In the last three weeks I have received three hand-written thank you notes from clients - one from an agent pleased with the Staging work I have done for several of her clients, one from a builder-owner happy with the results of a vacant staging just installed, and another from a regular agent client who had played an April Fool's joke on me (Thanks for including a gift certificate, David! Went to Cheesecake Factory last Friday and had a blast).
What struck me as I was opening my mail was that these people took time out of their very busy schedule to find a card, write a message inside, look up my address, address the envelope, pay the exorbitant price of postage these days, and get the card into a mailbox. Amazing! After all, how many times have I thought I should write a thank you note and just never got around to it? The person's name languishing on my to-do list until so much time had passed that by the time I actually thought about writing the note it seemed so ridiculously past the appropriate time frame that it would just be silly to do it now :-)
What I should continue to remind myself is that although my superior skills of procrastination help me justify these things in my head, they do not actually translate to the general public or help my business in any way. The time it takes to find a thank you card and write the message is a small investment when considering what that acts says to a client. The act says that the recipient matters, that what they did to help my business or my clients was valuable and worth a few extra minutes of my time to tell them so.
* There are services that will send what look like handwritten cards for you; one of them is www.sendoutcards.com
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