Engagement
GiftCard Partners Succeeds with Remote Workforce
By William Ng
August 26, 2011
Ed Shulkin and Deb Merkin aren’t big believers of the rat race, but when they started GiftCard Partners 10 years ago as co-founders, they didn’t intend to build a company completely without bricks and mortar. But that is what GCP is today: a virtual company that manages the B2B gift card business of some of America’s leading retail brands. And it is demonstrating how an organization that’s entirely made up of a remote workforce achieves employee performance by treating its workers with flexibility and utmost care.
“We refer to our team as family members,” notes Shulkin, who came from a high-level career in retail to become an entrepreneur. “The concept of a work family is very important, and one of the things that motivates our team very strongly is that culture,” he says, adding that it has yielded a tight-knit staff that works hard for each other and the company.
“Ed and I didn’t set out to create a virtual company, but we both like to work from our houses,” Merkin explains, in recalling how she and her business partner held nighttime strategy sessions for their budding company after both his and her children had gone to bed. A big work/life balance proponent who has an extensive background in technology and distribution, Merkin notes, “People are respectful when you give them the flexibility to work at home, and they work a lot harder.”
As GCP took form, Shulkin noticed the company attracted professionally talented stay-at-home moms who wanted to continue working and fit hand in glove with his and Merkin’s family philosophy, which is a company keystone. (One staff member, Stacey Sicurella, marketing manager, recently wrote an article detailing her company experience for
Working Mother magazine.) Aside from allowing their current 10-member staff—all women—the freedom of flexible work schedules, Shulkin and Merkin make sure to thank team members regularly to keep them happy and engaged.
During a very busy period last year, when everyone was working “crazy hours,” according to Merkin, she made it a point to send every member of her all-female staff flowers to their homes. In another example, Melina Balboni, vice president of marketing, graciously hosted a GCP-sponsored pool party at her home in Stoughton, MA, for nearby team members and their families. “We all care about each other, we’re all close professionally and personally,” says Merkin.
Loosely based in Wellesley, GCP has virtual-based employees—salespeople and marketing, customer support, and finance and business development people—in Massachussetts, New York, California, Florida, Oregon, and Rhode Island. GCP specializes as an outsource company for retailers and merchants that want to do business in the incentive, promotion and loyalty, fundraising (Scrip), and affinity channels but don’t have the internal expertise and resources.
Both selling to incentive houses and working as a liaison between retail brands and their end-users, GCP has placed top retail gift cards into employee recognition, sales incentive, health and wellness, and workplace safety programs. Skype, emails, virtual meetings, and telephones are the day-to-day tools that GCP’s remote workforce uses to develop, market, and run business for clients like CVS/pharmacy, Brinker International (the proprietor of Chili’s and other national restaurant brands), AutoZone, and Lane Bryant.
“We’re on the phone
a lot,” Merkin half-quips. “That’s how we keep everybody together as a team.” And while there are times when staff do have to be available during business hours—such as those who handle sales and customer service—for the most part, Merkin says it is not a big concern, to her, where and when GCP’s team does what needs to be done. “There are such talented and disciplined people within our group, it just doesn’t matter,” she says. “It matters more that they are able to work in ways that work for them.”
Back in June, GCP held its first-ever face-to-face employee gathering, at Babson College’s Executive Conference Center in Wellesley. It flew in all of its “family members” from around the country for two days of brainstorming and tactical meetings and, perhaps most important, teambuilding. “It was the first time all of us were together. There were some people who had never met,” Shulkin notes.
The company ended the first day with a teambuilding exercise where the entire team made dinner. Says Kate Balboni, a GCP account executive: “Our evening was not the typical dinner out. We split into teams and worked to prepare various dishes, all of which came together as an amazing family-style dinner. We had been introduced to the idea of a “family work culture” earlier that day, and making a gourmet dinner and enjoying it together, with a livelier conversation than what we would have had in a restaurant, really hit this concept home for us.”
Even though it is a virtual company, GCP is growing at a double-digit rate both financially and personnel-wise, according to Shulkin, so he says the company will begin holding face-to-face, teambuilding meetings twice a year. And, for a B2B gift card company, it is only fitting that GCP will create a gift card incentive program for its own team. “We believe it will further motivate our employees,” Shulkin says.
After what Shulkin describes as six to seven years of “controlled growth” for GCP, his intention is to stay loyal to his vision of a small company that services top retailers in the special markets. But he does admit, “We didn’t start out as a virtual company. It just worked out that way.”
GiftCard Partners uses many of the virtual-employee motivation techniques discussed by Incentive columnist Roy Saunderson, president of the Recognition Management Institute at incentive management provider Rideau. Click here for Roy's column.