Gratitude Pays

What’s Your Gratitude Budget? (Most Businesses Don’t Have One)

This Maven Monday, Brandon asks a question most business owners have never considered — and it might change how you grow in 2026:

What if the most profitable move in your business has nothing to do with advertising… and everything to do with something you already have?

In a week when everyone else is thinking about gratitude at home, Brandon turns the lens toward your business and challenges a blind spot that drains margin, momentum, and morale in companies of every size.

Inside this episode, he unpacks:

• A surprising factor that quietly separates the most profitable companies from everyone else
• Why your marketing plan might be missing its highest-ROI line item
• A simple shift that can strengthen trust, increase loyalty, and energize your team

This episode will give you a perspective most leaders overlook… and can’t afford to ignore.

For entrepreneurs wanting to grow without wasting money, join the Maven Marketing Mastermind → https://www.mavenmethodtraining.com

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Host: Brandon Welch
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Core Question
• 0:24 Gratitude As Strategy Not Fluff
• 0:50 Retention Economics And Profit
• 2:01 Practical Ways To Show Appreciation
• 3:06 Set A Real Gratitude Budget
• 5:43 Holiday Wishes And Closing Promise

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, Brandon Welch, and it's just me and you today. This is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business, and achieve the big dream. And I just have one question for you today. What is your gratitude budget? As we're looking forward to family and the end of the year and celebrating the holidays, it's easy to think about gratitude and being thankful. But when it comes to business, uh I want to propose to you that this is much more than a feel-good thing. This is much more than a tradition. Um, it should start from your heart, but gratitude, it turns out, is actually the most profitable marketing strategy you could employ. Uh Bain Capital is famous for uh finding in many studies that a 5% increase in customer retention can produce a 95% increase in profitability. Think about that just a second. If you just had a better connection and a better uh lasting impression and loyalty with your past customers by loving on them versus uh spending all of your time and energy focused on new ones, you might find yourself way more profitable. And that is something that um we tend to attract that type of uh business to work with here at Frank and Maven. Uh but the more I'm in the uh business world and doing speaking and consulting, I see a lot of companies that don't just naturally have that as a value set. And that's why when we bring on a new company, our very first thing uh to focus on is past customers. And we almost always, I mean, I'm talking people that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and have multi-million dollar ad budgets, we almost always find an immediate uh way to improve profitability of their marketing just by focusing on past customers. And we're gonna frame that in um gratitude for this week, but I hope every week. Um, and just look around and say, how often are we making a special connection, sending a letter to our top you know, 50 customers or our past best 50 customers this month? Um, how often are we sending text messages or emails just saying, hey, thinking of you, hope you're doing well? Um, and possibly, it doesn't have to be this, but how often uh are we spending extra time and possibly money on very you know well thought out gestures? I'm not talking about just the, you know, just the Christmas card greeting or maybe some you know cliche uh marketing promo item you might send them. How often are your team and you sitting down going, how could we just knock the freaking socks off of everybody who's already helped us be successful? And I think that produces fruit, uh, not just in a transactional level, but it produces um a sense of uh gratitude and want wanting to do better for your past customers. I think it produces a mindset. Uh, I think it actually produces a um a spiritual lift um in every corner of your business. And so what are you celebrating? Who are you celebrating? Uh, this could be clients and this is this could also be team members. And so here we have an unreasonable gratitude budget uh at Frank and Maven. Uh, I am often hearing from our financial people, it's like, are you sure? Like, did you have to do that? And it's like, yes, and we're not going to do anything irresponsible. We're not trying to buy love in any way, but um, both the time and the effort, uh, and and literally weeks and weeks and weeks of our time. Uh, you know, if you add it up all the times people are either celebrating anniversaries or people for their things, whether it's internally or externally, and then for Christmas and holidays and things that nobody will ever see coming. We are very often sitting down and saying, How it's it's at least a half hour a week. We're spit, we're sitting down saying, How do we just appreciate the heck out of the people who let us do what we get to do? And um, everybody's gonna have some sort of prompt for you to be grateful this week, and it's gonna say, you know, what are you grateful for? And you're gonna think about you know, your kids and your family and all that stuff. And amen to that. Like we should, of course, do that extra special this week. But as a business uh prompt for you, um, how much are you actually budgeting towards your past customers versus new ones? Everybody gets excited about stealing market share and getting new leads, and those are fine things to do. You have to do that. But if you just focus on your last ones, you are going to be more successful um than focusing only on those new ones. So uh it costs five to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Uh, and existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers. That's according to Adobe study. Retention is cheaper, uh, it feels better, it's better on your team. It's not just a monetary thing, it's a better energy equation. And so just ask yourself this week, what is your retention budget? And I want to see you throw in more events, I want to see you um taking the time for every person to either write a letter uh or do something that's more personalized than the standard call up the promo company and just send something with your logo on it. Um, how much time are you dedicating towards that? Because it could always be more in my experience. Uh, and the return in this category, if we're talking about marketing and eliminating waste and growing your business, the return on gratitude is just premium to just about anything else you could possibly do. So that's what I have for you this week. I wish you the very best Thanksgiving. I hope you are safe. I hope you are slowing down. I hope you are turning off your notifications. I hope you're breathing. I hope you're getting extra rest because that too is a form of caring for and taking care of what you already have. Uh, we wish you the very best from Frank and Maven and the Maven Marketing Podcast. We will be back every Monday answering real life marketing questions because marketers who can't teach you why are just a fancy lie. Happy Thanksgiving.