Thank you Santa: An Entrepreneur’s Christmas

Dear Santa:

Thank you for stopping at my office last night.  I hope you helped yourself to some of the M&M’s we keep on the conference table.  I would have left a glass of milk, but our mini-fridge is on the fritz and we just haven’t had the free cash flow to replace it.

Santa, thank you for the big red bag of office supplies you left.  Those will come in handy if I ever hire an admin person to hook up the printer and design some brochures.  There never seems to be enough time for those kinds of things.

The box of white board markers are especially appreciated.  If you’ve been watching me you know how much time I spend in front of the white board working on my business model.  I’ve probably been through a hundred EXPO markers this year.  And thanks for getting some green ones too — I was getting tired of seeing red.

I’m sorry I didn’t get a letter off to you this year.  Actually, nobody on my list got Christmas cards, despite my best intentions.  I signed up with SendACard.com to help me streamline the process this year, but by the time I took a holiday photo with my iPhone, uploaded my scanned signature, got an account at eStamps, and linked it to my PayPal account, it was Christmas eve.  You’ll be glad to know that the effort wasn’t wasted, though… I scheduled the cards to go out right after Thanksgiving next year.

What I’d really like to speak with you about, Santa, is some kind of joint venture between our two organizations.  You clearly have an excellent operations and logistics capability.   Have you ever considered offering all of that as an outsourced service?  A guy like me could really make use of your elf-centric manufacturing and your instantaneous package delivery services.

With enough elf power, I’m sure that I could grow my business into something that would change the world.  I realize that you have been changing the world every year for centuries, and I could really benefit from your perspective and mentorship.  Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sitting on my board of advisors?  Everyone says I need one of those, and a celebrity name like yours could really help pull that together.

Speaking of celebrity names, would you (or Mrs. Claus if she is so inclined) be interested in an endorsement deal?  I saw what your likeness did for Coca Cola in the 50’s and 60’s.  I could really use that kind of sales bump next year.  The compensation would have to be small at first, but I could easily give you a nice royalty on each sale.

Well dear Santa, I know you’re as busy as we are, so I won’t keep you any longer.  If you’d like to follow up on any of my ideas for a joint venture / collaboration, let me know.  Just an email will be fine, I know how hard it is to schedule a face-to-face meeting.

Perhaps I’ll be in the office next year when you make your rounds.  If you arrive a bit before midnight, it’s likely you’ll find me standing at the whiteboard…

Till then,

David