The Green Sheet Online Edition

November 24, 2014 • Issue 14:11:02

Inspiration

Thankfulness breeds prosperity

At Thanksgiving, what many ISOs and merchant level salespeople (MLSs) are most thankful for is the beginning of the holiday shopping season, starting with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in the days following Thanksgiving. Consumers spend an enormous amount of money during this time, taking advantage of special deals to stretch their dollars as far as possible. And for you, as ISOs and MLSs, this means more payments processed, which gives your residual streams a healthy boost.

Gratitude first

However, for some, all this buying and selling makes a travesty of the holiday. Thanksgiving should be about expressing gratitude rather than raking in profits. But what if expressing gratitude helped generate prosperity? Or put another way: what if those in the payments industry celebrated Thanksgiving by focusing as much on gratitude as on the bottom line? Could this, in the long run, be good for the bottom line?

This seems to be what Oprah Winfrey suggested when she stated, "Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough."

Be grateful first, before anything else, and the profits will take care of themselves. By contrast, concentrating on what you don't have – that is, cultivating ingratitude – will hurt sales and cut into business. If this philosophy is what inspired Oprah in her business – through which she amassed a $2.8 billion fortune and gained respect as the wealthiest self-made woman in America – we should certainly pay it heed. What better time to do so than at Thanksgiving?

Benefits for all

Here are a few ways in which giving thanks can increase sales and customer satisfaction, which will benefit your business, as well as the public good.

• Thanksgiving for merchants: As ISOs and MLSs, your main job is to acquire merchant accounts and provide quality service to retain those accounts and increase profits. But where is the opportunity to give back, to show gratitude to the merchants who are the backbone of your business? Thanksgiving would be the perfect time to do so. Consider giving your merchants a call, or sending something via snail mail to express your gratitude for their business.
• Thanksgiving for partners: After all, the success of any business is due to the combined efforts of many. Whether you work at a big ISO or at your own small office, there are those who make your life easier and help your business prosper. Identify and thank those people; consider giving some of them gift cards or offering incentive programs to show your gratitude.
• Thanksgiving for the community: Consider taking part in a yearly event advocated by Bill Gates and other entrepreneurs: Giving Tuesday. That is, use the Tuesday following Thanksgiving to make a donation to a service organization in your community. It's a goodwill message that will impress other businesses, including merchants you may want to do business with in the future.

All this will help show that gratitude, especially during Thanksgiving, is good for business while benefiting all concerned. That is something for which we can all give thanks.

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