Matt Vance: We’re glad you’re present for today’s episode. We believe you’ll find the conversation a true gift. Today, we’re speaking with the CEO of Gifted, the free employee recognition platform for HR managers, salespeople and team leaders. Welcome to our guests. Thanks for being here. Micha

Micha Berkuz: Thanks for appreciating taking the time to take part in this awesome podcast.

Matt Vance: Thank you so good to have you. Thanks for joining us for our listeners. Micha is one of the world’s foremost leaders in the gifting industry with a programming background, and passion for business. He was the founder of me back in 2008, having only raised 180,000 startup funds, Micha and his team grew by me to the largest B2C and B2B gifting and employee recognition platform in Israel with annual revenue of 150 million. Micha has since exited me and moved to San Francisco to focus on gifted.com and enhancing the rewards and recognition programs for departments everywhere.

Matt Vance: And for everyone listening, I have to tell you that I have personally used gifted before coming over and starting Mobrium and getting this podcast going. I was the VP of culture at Ifit and we used gifted to give personalized gifts to our team members around the globe and Is actually how we first got connected. And about a year and a half ago. So it was really neat to use this product to help send out gifts and rewards and recognition that were both equitable in the right currencies for people, depending on where they were working throughout the world and something that they could personalize to what they wanted. So that’s why we’re here. We love the experience with giftedness and wanted to meet the man behind this incredible team and product.

Micha Berkuz: No. Thank you guys. I appreciate the intro. Yeah, I’d love to share the story. It’s been a very interesting different ride than most usual Silicon Valley startups. So, we’re happy to kind of share that journey with you in the listeners.

Matt Vance: Yeah, we’re so excited to hear more from you. And first off, we wanted to share a little bit with our audience. Your first language is Hebrew. Is that right?

Micha Berkuz: Yeah, I’m originally from Israel, I grew up there, I moved out here about six years ago. We spoke about it before, what we said, sometimes my wife, I kind of picked up a decent accent growing up because we didn’t have cable TV coming in really, really late to our area. So, my dad put up a satellite like this and I grew up watching the single channel that we had in English, which was the NBC Super Channel. So I grew up watching Conan O’Brien at the age of five, Conan O’Brien. and Jay, Leno late night shows and Great. Khaneer back in the day. So it was one of those, I managed to pick up on this in accent, but my wife always tells me that. I need to tell people from Israel because I still make those grammatical mistakes. So if they know it’s very impressive. But if they don’t know, I might sound like I’m a little off when it comes to English. So yeah, definitely still working on my English, but yeah,

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Matt Vance: Yeah, we were seeing each other earlier, it was shocking to even hear that because honestly, you sound American. But would you mind sharing a sample with us of the Hebrew language?

Micha Berkuz: Yeah. I think, first of all, I can speak, I can do a very bad Israeli accent, very bad is aliacs and speaking in English so you can go to there but one of the words I can say I’m very happy to be here. I mean my old Sonia Lotto. Yeah so I’ll be happy to give a free Hebrew lesson to any one of the listeners who’s willing to invest 20 minutes and learning the basics of the most common important. Hebrew words, I think todaq Thank you so bada for having me here. Appreciate it.

Matt Vance: I like that such a soothing sound. That’s really hold that. Yeah, I’ll see Megan remember that by the end of the episode.

Micha Berkuz: Yeah.

Matt Vance: Tell us how you got into the gifting industry Micha.

Micha Berkuz: Yeah, by chance. I actually grew up playing basketball. You can’t see it on video or on video right now, but I’m six eight. So, I grew up playing basketball professionally and had to kind of force myself to retire at 21. I had a little bit of an injury and then kind of found myself calling in love with programming and was back and early late 90s and I kind of, worked as a developer, as an engineer within a few companies and one day my Sister bought me a.

Micha Berkuz: It wasn’t my ex-girlfriend who bought me a PlayStation and my sister wanted to buy me a gift card to buy a game for the PlayStation. She spent the whole day, getting into the car driving getting a parking paying for parking going to the shop, buying this piece of paper and then my other sister and my mom wanted to kind of chip in and they wanted to add, a few dollars to create one big gift and I was like, it can’t be that, back in 2008.

Micha Berkuz: There’s no reason to waste so much time to get a piece of paper that is worth X number of dollars. And that’s when I tried to look up online to see if there’s anything out there and there was nothing. So we started kind of finding a transition, the whole plastic and paper gift card to a digital platform. It was an interesting time because it was back in 2008. The world kind of collapsed and the rise of the Daily Deals website came up, the groupons living social and all that stuff. And it gave us a good push because kind of the stars aligned because it brought us to the point where

Micha Berkuz: the fear of putting your credit card online went away, as you need to get an 80% discount with Groupons. So people like that, who care about security when I’m getting a massage for 80% discount and that opened up the floodgate of people kind of moving from the regular ecommerce to, widely using credit card online specifically in Israel. And that was kind of the start of coming up with an idea. You went back home, broke down an idea of what that platform is gonna look like and then got on my scooter and went door to door to businesses in Tel, Aviv trying to get them on board to connect with their point of sale to do the gift card transaction and that was the beginning of getting into the gift card industry and we tried to set up the I, partner with my co-founder shy and we got to the point where we try to raise capital.

Micha Berkuz: Couldn’t raise any money. I had a website building development company that kind of paid the bills for the month. And we got to the point where we went to all the VCs and they all told us. No and we couldn’t get the money to set up. the operation I got rejected from pretty much every venture capital in Israel. I have a folder on my

Micha Berkuz: My Gmail is called No exclamation mark,…

Matt Vance: Man.

Micha Berkuz: and it has all the rejection emails of all the VCs that said, this is not for us. And the funny thing was that one of our appliances on my website building company that we built their website. I kind of pitched the idea to him. He said what, it’s interesting and my co-founder said it in the best possible way, saying we liked him that there’s a product and he liked us that there’s money. So we got to the point where we got a. It wasn’t even an investment, it was a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty thousand dollar line of credit from the bank. The set up the company, and that was the beginning of, by me, which was our Israeli gift card operation. It was strictly a B to see play. It wasn’t like a B2B employee recognition, but after getting a lot of those retailers and nationwide brands, we realized that we have this amazing gifting comment content network, why not build another layer on top of that for employee recognition.

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Matt Vance: Yeah.

Micha Berkuz: That’s where the employee recognition layer came in and the gifting aspect of working with other companies and that’s where the holding kind of took off. Unfortunately, the right place at the right time. We kind of managed to build a pretty substantial brand there.

Matt Vance: Holy cow, that’s impressive. And so obviously, you had a successful company and you moved on now to gifted and previously, you told us about some advice that you received that has helped you in doing business. and if you could share that advice with our listeners,

Micha Berkuz: Yeah, I played basketball and right after that, I got into learning how to kind of code and work as an engineer. I never had any formal education. Kind of barely got through high school and so my kind of business school experience comes from reading and learning and all those things. And it was one of those moments where it’s a story that I like to share with entrepreneurs as well. We?

Micha Berkuz: It was one of those moments that your life is kind of divided before and after you heard something and it changes your whole perspective, it doesn’t happen a lot. But this was one of those moments and it was an article that I read about Mark Cuban from Shark Tank owners of the Dallas Mavericks. And they asked him really, really interesting questions. What is the most important quality for a person that is working for you and you would say, for people that work for me, I love people who are smart, driven, loyal, whatever quality that you think of a person and he said those things. Don’t interest me. And the only thing that is interesting for me was these people take pressure off. And a person that takes the pressure off. Me becomes invaluable. and I was mind blown and I thought about the whole thing of

Micha Berkuz: Wow, that is very interesting. How do we, I went back to my team and I spoke to my VP of R&D back in. And at, I mean, I said, what, let’s take We had a team of 30 engineers there we grew up to having a team of 150 people, there’s a substantial engineering team there. And I asked him, Can you divide the team to the people who are adding pressure and the ones who are relieving pressure and he came back a day later it’s like, Wow, this is unbelievable. I know exactly who the strong players are. I know exactly who I have to work with, I know exactly. Unfortunately, there are two people that we have to kind of, have a talk with and maybe let go. But the idea of relieving pressure kind of seems to fit into not just the sea level executive of management, but also every level of management.

Micha Berkuz: And even to go step further and this is something that we can kind of translate to our company. We were so impressed by this kind of method that we turned that into one of our corporate values. So relieving pressure not just between team members and managers but also between team members. So my engineering teams knows that they have to keep the platform stable because that release pressure from our customer success team dealing with bugs and issues and problems with the platform and our, marketing teams know that if they do a great job that release pressure, because the stale team will have an amazing pipeline that they can work with. So the whole relieving pressure aspect of it, kind of translated into pretty much every aspect of our company. And it was fascinating to see how something so small can have that job. profound impact on, the way that our company operates

Matt Vance: And that is so inspirational. How you learned something personally and it was just this epiphany moment that helped. You see things so clearly with a different lens to look through without how to evaluate teams and then embed that as a company.

Matt Vance: Is it part of the hiring and firing practices of gifted? I’m just curious if there are other ways it’s applied.

Micha Berkuz: 

Micha Berkuz: If you can repeat that, Matt, I just lost you there for a connectivity issue for a…

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Matt Vance: Yeah,…

Micha Berkuz: So just the last light question.

Matt Vance: no worries. Yeah, I was just curious. If relieving pressure is part of the firing criteria and other ways that you help, encourage that, relieving pressure behavior, among team members.

Micha Berkuz: A hundred percent. I think that’s one of the number one, of course, everyone should have a grace period and I think we can’t be as effective to the company. I look at it from a very active and passive perspective.

Micha Berkuz: There’s the passive perspective of someone who came into the company, he or she is still learning what they need to do and they asked the right questions and we help them with the onboarding. They go through the whole training session and they work with our training, kind of, We try to take a person and put them in every seat for a few days so they can learn, what it looks like from the customer success perspective because if they know the impact of the engineering team on the customer success and vice versa in, delivering the right feedback. So we can make the product better. They can have a better idea of what it looks like even if they’re on the sales team for example, and there’s the kind of active pressure relieving, where if someone adds pressure actively by asking the wrong questions over and over again, not making the effort.

Micha Berkuz: Or, being someone who’s not letting helping other people relieve their pressure and do their jobs. That’s something that’s kind of a red flag for us. And we also talk about it very early on even during this kind of interview session. So we love sharing that perspective because we are in the recognition and engagement business. So it’s an easy sell for us because at the end of the day, we build a product and we have a company that works that the byproduct of what we do is making people happy. So it’s a really kind of a mission that is very easy to get people to get on board and we love that but it’s also kind of required. There’s a lot of responsibility because a lot of companies kind of trust us with their information, with their talent, with their team, with the engagement with their team. And if we can kind of establish that internally within our company, it’s much easier to kind of

Micha Berkuz: reflect that on our product, on a relationship with our clients and also with the criteria for hiring and people who will join the team. So we put a lot of emphasis on that very early on even in the interview stage.

Matt Vance: It’s such a cool value, too, because it shows and it puts an idea that everyone needs to be caring for everyone else. It’s not just the receiver side. Who’s really being pressured by me? It’s how I can relieve pressure from my coworkers or my supervisor so it’s really gifting that in a community of your team, right?

Micha Berkuz: And the fascinating thing is that It works so well for us,…

Matt Vance: Call.

Micha Berkuz: in terms of, internally for the company. So, we kind of translated the whole thing. I said, It’s a corporate value and it doesn’t just apply to team members and employees, it really applies to our strategy in terms of building the product for our clients. So, for example, if you talk about relieving pressure from an HR manager, here she needs to take care of some sort of recognition program, and if we can build a product that automates a lot of these processes. All right? So for example, we automate birthdays, anniversaries, milestones, gifting, and all those, different programs. We can do a weekly launch. That is being sent automatically based on people. We are thinking with your R is platform and pull all that information to update automatically that all of a sudden becomes something at that moment that

Micha Berkuz: Keith is being offloaded from you as a person who’s running the program and you can focus on other things, like, hiring engagement, all those things. So for us the value of relieving pressure is not just between us and team members and employees. But it’s also how we build a product that would relieve pressure from our clients and give them more time to do other things as we kind of take care of this aspect of the engagement of their team.

Matt Vance: I love that, I can totally picture an HR manager doing that same exercise that you talked about reviewing their list of team members, but an HR manager evaluating their investments. the tools, they use the products and services that they purchase and find the ones separating, the ones that relieve pressure and add pressure. If you have vendors or tools or products that are making your life more complicated and they’re more difficult to manage than it makes sense to cut them out,…

Micha Berkuz: I’m

Matt Vance: And reinvest in ones that are relieving pressure on your life.

Micha Berkuz: I’m running back to my credit card statement to look at all the SAS software that we’re using right now, and to practice exactly that and to see which ones I can remove or add to my team. Really pressure. Never thought about that as a third party, we thought about it from us as a provider…

00:20:00

Matt Vance: but,

Micha Berkuz: but never as a user. So thanks Matt. I’ll definitely use that right down. If we can practice…

Matt Vance: Yeah. Another great application for your advice.

Micha Berkuz: what we preach.

Matt Vance: I love it. That’s really cool. So let’s take this conversation just a step broader so gifted is providing services to all these different R teams all over the globe. Why is it important for companies to have a rewards and recognition program in place?

Micha Berkuz: still the way that I look at it is and the way we kind of try to look at it from our perspective is I think there’s a strong correlation between the number of touch points that you have. With your team members. And things with retention, with the way that they feel about your organization with their satisfaction and gifting is one part of it. So for example, it’s not always about these huge celebrations. It’s not always about the annual bonus or something like that. And the way that we look at it, that the slogan that we chose for the company for gifted people is simply appreciated. And when we spoke about it before we were wondering, some people on some people said, it might be not as

Micha Berkuz: Exciting is gifting and all those things. And I went back to my partner and I asked her What do you think? Does it have enough of an impact? And she gave me a great example. She said there’s a huge difference between someone saying, great job. All right, so that’s one thing. But there’s a huge difference between that and someone coming in and saying Hey I really appreciate what you’ve done to the team. You’re really helped us get through this deadline and that has such a profound impact and it has nothing to do with gifting. Gifting is a byproduct of that type of engagement that We’re looking to do so I think that is and not everything has to be huge.

Micha Berkuz: Sometimes, we just had one of our sales team members, he got sick at home and we just sent him a small reward of 25 bucks with doordash school Breeds and Grubhub and we said, Hey, get a better order of chicken soup. That was kind of the type of engagement that we had internally within the company. And the funny thing is that he started using that as one of the examples that he talks about when a client is interesting and gets on a call, he brings that up with his experience from the platform as a little touch point for engagement that had nothing to do, nothing happens. Just because it was a sick day, I got up from comic books so it’s not necessarily about overall we have to do this huge rollout of this Amazing Crazy program that we committed.

Micha Berkuz: to an annual budget or something like that. It’s more about, let’s build a platform that first of all, the most important thing is that you mentioned that in the beginning the platform is free. So we did not charge a per user fee or a monthly fee or a minimum, so it can be like a one off when you want to send that, get a gift or it, could be something that you use on a regular basis. And you’re gonna have your whole milestone gifting recognition annual program, to be used with the platform. So that’s kind of our approach. It’s not necessarily about changing a company culture, but being that sidekick that helps you increase those touch points. During the year.

Micha Berkuz: To connect that with higher levels of retention satisfaction being seen adding features like, allowing managers to have a budget that they can go ahead and kind of recognize their team members. You have a monthly, annually, quarterly, budget. You can go ahead and log in yourself and if someone’s did something great, you can kind of engage with them. So we’re looking at ourselves and this is something I’m gonna regret saying, but no one’s companies aren’t gonna shut down because they’re not giving enough. has other problems like you’re gonna have a problem if you’re not hiring people too quickly. But if we can be the ones who kind of take that load off and really depress it, I think that ties it back to our goal and our role with serving a client or a company. So, that’s how we see, kind of perceived as a gift that fits within an organization.

Matt Vance: I was seriously going to ask you, if you guys use your own product, with your employees. And I think that’s so cool that you can do that. I mean, to integrate your own products into the culture of your company, and actually see the impact for them to share with other users, right?

Micha Berkuz: I can give you a great example from two hours ago. I had a client who spoke to Julian from our team. and one of the things that he said is that this person is originally from Ukraine, and Ukraine is celebrating their Independence Day and we have a whole team in Ukraine of engineers that we support. And we supported them through the war…

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Matt Vance: That’s so cool.

Micha Berkuz: everything that’s going on there. And he asked me if it’s okay to send that client a small gift. He’s right now, in Turkey and we have some gifting options in Turkey and if it’s okay to send her a gift. So we created a version of our logo with the Ukrainian flag and we send them a small Happy Independence Day,

Micha Berkuz: Will give a gift to someone for that specific occasion and…

Matt Vance: Wow.

Micha Berkuz: It didn’t come for me. It came from him, he came up with the idea. He came up with Let’s create something in terms of our brand and how that supports Turk, Ukraine specifically for that person living in Turkey right now. So it kind of came together as an opportunity that we learned all the time. Every day it goes by. Someone comes up even from our team with an idea of how we can kind of recognize our engagement with people not necessarily internally as team members, but that was the perfect kind of opportunity and recognition option for that specific occasion.

Matt Vance: It’s clear that it’s impacting your culture, very positively and even bringing just innovation, within your own employees on how to use the product and different ways.

Micha Berkuz: Thank you.

Matt Vance: And one thing I wanted to add Micha just kind of from my own lived experience when I was using gifted at Ifit the person, receiving the gift, has the opportunity to send a message back to the person that shared a message and I was the one sending all those out to all the employees. And so I would get emails back from people about the impact that a small gift or piece of recognition made in their life and in their day that day it wasn’t necessarily something that changed their life. But for some people it was more significant and seeing those little messages come back, just helped me realize that.

Matt Vance: Just helps it fill that much more significant and…

Micha Berkuz: In. Yeah,…

Matt Vance: meaningful. So I think it’s definitely powerful

Micha Berkuz: and Matt, I think if you look specifically in the HR space, it’s one of the hardest things to quantify. If you look at sales and marketing like you put a dollar here and you get a dollar and two cents on the other side. You did a great job. Let’s scale this, it’s very hard to measure. If you invest X number of dollars into recognition, you don’t get that immediate return but you get that as a feel that you get in the company and we added that thank you future just to be able to say. All right, we did this campaign, we sent everyone a gift or someone sent a gift and they are able to send a thank you through the platform, but it’s not just receiving those thank uses. We even created this Export option that you can take all. The things that you received on the platform.

Micha Berkuz: To a specific occasion or overall or between specific dates and export that to this report, that shows you all the thank-yous of all your team members so you can share that with your leadership. So you can take that Hey we sent out a virtual lunch for everyone and these are the things that we got. Here’s the impact that we made and a lot of times goes, kind of unseen. If we don’t have that option of sending notes, those thank yous, but it’s more about How do we take that return on investment? That is really, really hard to gauge when it comes to recognition and turn that into something that is super easy to communicate to the companies like leadership and the team in general about the impact that this program specifically had

Matt Vance: And yeah, that is super impactful. It’s taking something that may seem kind of invisible and quantifying it and bringing it to life. This reward and recognition is helping strengthen relationships. And that’s essentially just saying this is how we strengthened relationships today. So I think that’s really neat. Typically, so we typically ask a question, This is kind of our anchor. Question of how company, culture, creative, drives greater profits, and I think you just barely spoke to that about, helping showcase to leadership how relationships are strength and through strategic rewards and gifting. But do you have any other thoughts about increasing profits through company culture?

Micha Berkuz: Yeah, I think it’s not necessarily about company culture. I think it’s first of all obviously recognition equals more satisfaction equals retention equals, let’s turn over more money to the company. That’s what you’re gonna hear from each other, a recognition and engagement platform. But I think one of the things that we saw is the kind of transitioning of our platform to other departments. So, for example, you’ll see the HR using it, and then someone from sales or marketing is receiving a reward, and they’re like, all right, I can start using this to engage with my clients. So one of our clients is A ly Billion dollar bowling company and they’re using the platform to send out rewards for people who are engaging in meetings, they send a five dollar cup of coffee.

00:30:00

Micha Berkuz: Disclose a meeting.

Micha Berkuz: To set up events at their, thousands of bowling alleys that they have across the US. So we saw some creative usage of our platform, we started adding more and more features to the platform to support other use cases. So, all of a sudden, the marketing will do a competition or between, different clients or client gifting, for salespeople or incentivizing salespeople. Not just based on metrics, but in these intermediate points where you want to give them something for closing a great deal, but it’s not necessarily, they’re gonna see it at the end of the quarter, probably, but they did something great today. There’s no reason to wait two months, if you’re in the beginning of the quarter or middle of the quarter to engage and recognize that specific person. So I think the cool thing about it is that we start seeing these extension within a company of using the platform and different use cases that we didn’t in the beginning, had in mind, We’re using it to get customer feedback, every time we get on a call with one of our admins that will give us

Micha Berkuz: half an hour, an hour, of their time, we can use the platform to recognize them, and send them a small reward just to thank them for forgiving us, valuable feedback. And the responses that we’re getting is like, We would have given this, gladly regardless because we’re using the platform. But I said, if we don’t practice what we preached and obviously, we’re missing the platform.

Matt Vance: And so do you have anything else to add for our listeners today before we wrap up and to share your information?

Micha Berkuz: Yeah, I think the only thing that I can share is that, the

Micha Berkuz: And like I said, gifting is a part of what we do. I think there are so many ways to recognize and engage with your employees and your team members. It could be like you said, a slack channel for kudos, not everything has to be like a platform or a product that is implemented and it has a cost. The idea for us is kind of to democratize the whole engagement and recognition. Where companies and it’s funny to see we have clients with an eight employee funeral home in Virginia and a 30,000 employee company. That’s integrated into the work day in this huge corporate client. But it’s not like we don’t target a specific market. So I think if we can do that on the gifting but other, professionals can think about ideas for them internally to just engage with their employees, not necessarily in the gifting space. I think that’s a huge key and a takeaway from the conversation that I think is kind of a low hanging fruit, if you just think about it.

Matt Vance: Yeah, I know I’ve been on the end as a client and as an employee of gifts like this and specifically from gifted as well. And I know for me with the ones I was a client for they made me want to be loyal to them because I’m like, they appreciate my business and then as an employee it made me want to be loyal as an employee and continue on with the company. And so I think you hit on all those points: retention reducing turnover and also just creating a better culture. Are people happy and enjoying work and they’re receiving feedback, both directions and feeling appreciated for the work that they’re doing.

Micha Berkuz: I agree. Thank you for

Matt Vance: You guys clearly practice what you preach. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Micha Berkuz: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate the time. And I was really looking forward to this podcast and it was a great experience, I appreciate it.

Matt Vance: So to those who are listening, Micha is truly a leader. Check out his LinkedIn profile and go visit gifted.com to learn more of how a rewards and recognition program can ignite greater engagement and productivity at your company. Thanks for listening. Thanks, we’ll see it.

Micha Berkuz: All right.