Over the last year or so, I've been on the receiving end of quite a few unannounced gifting… a token of gratitude for offering my business building tips.

This is awesome. It's really cool to know that people appreciate the hard work. And as the economy continues to plunge, it would seem an unannounced gift is a welcome token of appreciation.

Does your current corporate gift policy actually
hurt your bottom line?

Accepting gifts is almost always tricky… depending on who is making the gift (and the donor's wishes for the gift).
Sometimes a gift is just a gift with no string attached… no catches:

One time I got a $100.00 PayPal cash gift for absolutely no reason. This gifter just enjoyed talking to me on the phone. And this guy is well-known (and well respected in the internet marketing industry). It was great! Very cool move. I tell this story often.

But this is by far the exception rather than the rule. Most other times, a gift is nothing more than subtle (and not so subtle) bribe to squeeze a person for free advice or free services.

I finally decided to pull the plug and develop a super simple corporate ethics policy on gifting:

I'm no longer accepting gifts. Just about every time I do, it costs me more than it's worth.

One time I got a small cash gift, but I then found myself spending hours and hours of time setting up an entire website for free. If I figured out my net pay per hour, I could have made more flipping burgers.

Author and publisher Jeffrey Dobkin ("How To Market a Product for Under $500") has a similar position on free lunches:

"A person calls and says he wants to take me for lunch. I reluctantly agree and we wind up going across the street for a brief lunch – that takes an hour and a half – while he hammers me for marketing information. He then orders a coffee – good for another 45 minutes. Finally, the bill arrives, it's twenty bucks and I ask if I can leave the tip and he agrees. I leave a nice tip as we took so much of the waiters time and they can't turn the table again till dinner. Then when we're leaving he thanks me briefly for the information, but feels like I owe him since he bought me lunch. No thanks. I don't do that any more."

One listener to my broadcast insisted on meeting me and paying for lunch. I bit. And it was a nightmare… the entire lunch was a blatant attempt to sell me an MLM opportunity. It was REALLY, REALLY awkward.

Sometimes a gift was never meant to be… a listener of mine heard me rave about Sather's famous cinnamon buns in Chicago. She actually took my hint and tried to send me some — shipped by Priority Mail, too. There were no strings attached and had all the best intentions in the world. But the buns never arrived at my house… instead they were mistakenly shipped to my PO Box. Yikes! That mistake cost my listener at least $20.00, and all I got were hard-as-rocks buns.

Unfortunately, I find the cons far outweigh the pros. It's for this reason I've put into immediate effect a new, no-gift policy.