Jess Lindgren is a longtime C-Suite assistant, and host of the Ask an Assistant podcast.
In this Ask an Assistant spotlight episode, Jess talks corporate holiday gift lists.
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ABOUT JESS
Jess Lindgren has worked in the C-Suite of organizations great and small for 20+ years. She focuses on supporting her current CEO in his many endeavors, improving the relationships between EAs and their Execs, and has very low tolerance for any meeting that should have been an email. Jess hosts the wildly popular* business podcast, Ask An Assistant.
*in her Grandma’s sewing room
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Burrows 0:00
Hey, friends, it’s Jeremy Burrows, host of The Leader Assistant Podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. I’m actually excited to put the spotlight on my friend Jess Lindgren’s podcast called Ask an Assistant. Jess takes questions from you all and then answers them on the Ask an Assistant show. So be sure to go to askanassistant.com to check out more episodes and submit your questions for Jess. I hope you enjoy this spotlight episode of the Ask an Assistant show, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Podcast Intro 0:34
The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing leader assistants.
Jess Lindgren 0:55
Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask an Assistant, the podcast for executive assistants and the people that love us, I’m your host. Jess Lindgren, let’s get to work this week. No question. Asker, it’s just you and me, baby. We are talking about maintaining and updating your gift list. This isn’t exactly a roughly quarterly. This is more of a once a year kind of thing, and it is early enough. Honestly, next year, I might even remind you folks to do this, maybe like late August, early September, instead of end of September. But something that I used to do, I don’t do a ton of corporate gifting in my present role. It’s more of kind of an ad hoc you know, hey, thanks for inviting us to this event. Thanks for working on us with this project kind of thing. It’s a little different when you work in an office and you’ve got lots of vendors, people who come through all the time. If you’re in more of a traditional business space, you just have people that come and go through your office for any given reason. And I mean, not even necessarily a traditional business space. Every every business is so different. But in my present role, it’s just the two of us. In the role where I did a lot more corporate gifting, it was a much bigger team. We had an internal staff of probably just ballpark, let’s just say, 50 people of internal staff, and so there’s a lot of support and a lot of external parties that come into play when you have a bigger company like that. And again, if you’re just a little two person company, maybe you have lots of people that come and do it, go and do a ton of gifting yourself. Again, every business is different. Using the example of the former role where I did a lot of gifting. One of the things that I did that was super helpful is maintain and annually update the gifting spreadsheet so we would just have a little who, what, when, where, why? You know, who is this person? Are they an employee? Are they a vendor? Are they somebody that we do business with for whatever reason? What did we give them? When did we send it to them? Where did we send it, and why? What’s the relationship? What is it that you know, just to kind of refresh our memories, because there’s always going to be people who are added to that list every year. There are going to be people, unfortunately, who don’t make the cut. So just having that little visual reminder, especially since it’s something that you only do once a year, going through early in the holiday process season, as things start to wind down for the year, it’s just a great time to do it. Like now, like, if you don’t already have this spreadsheet, I am working on a downloadable template for you, it will not be ready by the time this episode is out, but it should be ready, because I release the episodes 5am Eastern every Tuesday, and the template should be ready by the time I post it to LinkedIn, so sometime Tuesday afternoon. But yeah, so just maintain that spreadsheet. If you already have a spreadsheet and there’s something other than the who, what, when, where, why of it all? I also used to maintain a budget on that, you know, how much did we spend on this person? Like, I might put a little link to the actual exact item that we sent, but I’ll also put a little reminder. Like, hey, this one was $50 plus $15 shipping. This one was $75 and shipping was free. So just a little running total of what you spent last year, especially in recent years. Things are, unfortunately across the board holiday gifting, including a little more expensive than they used to be, but creating and then maintaining that spreadsheet is so important again, because you’re going to do, you know, 100 other things this week, in addition to cleaning up your gift list. It’s it’s not always something that lives super crystal clearly in my mind, and hopefully this is something that will help you as you are determining who it is that does and doesn’t make the cut for your gift lists. I would like to. Really strongly advocate right up here at the top that you reach out to folks and find out about their dietary restrictions, speaking as a person who is allergic to dairy products, so that includes milk, that includes yogurt, that includes caramel, that includes all kinds of delicious things that go into 80% of holiday gift baskets. The number of things that my husband has been a recipient of that I cannot eat is just so very sad. So just do yourself a little bit of research note that on your spreadsheet, like, hey, Joan from Accounting has a nut allergy, please don’t send her a bag of salted nut rolls from Pearson’s candy. Like, you know, just a little bit of consideration goes a really long way. Um, it is kind of a bummer at the end of the year, as holiday gifts start pouring in when it’s stuff that you can’t even enjoy, like, I can look at it, I can watch while my husband eats it, but I would really like to be able to partake too. And the nice thing is, you know, I have been with my present executive for over a decade now, so it’s been a while since I used to do this high volume corporate gifting. The options like the number of people who have set up companies for gifting has only gotten larger, and hats off to them, because I have worked firsthand with a couple of people who ran small gifting companies and just the logistics of sourcing products, creating new relationships with people, maintaining stock, having a Beautiful space to assemble the gift baskets or gift boxes in I’m actually just going to take a quick peek and see if this company that I love is still in business, and they are Minnie and Paul. Minnie and paul.com and I will put a link to them in the show notes, because they are incredible. I met the team back when they were first starting out, and just their space was gorgeous. They had so many cool things. They always partnered with local artists, local crafts people to make their boxes super unique and special to Minnesota. I am from Minnesota, and we are oddly proud of being from Minnesota, especially lately go Governor Timmy, but yeah, just like the number of people who have started these companies, who maintain these companies, all all kudos to you, because the logistics behind making those boxes happen, especially this time of year, when the Volume is just going to be off the rails. I just love it so much. And again, being a person with dietary restrictions, I love it that there are companies who do things that are dietary restriction friendly, whether that means the things that they offer are not food, or if that means that they offer things that are vegan, things that are gluten free, things that are able for everyone to enjoy. So diving into things a little bit further, we’re going to use that who what, when, where, why? Kind of the same framework that I’ve talked about before. There’s an episode quite a while back about the who what, when, where, why? Of it all. I don’t recall the episode number off the top of my head, but again, another link for the show notes. I also use this framework for the holiday party episode, so just kind of a high level who, who are you sending gift baskets to? Are they internal people that get these? Are they external people? Are they your commercial landscaper. Are they the person who stocks your coffee machine? Are they the people who clean your offices? You know, who is it the external parties? The internal parties? Are they people that you have a long standing client relationship with? Is it someone that you are in the process of landing as a client, and maybe you want to just, you know, send them a nice little gesture around the holiday time, like, hey, thinking of you. Would love to be doing business with you. Who is it that gets these baskets or gifts or whatever it is that you choose to send? What? What are you going to send? Are you picking a company, the one that I mentioned before, Minnie and Paul. They are just incredible. The boxes that they I haven’t received a box from them in a while, but at the time, they had these really cute, like balsa wood boxes, and then they embossed a logo on it, and just made a really cute, really esthetically pleasing to open really nice, really high quality box of products. I really loved it. So Minnie and Paul is incredible. I’m going to give you the names of a couple of companies that I have worked with, and I’ll just give you kind of a high level impression wine country that is a company that. But when I used to do a lot of corporate gifting. So again, this would have been like 2010
Jess Lindgren 10:07
2008 2009 2010 somewhere in there, this company had been using wine country for ever. And like, they’re fine, and clearly they’re still in business. Their boxes are the last time I used them. They were pretty affordable. A lot of them, you know, they factor the free shipping in, so it feels like you’re getting a little bit of a deal. They’re definitely okay. They definitely offer some of the more traditional sausage and cheese and maybe a bottle of wine, and like a surprising at the time, number of baskets that did not involve wine even though their name is wine country gift baskets. But they were fine, but, like, no wow factor, like, they didn’t really, you know, they’re all right. Just been around for a long time. They’re all right, but didn’t, like, knock my socks off. Harry and David’s is a very long running gift company. They have been around forever. I was fortunate enough one year to receive an entire box of the Royal Riviera pairs. They were incredible, like, highly recommend if you can get those. And sometimes they come in a like a mixed box too. So you don’t just have to do pairs, but honestly, like some of the best pairs I’ve ever had, um, at the time, I was able to get my company to switch from wine country to a company called Mrs. Printables. And again, links to all of these will be in the show notes. Mrs. Printables. At the time we were doing these really beautiful carameled apples. So they would come in these really pretty presentation like the presentation was really nice and the treats were really good, very well received, especially by people who had been working at and with the company for a long time, we got so much positive feedback that year about how much everybody loved, you know. And every once in a while, when we were doing the former company, we would, you know, thanks for the basket, whatever. But when we switched, people really, really responded positively to it. So make sure, when you are choosing the what you know, what is it that you’re trying to convey to your employees, your vendors, your customers, your clients, your prospects? What is it that you’d like to convey, and what gift would you like to give them? Speaking of another Minnesota company, funky, chunky, that is one that I was fortunate enough to do some gifting with again, it’s been a while, but I did check they are still in business. They are still based in Minnesota. Their products are still looking incredible. And, yeah, that’s those are just kind of those are the ones that I have personally worked with. So I don’t want to you know you can do your own research. You can find baskets that fit, or whatever it is that you’re going to gift. People, I know people who work in like a sports adjacent field, and they always do a company custom branded baseball hat, or baseball or football, or some kind of, you know, a sporty thing, like make it make sense for your budget, for your company, for your clients, whatever it is that you’re going to do, do that, but pick a thing. You can even choose kind of like a tiered menu of gifts. So you could choose, like, okay, internal employees get tier B, long standing clients who make us X number of dollars per year get tier a, clients who make us x y number of dollars get tier B, and prospects get tier C or something like that. You know, whatever it is, again, that makes sense for the message that it is you want to convey to each of those. You definitely want to convey to your internal employees that you are thankful for another year of hard work. You want to convey to your clients that you’re thankful for all of the years and months and dollars worth of company value and to prospects, you know, show that you’re caring, that you’re thoughtful, and just a little, you know, a little gesture like that can really go a long way next up. So we had the who, who is it what? What is it that you’re sending? What is the message that you’re trying to convey? When? When are you sending these back, these gifts? I mean, I’m probably going to say basket again, but whatever it is that you’re sending, oh, actually, we’re going to go back to the what for a moment. So there are lots of companies that do pre packaged gift baskets, gift packages, whatever you might like to call it. But I’ve done a lot of fun stuff personally over the years with creating gift baskets. So if it is something where you you know, if you’re from Paris, mm. Maybe there’s some iconic Paris, Parisian stuff, or, like, even in Minneapolis, like I did a really fun basket one year for a group of probably, like, 10 recipients, and I got to go to there’s this cute little shop in Minneapolis called I like you, it’s kind of a, I don’t think consignment is the right word, but like, you put your art there, and then they have somebody who maintains the storefront, so you sell your art, and then there’s a store that’s just always open. And instead of being like Target, which is full of different departments and clothes and food and housewares and pharmacy supplies and whatnot. There’s a store full of everybody’s art. So like, there’s a little area where all the magnets are, there’s a little area where all the T shirts are, and everything is from different artists. So like, if you sell your T shirt for $20 when you go to a craft fair, you sell it at I like you still for $20 but I like you, takes a cut. So anyway, that’s too many nuts and bolts. Anyway, went to I like you, put together some really gorgeous baskets, and, like the clients, just loved it. So if your time and budget does allow, I really highly recommend and your creativity, like you have to want to do that kind of thing. You have to be into that kind of thing. But if your time, creativity, desire, all allow really, really, think about doing some custom made little gift packages for people, because it’s so much fun. Anyway, back to the when of it, all you know, are you going to send people a basket or a gift as early as November, because for me personally, having been an executive assistant for 20 years and counting, my goodness, where does the time go? Things really slow down after after Thanksgiving here in the United States, like hiring slows down. Decisions on a company level, really slow down. A lot of people, if you have, like, use it or lose it vacation like, I have friends that they get to the midpoint or, like, the September part of the year, and they’ve got a bunch of use it or lose it vacation time, and then they just take like, one or two days off a week through the end of the year. Like, people, things really slow down after the midpoint of November in the United States, at least. So like, do you want to catch people before Thanksgiving even? Do you want to catch people at the first part of December? Do you want to catch people midpoint of December, right around Christmas and other holidays? Do you want to get them in January, when it’s more of a thanks for everything in 2024 here’s to a bright 2025 kind of gift. So definitely think about what’s best. Again, speaking as an executive assistant and speaking as the person who did a ton of gifting, we definitely got inundated with gifts. I would say the midpoint of December is when the bulk of things came through. So like December, 10 to December, like 17th or 18th. And there’s nothing wrong with that, like, that’s a great time for stuff to arrive, and especially if you’re going to be starting to think about placing those gift orders. Now you can get better pricing. Sometimes you can get better deals. Again, everything in the world is a lot more expensive at the time of recording here in the last quarter of soon to be last quarter of 2024, but like back 10 years ago, when I was doing this, 10 plus years ago, you know you would get free shipping if you spent X hundreds of dollars, or if you ordered early enough, you got a better deal, and pricing would kind of incrementally go up. So like, if I couldn’t corner my executive to sit down and approve the budget, if you’re ordering 300 gift baskets, every $5 makes a difference. So just figure out when you can place the order honestly, the earlier the better, and you can set it for a future delivery date. So like taking care of the order now, before the crush of holidays and time off and end of year tax deadlines and everything else comes up, just check this one off your list now and then figure out again, is this kind of a November, December, January kind of thing. When do you want people to be thinking most about you and your company? When will your gift make the biggest impact? And honestly, we’re going back to the what for a second. One of the other things that just came to mind is, I did one year do, instead of a physical gift for each person, we made a charitable donation. So, like, if you knew the organization well enough to say, Oh, hey, the director of such and such a company is on
Jess Lindgren 19:58
the animal. What’s the Humane Society board or something like that. You know, we made a donation in your name. As a long standing client of gal Friday, 612, we made a donation in your name. Thank you so much. You know, so like, a donation is definitely an option, and there are a lot of companies. A friend of mine, his family every year sends him like he gets a little stuffed animal one of the companies, because they adopt, like a goat, or, you know, something on his behalf. So there’s some some, definitely some fun charities that you can get involved with. Doesn’t always have to be a physical gift. Okay? So we did the who, what, when. Now we are going to do the where, especially in this post pandemic landscape, there are definitely companies that have all returned to Office, where you’ve got dozens, if not hundreds of people all in one building. More often than not, you’re going to have kind of a distributed workforce. Also your your vendors don’t work in your building. They don’t have an office. Generally speaking, again, every company is different. Who knows? Maybe they do. But where is it that you are going to be sending these items? Are you going to send them to your employees homes? Are you going to have a bunch of them sent to the office so that you can walk around the building and hand them out? Are you sending it to your vendor’s offices? Are you going to get it to the right person? Sometimes those folks, again, it’s they. They could work from home and never go to the office. They could be stationed at a totally different location than what’s on their business card, speaking as the executive assistant and the person who does all of the gifting, it’s totally reasonable to call folks up and just, you know, hey, I’m the office manager, I’m the Executive Assistant, I’m the person who is doing the gifting this year. Could you please confirm what the best address is? And if they don’t want to share an address, you could just say, Okay, no problem. You know, we’ll just make a charitable donation on your behalf instead. So definitely, lots of options, but definitely take the time to confirm that the gifts are going to the right place. And then the last, the most important, why? What’s your why? Why are you giving folks these gifts for your employees. You’re thanking them for another year of service. You’re thanking them for all of their hard work throughout the year. Just a nice little end of year button on top of anything else that you might do, if you do a holiday party, if you do cash bonuses, whatever it is that your company does to celebrate your employees, a little gift package, a little gift basket, whatever it is at the end of the year is just it makes a person feel appreciated again. For your clients, you’re saying thank you. Thank you for another year of working together. Thank you for helping our business be a success. Hopefully we have been a good client in return, hopefully we have made some referrals that help you further your business. And for prospects, you’re looking to earn business, you’re looking to say, hey, we’re really we’re a thoughtful, generous company over here. We treat our people well, and we’d love to be doing business with you. So let’s make it happen. So that’s my 22 minutes. I was going to say two cents, but 22 minutes and counting on refreshing your gift list. So give it a whirl. Let me know what you think. Again. I will have a template for you to download with just a little string of options, things that you might consider to keep track of for yourself. And obviously, with any template that I might offer, please take it, make it your own. It will be downloadable, if it comes from Google Drive, it will be something that you need to make a copy. So, like, it’ll just prompt you to say, you know, click to save and make a copy. Yeah, and we’ll just go from there. But that’s everything I’ve got for you this week. Please look over those gift lists, update them, or create them if you don’t already have one, do some research into the company that you want to use again. All mentioned companies, for sure will be in the show notes for this one. If there’s anything that I missed, let me know. Always, my ears and eyes are open askanassistant.com I’d love to hear from you. Leave me your comments, questions, thoughts, concerns, please know, no problem too big, no problem too tangled to untangle, and the only stupid question is the one that you don’t ask. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week. Take care.
