Christmas Gifts for Contractors, Suppliers and Referrers

Include the people who send you work. Most businesses build a Christmas list of staff and clients, stop there, and leave off the contractor who was effectively part of the team all year, the supplier who held a delivery for them in March, and the person who quietly refers them business and has never asked for anything.

This third list is short, it costs very little, and it has a longer tail than either of the other two. It also has the trickiest etiquette, because two of the relationships on it have money moving through them in a direction that makes a gift capable of being misread. Our gifts for clients range covers most of it.

Who is on this list

Four groups, and they are worth separating because the gift means something different in each one.

Contractors and freelancers who worked alongside your team without being on the payroll. Suppliers you buy from, where you are the customer. Referrers: the accountant, the broker, the former colleague who sends people your way. And the people who make the year work without appearing in any of those categories, such as the bookkeeper, the cleaner, or the person at the building who signs for everything.

Draw the list in November and draw it wide. The most common failure here is not a badly chosen gift. It is somebody who obviously should have been on the list and was not, which is a thing they notice and you do not.

The contractor who worked with you all year

The easiest case and the one most often missed. If somebody sat in your stand-ups, learned your systems and delivered alongside your team, the fact that they invoiced rather than being paid a salary is an administrative detail, not a relationship.

Treat them as team for the purposes of this list, and specifically: give them the same gift the team gets, not a different one. A contractor who receives a visibly different gift learns exactly where they sit, and if you have spent a year getting them to feel part of the group, this is a cheap way to undo it. If the team gift is going to the office and the contractor works from home, send theirs and say why in the card.

The supplier, and the power imbalance in it

This is where thinking is required. You are the customer, so a gift from you to a supplier travels down the power gradient rather than up, and it does not carry the same difficulty as a gift coming the other way. It can still be misread if it is large.

Keep it modest and keep it about the year rather than the account. A gift that arrives with a contract negotiation three weeks away reads as positioning, however innocently it was meant. Sent in early December with a card naming a specific thing they did, it reads as what it is. If a supplier has genuinely gone out of their way for you, say what they did, because that is the part their team will pass around their own office.

The referrer, where the gift is a thank-you and not a hint

The trickiest of the four. Somebody sends you work, you want to acknowledge it, and you do not want the gift to look like a payment for the last referral or a deposit on the next one.

Three things keep it clean. Send it at Christmas with everything else rather than on the day a referral converts, so the timing is seasonal instead of transactional. Keep the value modest, because a large gift is exactly what turns thanks into an arrangement. And write the card in the past tense: thank you for thinking of us this year, not we look forward to more. Our thank you hampers are the right register for this, because they read as thanks rather than as a business gesture.

This is only about how to thank a person who has been generous with your name, rather than about setting up an arrangement between two businesses.

Policies, and the gift that gets returned

Some organisations do not allow their staff to accept gifts. Some allow them under a value threshold. Some require them to be declared. You will not know which in advance, and it is not your job to find out.

What you can do is make it easy either way. Send to the workplace rather than a home address, so it arrives in the open. Keep the value modest, which is what keeps most gifts inside most policies. Choose something shareable, because a gift that becomes morning tea for a team is far easier to accept than something personal. And if it comes back, take it gracefully and do not try again with something smaller: the person returning it is following a rule, not making a comment about you.

What to spend

Less than you spend on clients, and the same for everyone inside the same group. The $60 to $100 range covers most of this list comfortably and is generous enough to be meaningful without raising a question about why. Step up for a contractor who was effectively part of the team, because they are on the staff list in everything but name.

One rule matters more than the number: be consistent within a group. Two suppliers who compare notes and find they received noticeably different gifts have learned something about how you rank them, and it will not be the thing you meant to say.

Where to start

Write the third list, sort it into the four groups, keep the amounts modest and consistent, and send in early December rather than late. Our gifts for clients and our Christmas hampers for staff and clients cover the range, and one order can go to every address on the list against a single GST tax invoice, which keeps it simple for your finance team. Christmas gifts for clients handles the client list itself, client gifts versus staff gifts works through the difference between the two, and Christmas gifts for staff and clients sits above all three.

If the list is long or the branding matters, talk to us rather than working it out alone. You can place a corporate order, email corporate@hamperswithbite.com.au, or call 1300 795 802 between 9am and 5pm AEST, Monday to Friday. One person who knows your brand and your deadlines will carry it from the first quote to the final delivery.