How to Sign a Business Holiday Card: One Name, the Team, or Everybody

The rule first: the person the client knows signs the card. Not the managing partner because they are the managing partner. Not the whole office because it feels generous. The name the client would recognize if it came up on their phone.

Everything else on this page is how to make that work when there are a lot of cards and a lot of people.

Print the firm, sign the person

You get up to four lines of imprint inside the card at no charge. Use them for the firm: the name, and a short line under it if you want one. Then sign above it, by hand.

That division of labor is the whole trick. The printed lines say who it is from on paper. The ink says who actually thought of them.

One name or several

One relationship, one name. If a client works with you, the card comes from you. Adding three colleagues they have never met does not make it warmer. It makes it a committee.

A client served by a team gets the team they know. The two or three people who are actually on the account. Not the floor.

"From all of us" belongs in print, not in ink. If the card is genuinely from the firm, the imprint already says so. A dozen signatures squeezed into one card read like a birthday card passed around the break room, which is more or less what happened.

Sign the way you sign an email to that person. If they know you as Mike, it is Mike. Your full name with a middle initial is for documents.

One line above the signature

Five or six handwritten words above your name do more than the printed verse ever will. "Good to see you in March." "Enjoy the new grandson." It is the only part of the card that could not have been sent to anyone else.

If you take one thing from What to Write in a Business Thanksgiving Card, take that.

Getting 300 cards signed

This is where good intentions go to die, so plan it like a job.

• Split the stack by relationship, not by alphabet. Each person signs their own clients. A card signed by someone who knows the client takes the same ten seconds as one signed by someone who does not.
• Put it on the calendar. Signing 250 cards with a line on each is an evening and part of another one. Book it for the day the cards arrive, not "when things calm down."
• Get the envelopes addressed for you. Addressing is $75 per 100. It takes the slowest, least valuable job off the table, so the time goes to the part that counts.
• Test your pen on the first card. Some inks sit on top of coated paper and smear when the next card slides across them. Find that out on card one, not card 180.

Three things not to do

A printed signature on a card to your own client. It is worse than no card, because it tells the person they were on a list.

A stamped signature dressed up to look real. It fools nobody who has ever signed anything, and once they notice, the card stops being a card.

Signing for somebody else. If a colleague is out, their cards wait or their name comes off. A borrowed signature is a small lie on the one object that is supposed to be sincere.

The short version

Print the firm. Sign the person. Add one line nobody else could have written. And start the evening the cards arrive, not the week after.