, for the sale. They’re interested. As I like to say, a referral is somebody ready, willing, and able to buy, right. If we’re not getting those type of things, we need to make sure we educate our partners to make sure that that’s there.

Jay Small 09:12
yeah, I think you can skip a few steps of like the beginning of the sales process, when you get a nice referral to somebody. When you make a cold call. It’s like you’re trying to build that rapport and that credibility for the first couple of calls. Like there’s that sense of do I trust this person? What are they trying to get from me? Is this a scam? Like, you’ve got to get past all of that when you’re cold calling somebody whereas you get referred into somebody if you sort of bypass all of those things, and you’re riding off that other person’s credibility.

Matt Ward 09:36
Yeah. And I mean, so So when you say control your activities, how many events are you trying to go to, networking events and things like that each and every week or month?

Jay Small 09:46
So I’m trying to do at least three to four networking events a week. You know, there’s some meetings that happen weekly. There’s some meetings that I’m a part of that happen bi weekly, and then there’s like one off events that pop up like, you know, the golf outing that you hosted that, you just look for these things. And you know, hey, this is gonna be a great event. And sometimes those are really like the best ones, at least in my opinion to go to because you go to the BNI every week, and you sort of get into this routine, where it’s the same people talking about the same things. And sometimes, you know, I hate to say it, but sometimes people aren’t necessarily paying attention to like the referrals anymore, after you’re in the same group for a certain amount of time where new people, and you’re like, Wow, I didn’t even know this industry existed, or like, that’s really interesting what you’re working on there, and you really get to meet like a new sphere of people from those new events.

Matt Ward 10:35
I see when it comes to the network, the thing you’re talking about with the networking event, I see this a lot. What happens is, we get networking group fatigue, it’s like zoom fatigue, we get this fatigue, because we’re going every week. Doesn’t matter whether it’s BNI or Ampirit, or anybody else, right? USA 500, NGU. You know, it can be free events that meet every week too. People get this fatigue, because they feel like everybody’s saying the same thing. And what I teach people is that you need to say the same thing, 12 weeks in a row. And here’s why. Because people don’t show up every week. There’s lots of reasons why somebody is not there. There’s also reasons why somebody is not paying attention, they’re on their phone, they get a text message from their kid, whatever it might be. And so the messaging that we send out isn’t enough, if we just do it once or twice, right. And we have to do it 7, 15, 20 times, whatever the sales guru say you have to do it. And so these impressions that happen on this weekly basis, are what happened, I was in a weekly networking group, recently, a b2b group. And one of the business advisors who talks about finance stuff was in the group. And she mentioned something. And Funny enough, she had said that same thing about six weeks in a row, and it never connected with me. But when she said it in this particular week, it connected with me, because four days earlier, I had a one to one with someone who is going to be looking to sell their business in three to five years. And her commercial was about how she can help them position, the financial side of the company to help them sell. So the fact that she repeated, it worked out really well. The issue comes when we as individuals start to tune out to that, which is what you’re seeing with some of these people in these groups. And so you have to find a way to make it fun, you can still say the same thing. But just start by putting on a silly hat. And I mean, I know that sounds lame, but you have to do that pattern interrupt, if you think about Facebook, right? When do you stop the scroll on Facebook? When the when the ad stands out, right? When you have a clown come through the screen, right? Something like odd like that stops the scroll. So how do you how do you regain the attention? You know, sometimes what I do is if I’m on a zoom meeting, and it looks like somebody is not paying attention, and I’m doing my commercial or something, I’ll just be like, so. So yeah, so this is what I do for work. And Jay, what do you think about that? And if you do that enough, if you do that enough, what will ultimately happen is everybody will know that you’re going to do that, and they don’t want to be called on and not have the answer. You know. So and that’s the strike. That’s why people leave groups is because they get discouraged. They might say that they’re not getting enough referrals. And the funny thing about that is, I always see that they’re not tracking them properly. I tell people how how’s your networking group working? Well, it’s okay. It’s not great. Yeah, I’m not getting referrals from it. Why is that? Well, the people just aren’t giving referrals. Whose fault is that? Well, it’s their fault. No, it’s your fault. I always tell people, it’s the person who’s sitting in the seat. It’s their fault. Because it’s all the actions you do. And the things you say, and the ones the ones you have, and the conversations you have to build those relationships. So have you gotten to this point through relationship building yourself? It sounds like you have.

Jay Small 14:11
Yeah, yeah, no, we’ve definitely it’s one of those things when you first start in an industry it takes a lot more to get that momentum going and then once you’ve been doing something for a couple of years, people sort of start to know you as the go to person for that thing. So you build that credibility, you build that reputation, and people get a better understanding what you do over time. Like you said that consistency is key, saying the same thing over and over again because it’s right place right time. You know, I’m the same thing with audiobooks, you know, you listen to an audio book the first time and then you listen to it the second time and it’s like you get something completely different out of it. And that can happen over and over again, depending on what you know, season of your life you’re in when you’re listening to that book.

Matt Ward 14:51
I once read a blog post by famous author and irrotational speaker as he calls himself Larry Winget. And Larry Winget said the idea when you read a book or listen to a book or listen to a podcast is not to take in all the information, it’s taking one small tidbit and grow from that and make changes. It sounds like you’re doing a lot you know, when you think of what people know you for and not so much as an IT company but they know Jay, what do you think people you know say, what are the attributes that they assign or give to Jay small?

Jay Small 15:35
Yeah, you know, that’s a good question and it’s something that I try to think about you know, from time to time because it’s good to try to know how you’re showing up to people or how you think you’re showing up to people. so I think that people would see me as you know, a driven individual, somebody who’s motivated to get a job done and more importantly somebody who’s you know, of the mind of service you know, servant leadership, that’s the way that we’ve built our business to be so successful in a short period of time is making sure that we’re actually doing the right things and doing a good job for people. So I think that whether you talk to my clients or my co workers, I mean my co workers might tell you I’m a little crazy because of like the level that we take that to trying to make sure we’re always over delivering on what we’re saying we’re going to do for people but I think it’s super important and that’s how you really start to get those referrals over time too. Yeah, doing what you said you’re going to do but also maybe a little bit more you know, going the extra mile, taking it that one step further that’s going to lead to an unbelievable experience and just making things as easy as possible because one of the things that drives me crazy is when it’s difficult to do business.

Matt Ward 16:46
That’s so painful. so first thing is the number one pillar in my book on referrals is over deliver right because I’m glad you said that and then number two is I just did a video on making it easy to get referred. Making it easy to contact to get them to network with somebody it’s super easy. So when you talk about servant leadership, I mean leadership is a big component right? I think we grow as leaders the more we do, would you say that that is one of your strongest attributes for yourself, one of your strengths?

Jay Small 17:22
So when I look at myself, I mean I think I hold myself to a high standard when it comes to that, so I see you know some of the people out there that are either in my life you know directly or people that have influenced me through their writings or their speeches and things like that and I feel like I am not even close the the level of leader that those people are. So i i’ve never necessarily looked at myself as a great leader. I’ve looked at myself as somebody who’s always striving to be the best leader I possibly can be and always trying to improve on that but I guess you know, if you take a look back and I look at myself five years ago, yeah it’s night and day. I’m a much better leader than I was then. If I look five years back from then I’m much better, like way way much better leader than I was back then. So I think what I tried to do is just constantly be improving and constantly being focused on those things and leadership being a huge one because as we’re growing a team we’re hiring new people, you know we’ve got three employees right now and it’s the biggest team I’ve ever managed in my life because we’ve just grown over time and you know, someday we might have 20 employees or 25 employees directly under me that that I’ve hired. And you know I want to make sure that I’m able to fulfill that leadership role when that time comes.

Matt Ward 18:36
I’ve been there man. I had three at one time, then I had eight and then I had none on purpose. I sold the company because you know I never wanted to have children so there it is. It’s it can be a challenging situation and especially now with the labor market the way it is, super hard to hire. Employees are demanding even the most ridiculous benefits sometimes just take a job you know, like unlimited time off and unlimited work from home and so unfortunately they don’t always see the opposite side of the fence on that you know, but it’s a challenge and I think creating the right culture in a company is definitely the way to go I mean, I was able to attract people that could have gone into Boston and worked for 20 $30,000 more a year and instead they worked in Gardner right because of the the culture and the the the way we had it so it is about leadership. What ways do you improve on that, you know, how do you improve yourself and your business over time? What’s your biggest process for that?

Jay Small 19:48
Yeah, so I do a few different things you know, always trying to look for, you know, good books on the topic. I think that’s always a good place to start to, you know, like you said, grab that one idea. Going to seminars or doing web events or things like that. But the funny thing with leadership is you can go to as many seminars as you can possibly fit in your calendar, and you can read as many books as you possibly can, but you’re not going to necessarily learn how to be a leader until you actually step into that role. And you actually have a team of people that are looking to you for decisions. So I think the most important thing, you know, taking those things and trying to apply them in real life, and then seeing how that actually works, and seeing, you know, what those dynamics are with your team and constantly trying to get aligned with with the people that you’re working with.Cchecking in with people, you know, to see what may be on their plate that you may not be aware of, and what their challenges are. I find that like, the real world application is really where you test yourself as a leader.

Matt Ward 20:44
And then it’s about revisiting, right? It’s like the self reflection side of it. Right?

Jay Small 20:48
Exactly. So it’s constantly, you know, looking at what you’re doing, looking at how that’s working, and seeing if there’s a better way to do it.

Matt Ward 20:55
Jay, do you have a process for your own self reflection?

Jay Small 20:58
So I don’t have a formal process, but I try to do it on, you know, a weekly basis at the very least. Sometimes if there’s, you know, if stuffs really hitting the fan, and it’s a tough time and a bad day, you might look back that day and say, What have I done today positive? What could I have done better? And, you know, let’s go from there. But I try to do it, at least on a weekly basis, where we get to the end of the week, and I’m looking back, because we have a meeting with our team every Monday morning. So it’s like, let’s look back at what happened at that meeting on Monday morning. What we all said we were going to do, then let’s see where the week went from there. And how did I show up this week? And how was I you know, showing up to the team? And was I supportive enough? Did we get everything we needed to do done? And if not, why didn’t we? Like could I have done something more to help facilitate that. So that’s what I tried to do. At the very minimum.

Matt Ward 21:49
Years ago, I hired a business coach, when I had my web design company, his name was Jim Derocher. He’s in Groton, Mass. And he, he taught me to ask four questions. What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Would I do it again? And if so, what would I do differently? And I literally started beating that into my brain. And now there are times when I go to a networking event, and I leave and I’m driving home and I asked myself, those four questions. Those are the four questions I asked after the big event. And we dug deep on that. And then we said, okay, let’s break it down. We had a meal. Let’s ask the four questions about the meal. Ask four questions about registration, let’s ask the four questions about pricing. Let’s ask four questions about the networking. So we deconstructed every part of the day to find where we can improve, right? And where we would not do things again, right those things are gone. And then we’ll do something different next time or something better, right? And so whether it be an interaction with an employee, an interaction with a customer, a sales, pricing conversation, a cold call? I mean, that’s a great process to ask yourself.

Jay Small 22:56
Yeah, it’s super powerful. And when it comes to things like cold calls and meetings, I always like to try to record them if I can too. I always asked somebody’s permission at the beginning. But there’s a couple reasons. You know, if you’re on a call like this with a potential client, first of all, you want to make sure that you capture the whole conversation. So you can look back at what is important to them in case you miss something. But also, you can look at it for the reasons that you’re talking about, like, what could I have done better here? Like, Oh, I missed that they said this directly, and I didn’t even pay attention to it. I glossed right over it. And that could have been a huge opportunity to dive deeper into whatever their paying point is, or whatever they’re really looking for, from an IT company so, like I love to go back through and actually physically listen or watch those types of meetings. Because that’s how we’ve improved our sales process over time as well.

Jay Small 22:56
Yeah. So you mentioned that you read a lot of books, I like to ask all the guests on the podcast, what is your favorite business book that you like to read?

Jay Small 23:52
That’s a good question. I mean, it really depends on the it’s a cliche answer, but it depends on really what time I’m looking at, or what’s going on in my life, but I think one that I’ve consistently gone back to, and that I’ve, you know, read over and over again, since I got out of college actually would be Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I think that is just such a classic. It’s such a fundamental book on, you know, mindset, like we talked about in the beginning, I think that you can learn a lot from that book, I probably read it at least 20 or 30 times at this point. And every time I listen to it or read it, I get something new from it.

Matt Ward 24:29
Yeah, that’s great. You know, it’s it’s interesting, because we’re often dealt a lot of blows in business, right? We talked about mindset earlier and things like that. It produces, I think, a lot of stress in our lives, whether it be in business or personal or crossover. How do you deal with that?

Jay Small 24:50
You know, that like you said at the beginning, some of those fun things that I like to do like golf, gym, guitar, I feel the gym is very important. You know, getting in there and doing a workout, I find myself a lot of times, if I start my day, and it starts going south real quick, I’ll go to the gym, even if it’s just for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, like whatever I can fit into my schedule, but I find that it’s important to get that in there because it’ll change the whole trajectory of that day rather than continuing that downward spiral or that plunge that you’re on track for you go to the gym, and you reset, and you just feel completely different. I think it’s the perfect natural, stress reliever. So that’s something that I’ve been leaning very heavily on, especially as I’ve gotten older, you know, I just turned 30. You know it’s a big new decade.

Matt Ward 25:45
I’m so much older than you.

Jay Small 25:48
I’m realizing, hey, I’m getting older and older times flying, I’m actually gonna be 31 in less than a month. So I guess I didn’t just turn 30.

Matt Ward 25:54
I know, I know. Isn’t that funny? I just turned 30. And then that was like, 11 months ago. Yeah. And then, and I think I turned 30, 20 years ago. I mean, I’m not 50 yet. But listen, when you get over 40, what happens when your birthday comes up and people say, Oh, how old are you, you have to start actually doing the math. You forget. So I was doing it the other day. I was an odd year, baby. So I was born in 73. So I always have to do the math. And I always get it wrong. I literally get it wrong. The last three years, I’ve been getting my age wrong. And I’m not lying about my age, because if I was gonna lie, I just be 29 or I’d be 39. But it’s clear with the hair, or the lack thereof, that I’m not 39. So I have to do the math, and I’ll be 48 this year. And it’s always it’s just one of those things. I don’t know, you just have to start it. I don’t know, hey, you’re so funny. You’re like I’m entering a new decade, I’m gonna be 30 I’m so old.

Jay Small 26:01
I was neglecting my health a little bit towards the end of my 20s I wasn’t getting to the gym as much. And I felt crappy. You know, I started to realize, Hey, I’m not in college anymore. I can’t just you know, stay up all night and skip the gym and do all this other stuff. Because you just feel it a lot more. It takes a bigger toll on you. And you know, I know the older I get, the more important that’s going to be in talking about mindset. It’s hard to have a good mindset if your body feels like crap.

Matt Ward 27:28
Yeah, yeah, I mean the fitness thing. I don’t know, I never, that was never really my thing. In fact, I don’t really. fitness doesn’t fit my vocabulary very much. Well, in one way, I’m fitting this whole pizza my mouth. I mean, that’s the way I deal with stress. I just eat another pizza. Yeah. Lately, I’ve been in a relationship with the refrigerator. Yeah. Called a pandemic relationship. Yeah. It’s all good. So, not including in your industry, one question I like to ask people about is game changing software, what piece of software. And again, not something that runs your business, but something that that you could give advice to, for the listeners and the viewers on YouTube to watch? Or to check out. What piece of software do you think has been a game changer in business growth for you, Jay?

Jay Small 28:22
So something that it’s really simple, and I’m sure a lot of people have used it, but if not, then definitely check it out. But Microsoft Teams has been huge for us, you know, during the pandemic, with people working from home and working, you know, with a team and managing a team of people, just that collaboration, if you’re already on Office 365. And using you know, SharePoint for file share and creating your files through there, it just makes it so easy to collaborate through teams. The thing that used to drive me crazy about zoom calls is that the chat doesn’t automatically save. And like if you join the chat late you miss whatever we shared before. With teams, that chat saves the whole time. And you can go revisit it, you know, a couple weeks from now I can join the same chat session and talk about what we were talking about in that thread. So I’ve just found it to be you know, it’s a simple one, but I find it to be huge for our collaboration and just making sure that, you know, all the different segments of our business are aligned with one another.

Matt Ward 29:17
If people aren’t on Office 365, are they still able to get teams?

Jay Small 29:22
Yes. So you could still use teams, it might not be as effective for you, you know, if you’re doing file share through G Suite or something like that, but because he’s set up on the backend of SharePoint, so it’s really one in the same but you can still share files to there and you can still use it.

Matt Ward 29:37
Okay, when I hear the word SharePoint, I think big companies, you know, are solopreneurs, entrepreneurs going to be using something like teams?

Jay Small 29:44
Yeah, so I think anybody who has you know, a team, even if that team is one other person, that’s still a team, and it’s still powerful. So just for the reasons that I said before, with like zoom, or sometimes the chats aren’t saving, and you’re like, Oh, I know that we were talking about this, but I don’t remember what the exact conversation was. The thing with teams is it’s automatically saved there. So you can just go back revisit that. t’s like a combination of slack and zoom together is really the way that I see it.

Matt Ward 30:09
So it’s really replacing two tools in one,

Jay Small 30:12
For sure. And that’s really the point I was making with. if you already have office 365, you can potentially save yourself some money if you’re already using those other tools, you know, you already built out this, you know, tech stack, you can do it all with teams. Save those costs.

Matt Ward 30:26
Yeah, that’s great. You know, it’s been great to kind of dig deep into how you grow your business. And what I love about this podcast episode is the mindset stuff that we talked about. The fact that it’s about resetting and focusing on the right things, and not the wrong things, and the things we can control and the things we can’t control. And, and I love having a small business owner talking to another small business owner about things that aren’t about the products and services we offer. Right? Because that helps us strategize and grow. And, and I think ultimately, that’s how you gain the know, like, trust, and care about factor that produces referrals for other people. is is you have conversations that are off topic of services. I think that’s the big lesson for today, right? Is, is where is your mindset as a listener and as a viewer? Where’s your mindset? And can you course correct it consistently? Can you eliminate stress by going to the gym or eating a pizza? Right? I mean, if you come visit me in Templeton, we might actually get a Big Mac pizza.

Jay Small 31:36
Sounds awesome.

Matt Ward 31:37
I know, right? It’s awesome. Jay, if the listening audience in the viewers on YouTube want to reach out to you, they want to either do networking, they want to have a conversation about mindset and dig deeper on that. Or they want to reach out to you about managed services with IT. How can they get ahold of you?

Jay Small 31:55
Yeah, there’s a few different channels. Find me on LinkedIn for sure. You know, LinkedIn Jay Small, I think the actual URL is cinch IT Boston. So LinkedIn linkedin.com, slash cinch it Boston on there. And then my email address is Jsmall@cinchit.com, that’s just the letter J. S, M A L L at cinch it dot com. Or you can you know, give me a call, you know, 508-340-9914 you know, do all the above, do one or the other doesn’t matter to me, I’m easy to get ahold of, and I’m always here to help but be a resource in any capacity possible.

Matt Ward 32:30
Great. So we’ll put all that information in the show notes. Make sure you do not send carrier pigeons to Jay he might be unavailable and on a golf course.

Jay Small 32:37
smoke signals don’t work very well.

Matt Ward 32:40
Yeah, it’s been great. Make sure that you folks, get this great content & you hit subscribe, smash that subscribe button on YouTube and follow us in. engage us with the comments. Jay will be responding to all the comments on social media and on the YouTube channel when the podcast comes out, so make sure that you interact and ask questions. That’s what we love. And that’s what it’s all about. Jay, thanks for coming on the show. We greatly appreciate it. Listeners Thank you for listening and for watching and until next time, don’t forget to live happy, smile a lot, and high five everyone around you.

Matt Ward 33:31
Thank you for listening to the mass business podcast where we focus on growing a small business and understanding networking and referrals. Don’t forget to like on your favorite platform and share out this podcast. This show has been produced by Heather Grant music by Cailte Kelley. All rights reserved. I’m your host, professional speaker, author, and word of mouth referral consultant, Matt Ward. Don’t forget to live happy, smile a lot. And high five everyone around you.