Wishing You All a Happy Thanksgiving

What’s your favorite part of Thanksgiving? There is so much to choose from - family, football, parades, and Black Friday frenzies are all fun elements of Thanksgiving and make it one of the best times of the year.

Recently, a relatively-new vice president introduced a new Veterans Day tradition to Global Payments Integrated from a previous job. He started an all-office email string where employees were encouraged to share pictures and stories from family and friends that have served, or are currently serving, in the Armed Forces. As expected, and quite beautifully, the email string turned into everyone who participated thanking their loved one(s) who have served and going on to thank all the Global Payments Integrated veterans. Seeing that outpouring of gratitude flow into my inbox over a few days was not only a nice change of pace from the usual work emails that fill that inbox, but it quickly became something that I’m already looking forward to next Veterans Day. In short, this simple concept inspired the nearly-400 Global Payments Integrated employees to not only think about those who have sacrificed in service of our country but prompted many of them to reach out to all other Global Payments Integrated employees to thank them and their families for that same sacrifice. A perhaps unintended, but valuable consequence.

For many years, my favorite holiday has been Thanksgiving. For all the reasons I listed, but also because of the FOOD! Let’s face it – we all LOVE the food! So naturally, when I was starting to think about a Thanksgiving blog post, I initially thought to write it with appetizing information in a food-related way. I figured, like many bloggers do, that if I can make the reader’s mouth water, they are more likely to read the entire post. I thought that if I really want to tug at our readers’ heartstrings around Thanksgiving time, evoke the imagery of the best dinner of the year.

Posts like, “How to Cook up More Leads with the Right Marketing Mix,” or “Get the Right Ingredients for Stuffing Your Sales Funnel” (actual marketing–related posts I’ve seen) may seem a little quirky or cliché, but any dish can be a gem with the right balance of input materials and a little creativity; and can garner huge readership numbers. Instead of going that route and enticing readers in via their stomachs, I’ve decided that the Global Payments Integrated Thanksgiving blog is going to follow the lead of my new favorite tradition; gratitude.

Now is the time when I need to move forward with the meaty course of the blog and express my gratitude, on behalf of the entire Global Payments Integrated team, for everyone involved with this enterprise. At the risk of sounding cheesy (I’m not letting go of the food theme) that’s what I’m going to do….Thank you! Thank you first and foremost to our wonderful and valued clients/merchants/customers. It’s a very simple truth that this company would not exist without you. Not only do you make this business possible, but you also make it interesting, often fun and regularly challenging. For all those reasons and many, many more; Thank you! Thank you for providing us with the motivation to get out of our beds every morning.

Another huge thank you also needs to go out to our partners, another integral part of this company. Without all of them, we would have no access to all the great clients they send our way. Similarly, working with all our partners is challenging and extremely rewarding. Clearly, many of these partners and their representatives have become friends and we look forward to working with them daily. To our business partners - thank you for your patience and support – we couldn’t do this without you.

Finally, I’m going to dive into the dessert course – I’m going to express my own personal thank you’s. These thank you’s go out from me to my fellow Global Payments Integrated employees. The group of employees I have the privilege to work with daily are truly some of my favorite people ever. They make me laugh, they tell me the hard truths when I need them (one of those hard truths will likely involve cutting content from this post) and they are true and genuine friends. I am truly grateful for the time I get to spend with this group of people and I am amazed by their dedication to Global Payments Integrated and our customers. Thank you!

It’s important for me to really look at the word Thanksgiving when I think about my favorite holiday. I – and Global Payments Integrated - have a lot to be thankful for and we want those who contribute to that to understand how truly thankful we are.

Jon Christofferson

Digital Communications Specialist

Jon Christoffersen is a Digital Communications Specialist and has been with Global Payments Integrated since 2013. Jon has been in marketing and communications since 1998 working for various companies within the hospitality and tourism industry. Jon is a journalist by trade and served numerous years in the U.S. Army where he developed and managed public relations campaigns.

Jon Christoffersen author bio