Interview with Jeff Jackel
Photo courtesy of Getty Images, unless noted 

Jeff Jackel founded Client Giant with his business partner, Jay O’Brien, in 2018 to offer personalized gifting solutions for clients and staff alike, helping entrepreneurs increase referrals and drive repeat business as well as boost employee morale within their organizations.

Here he discusses his company’s unique data-driven approach to gifting and why it can be so effective.

How did Client Giant get started?
Jay was a successful real estate agent in Orange County, California, earning dozens of five-star reviews—in fact, he was our agent when my wife and I were buying our first house. However, he recognized that while qualities like punctuality and expertise were valuable, they weren’t enough to distinguish him from the competition. So he shifted his marketing dollars away from wooing new clients to providing personalized experiences for his current ones, including delivering surprise gifts. The result was a massive increase in referrals.

Today, a decade later, he and I are business partners and best friends. Together with my background in technology and his expertise in marketing, we’ve built an automated gifting platform that enables others to replicate his success with just the push of a button. Within six months of launching, we expanded across the United States and Canada, and we now have gift recipients in over forty countries.

What sets your approach apart from conventional methods?
Traditional gifting usually happens on predictable occasions like birthdays or holidays, but what truly creates a lasting impact is doing something special for someone when it’s not expected. We give our clients the opportunity to show they care and create delight with no strings attached—they can send a gift simply because an individual matters to them or their organization, resulting in a genuine emotional connection that’s far more meaningful for their business. In contrast, other companies rely on emails prompting recipients to click a link and choose from an online catalog of products. While that’s a nice gesture, it lacks the joy of discovering a beautifully packaged, heartfelt surprise in your mailbox.

What type of gifts do you offer?
At the entry level, we provide packaged selections, but for higher-tier offerings, we arrange unforgettable experiences like all-expenses-paid dinners with transportation, tickets to Broadway shows, and seats for professional sports events. We also set up premium concierge services like car detailing and house cleaning.

Who are your typical clients?
We help all sorts of clients, from entrepreneurs to small businesses to corporations, though our engagement platform can be especially effective for solopreneurs. Take, for example, real estate agents—they can’t control when someone’s going to buy or sell another home, which only occurs about every seven years anyway. That’s why they rely so much on referrals, and we can assist them with earning those by giving them a way to help grow and maintain their client relationships.

Meanwhile, for financial advisers, cross-selling to existing clients is easily the biggest yet most neglected opportunity for growth. If an adviser can take care of a client in a thoughtful way through our platform, that person will start reaching out more, which can lead to what I call “life share” followed by “wallet share.” Perhaps they just had another kid or hired twenty more employees—each of these occurrences is a chance for that adviser to sell the customer another product or service to help with their financial future.

You mentioned sending gifts to customers. Can clients also use your platform to send them to employees?
Yes—giving your staff truly considerate gifts is a wildly effective way to boost your workplace culture. Our services make it easy to show appreciation for them, not necessarily because they just made a sale or brought in revenue but simply because they are choosing to spend their career in service of your organization. By honoring them beyond the role they have in your company, you can create impactful moments to strengthen morale and loyalty.

What’s your selection and delivery process?
It’s mostly set-it-and-forget-it with automated campaigns that can be strategically timed or scheduled quarterly for convenience. Everything is designed so that a package or experience invite arrives at the perfect moment, such as before a major contract renewal, or, if preferred, simply every few months. We provide clients with an intuitive online dashboard and an app to manage their recipients and track gift deliveries.

Furthermore, everything is geared toward recipients’ interests, though clients also have the option to modify what’s chosen. As an example, if someone’s college-aged kids are coming home for summer, our system might select a customized movie-night package for our client to send them, complete with vintage treats and popcorn. Also included would be a QR code that goes to an individualized message or video, such as a thank-you greeting from our client. Many of our customers remain with us long term, using the dashboard to look back on moments they’ve created over the years. We’re constantly tweaking our system so it can learn more about recipients over time, allowing us to enhance the personalization and effect of each gift.

What makes your service so impactful?
Besides helping clients show care without expectation, our gifts are items of true value. We avoid consumable options that may be quickly forgotten and instead focus on meaningful selections, collaborating with social psychologists and trend forecasters to ensure that what we offer continually evolves with people’s desires. For instance, we predicted the rise of charcuterie boards before they became popular and partnered with a chef to create a cookbook on the topic that became a highly appreciated, long-lasting gift.

How is your effectiveness measured?
We regularly collect feedback and conduct case studies to evaluate our results—one financial adviser saw his revenue double in a year after using Client Giant to nurture his client relationships. Our members experience consistent growth in referrals and business, all thanks to our system that helps them retain loyal clients who are less likely to switch to competitors.

For more info, visit clientgiant.com