When business owners think about increasing cash flow, they often think about sales and marketing strategies that will help them recruit new clients. But Grateful Box founder Kim Angeli has a different solution: stop looking for new business and start practice gratitude.
“Business owners are constantly looking for new, new, new. What they don’t realize is the power is in the customers you have,” says Angeli. “They already love you. They’ve already bought into you. You can build a relationship with a customer who has been wowed, and they will send you more business. We call that relationship and gratitude marketing,” continues Angeli. “It’s connecting with your client beyond the transaction and telling them you care about them.”
Angeli coaches business owners on how to practice gratitude meaningfully and consistently – and outside the bounds of holiday giving that traditionally clusters around November and December. “A lot of people think they’re grateful, but they’re not acting grateful, they’re being grumpy!” says Angeli. “We want people to have consistent gratitude in their business and in their life because gratitude is the only antidote to fear and worry.”
The “Grumpy to Grateful” strategy is something Angeli first began practicing in her former career as a successful insurance agency owner. “When you own an insurance agency, every phone call is a problem,” says Angeli. So she began to think: how can we engage with our clients differently? Angeli recalls a time when she called one of her largest clients to arrange for an ice cream truck to visit the office. Angeli was greeted with silence, followed by the client telling her that in seventeen years of business, she’d never had a vendor reach out to do something this nice for her and her employees.
Angeli was blown away. She began to realize that investing in building and nurturing relationships with her clients garnered tangible returns. “We’ve accepted mediocre customer service as the norm, and we don’t get wowed anymore,” says Angeli. “When you adopt any kind of gratitude strategy for your business, people will walk across fire to refer you.”
But practicing gratitude in the workplace isn’t just about client appreciation and referrals. “You have to start from the inside out. My goal is to get people thinking differently about how they engage with employees, and then taking that outward to their clients,” says Angeli, noting that people often spend more time at work than they do with their own families.
“When have you given your employees a thank you behind their paycheck?” Angeli continues. “People are not being appreciated in the workplace. They just aren’t. Appreciation is our most coveted emotion. You have to show gratitude to that employee who’s giving you forty hours a week to build your dreams.” Ultimately, the impact is personal as well as professional. “They take it home. That person who was appreciated at work, those people go home and they’re nicer to their husband, their wife, their neighbor,” says Angeli.
It was on a personal level that Angeli first started practicing gratitude. In the midst of what she calls “a really crummy year” in 2010, Angeli understood the importance of building gratitude but wasn’t sure how to incorporate things like Jack Canfield’s “Hour of Power” or a gratitude journal into her already busy life. “That sounds all good and great, Jack,” she remembers thinking, “but I’m growing a business. I’m raising a seven-year-old, and my husband works an hour away. I don’t have time to sit down and write ten things I’m grateful for in a journal.”
Walking through Big Lots one day, Angeli was taken with a small box that said “Bless Our Family” on the top. She bought the box and began jotting down one thing she was grateful for every day before bed and slipping it in the box. Slowly, a transformation happened: in the midst of that “crummy year,” Angeli stopped focusing on all the things that were going wrong and became very conscious of what was going right.
“My life is not sugar plums and fairies,” cautions Angeli. “But I don’t have bad days, I have bad moments. I don’t allow the moment to carry into the day, the month, the year. I let them go.” Ultimately, Angeli sold her successful insurance agency at a 600 percent profit to “step into gratitude” full time and teach grateful living around the world.
“The Grateful Box is a global gratitude company where we inspire grateful living, professionally and personally,” says Angeli. “I personally work with business owners who want to increase cash flow, have happy employees, and have happy clients and keep them. I can actually grow their revenue with gratitude, and that’s what I love to do with business owners.”
Angeli is also one of the only consultants who teaches Nextdoor Business. One of the services Angeli offers is a “Nextdoor Business Page Audit,” through which she helps clients stand out and earn raving fans. Gratitude plays a role in this as well, helping clients maximize their allowed responses to hearts and comments.
“Our main focus is to inspire grateful living, personally and professionally,” concludes Angeli. “What would the world look like if everyone was as grateful as they were in November?”
Interested in using gratitude to grow professionally and personally? Learn more about The Grateful Box at https://gratefulbox.com/ or contact Kim Angeli at kim@gratefulbox.com.
