Scituate Light — photo by Frank van Mierlo, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY)
I've spent most of my career figuring out how to make things work better.
Hi, I'm Jay.
I've spent most of my career in operations and leadership roles, which is a fairly broad way of saying I've spent a lot of time figuring things out.
I've built and led teams, worked on customer experience, sales and service operations, implemented technology, developed processes, worked with KPIs, launched new initiatives, and stepped into plenty of situations where the answer wasn't obvious when we started.
These days, I do this work through Perched Ocean — the consulting business I created to work directly with small-business owners.
The part I've always liked most
I've always been drawn to the point where someone says, "Here's what we're trying to do. We're just not quite sure how to get there."
That's usually where the interesting work starts.
I like understanding how something actually works today, asking a lot of questions, finding the things that matter, and then figuring out what we can realistically do about them.
Why small businesses?
Working directly with small-business owners has reminded me how much I enjoy this kind of work.
In a small business, everything connects. Your website affects customer acquisition. Customer acquisition affects capacity. Capacity affects operations. Pricing affects what you can afford to build. Technology can solve a problem — or create three new ones.
You can't always separate the business into neat categories.
That's one of the reasons I don't.
I'd rather understand what's happening across the business and help you work on whatever is actually getting in the way.
What I believe
I don't think every small business needs to become a big business.
Maybe you want to grow. Maybe you want more consistent customers. Maybe you want to make more without working more. Maybe you want the business to depend a little less on you.
Or maybe you've built something you're proud of and just want it to work better.
That's enough.
If something in your business has you thinking, "There has to be a better way to do this," there's a good chance we'll have something useful to talk about.
Working throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and virtually across the U.S.