The Thank You Nobody Else Is Sending

This one is for you, the one who is working hard, delivering real results for your clients, and then moving straight on to the next thing without ever looking back.

You close the deal, you do the work, and you move on. You tell yourself the quality of your service speaks for itself. And it probably does. But here is what Jay Jacobson taught me in our conversation, and you can hear the whole thing in the full episode: the work is not what people remember. What they remember is whether you made them feel like they mattered after the transaction was over.

Jay has spent 45 years in funeral service, built a coaching and staffing firm, and somehow along the way created a business-to-business gourmet cookie company out of Ida, Iowa that ships to businesses all over the country. And if you look at all three of those things, there is one thread running straight through all of them.

People need to know you are still thinking about them.

The moment that started it all

When Jay was consulting with funeral homes, he kept running into the same problem. These businesses were doing deeply meaningful, expensive, emotionally significant work for families, and then going completely silent afterward. No follow-up. No acknowledgment. Nothing.

So Jay gave them a simple recommendation. Send a tray of cookies to the family about two weeks after the funeral. Not a card. Not an email. Something tangible. Something that showed up at the door and said, we remember you.

His reasoning was really specific and worth sitting with. By the two-week mark, he said, everybody else has gone home. All the food people brought over is gone. The flowers have wilted. And that family is sitting there thinking nobody is thinking about them anymore. And that is exactly when a box of cookies lands on the doorstep.

That detail is not an accident. Jay was not just suggesting a nice gesture. He was engineering a moment of connection at precisely the point when people feel most forgotten.

And pretty soon, funeral homes were asking him to just handle it for them. Then realtors. Then mortgage companies. Then heating and cooling companies. Jay had stumbled into a business because he understood something most service providers miss entirely.

Saying thank you is not a soft skill. It is a strategy.

You are being outworked in the relationship, not the craft

Here is what I keep thinking about. Most capable service providers I work with are genuinely excellent at what they do. The craft is not the problem. The gap is almost always in what happens before and after the work itself.

Jay put it this way. When you demonstrate to the customer that you are going to put their needs ahead of your own, your own needs are met in turn. You become a better business person in their eyes, and you build the trust that keeps them coming back.

That is the long game. And Jay learned to think in very long games. In funeral service, he said, you are not thinking about the next transaction. You are thinking generationally. You are making an impression on a family that their descendants will remember twenty years from now.

Now, your business probably does not operate on a twenty-year cycle. But the principle translates directly. The referrals you are not getting, the clients who hired someone else the second time around, the relationships that quietly went cold, those are almost never about the quality of your work. They are about whether the person felt remembered after you cashed the check.

Get off the holiday

One of the most practical things Jay said in our conversation was this: if you are sending a gift at Christmas, you are already losing. Everybody sends something at Christmas. The gifts blend together. Your gesture disappears into the pile.

Send something at St. Patrick's Day. Send something at Labor Day. Send something on a random Tuesday in September for no reason at all. When you are the only one who showed up that day, you are the only one who gets noticed.

The same logic applies to your follow-up emails, your check-in calls, your handwritten notes. The value is not in the gesture itself. It is in the timing and the unexpectedness of it.

Jay also made a point about AI-generated follow-ups that I think is worth hearing directly. He said that when you send an email or a text now, the customer automatically assumes it was generated as part of a marketing sequence. No thought went into it. But when something tangible arrives at their door, that assumption disappears. It cannot be faked. It cannot be automated.

The bar for standing out has actually gotten lower, not higher, because most people are leaning harder into the tools that feel efficient and unintentional at the same time.

What you are actually selling

When COVID hit, Jay's cookie business had to figure out what it was really selling. It was not cookies. It was community. The moment businesses stopped gathering in the same room, that shared experience evaporated, and the cookies were the vehicle for recreating it. He started shipping individual dozens to remote workers all on the same day so that when they got on their team call, they all had the same thing to talk about. Not work. Something their company did for them.

That shift kept his business alive. And it is a useful question to turn back on yourself.

What are you actually selling? Because it is probably not the service you listed on your website. It is more likely a feeling. Safety. Clarity. Confidence. Progress. The service is the delivery mechanism. The feeling is what people come back for and what they tell other people about.

Pay attention to what works for you. And then ask yourself whether your clients feel that thing not just when the work is happening, but before and long after.

Your next step

If you want to understand where the relationship gaps actually live in your business, the 6-Principle Prime Performance Assessment is a good place to start. It takes about five minutes and it will show you which of the six principles, Resilience, Intentionality, Clarity, Optimization, Influence, and Opportunity, are carrying your business right now and which ones might be quietly costing you. You can take it free at /assess.

The work you are doing is good. The question is whether the people on the other side of it know you still think about them once it is done.