Make the Company You Keep Matter
Episode 9 with Jay Tinkler, co-founder of Convoy Collective and Remarkably.
Jay Tinkler has spent more than twenty years working at the intersection of word-of-mouth marketing, behavioural science and trust research. In this episode of Queensland Business Stories, he joins Chris Tipper to unpack a question a lot of professional services firms skip past: why is so much business development still built around the transaction when trust is what drives retention, resilience and long-term revenue?
Jay’s path into that question started inside a Brisbane digital agency and kept coming back to the same uncomfortable pattern. Businesses were very good at proving competence, but much less deliberate about communicating care. The data says that matters. Jay points to research linking trust directly to the bottom line, then brings it back to the day-to-day behaviours that decide whether a client sees you as a supplier or a long-term partner.
Competence Is Only Half The Trust Equation
Jay uses a simple frame from Princeton’s Professor Susan Fisk: trust breaks into competence and warmth of intention. Competence is showing up, doing the work and keeping promises. Most professional services businesses understand that part. Warmth of intention is the human signal that you genuinely care about the person in front of you.
Most firms try to prove competence first and assume care will be understood. Jay argues the order matters.
That distinction changes the way business development sounds. A firm that leads only with credentials and capability can still feel transactional. A firm that demonstrates care first gives its competence somewhere to land. Same expertise, different starting point, very different relationship.
Why Convoy Is A Network, Not A Networking Group
Convoy Collective is Jay and Neil Terry’s practical answer to the networking problem. It is designed as a private business network for founders and leaders in professional and creative services, not another pitch room. No keynote circuit. No business-card race. No forced referral theatre.
The model is built around curated monthly events in Woolloongabba, fortnightly online roundtables, invite-only dinners and a Concierge service that actively matches members into useful conversations. The point is not volume. It is quality connections, fresh knowledge and held space for better conversations.
That is why the guest list ranges from behavioural scientists and neuroscientists to Disney Imagineers and experience-design leaders. Convoy grows deliberately slowly because the curation is the product.
The Customer Experience Lesson For Queensland SMEs
Jay and Chris bring the trust conversation back to the scale most Queensland businesses actually operate at. The Savannah Bananas baseball team becomes the case study. Sending ticket holders a playlist for the drive to the game and using an all-inclusive ticket model are not just quirky marketing ideas. They are small decisions that communicate care before the customer even arrives.
The same principle applies to accountants, coffee shops, service firms and technology businesses. Most businesses have moments where they can make the customer feel considered. The question is whether those moments are designed, or left to chance.
AI, Speed And The Relationship Layer
Jay is not anti-technology. He sees the value in automation for speed, repetition and operational delivery. His warning is more specific: AI is landing in a trust environment that was already weakened by the collapse of confidence in institutions and top-down authority.
Because AI feels human, people are beginning to treat it like a human relationship. Jay’s concern is not that businesses will use AI. It is that they will use it in places where the relationship itself was the value. Speed is useful. Replacing the relational core of the customer experience is a cost.
The Loneliness Of The Founder Journey
The episode closes on the founder experience. Jay’s observation is that founders are rarely short of people around them. They are short of people they can take a real conversation to. Convoy’s job is to shorten the path to those conversations, build trust with fewer touch points, and give members a place where opting in and out as life changes is understood.
For founders tired of the networking grind, leaders trying to draw the line between AI efficiency and human connection, or professional services firms that know the old model feels transactional, this is a useful articulation of what a trust-first business model can look like in practice.
Connect With Jay
Convoy Collective
Jay Tinkler on LinkedIn
The Remarkable Project podcast
More From Queensland Business Stories
Queensland Business Stories is presented by Connected Platforms. We sit down with Queensland business owners, operators and leaders to unpack the real decisions, constraints and lessons behind the work.