CEO of $486 million business empire spends her Fridays writing ‘thank-you’ notes

'I found that means an awful lot to people,' Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John said. (Image credit: Build-A-Bear)

Despite being the CEO of a $486 million toy business based in the US, Sharon Price John ensures she takes an hour out of her busy schedule every Friday to do something old-fashioned that’s often overlooked nowadays in corporate America: a thank-you note.

The head of Build-A-Bear said she found penning a message of appreciation not only helps her stay on top of the week, but is also great for business.

“I found that means an awful lot to people,” she told Fortune. “It only takes a few seconds to text somebody... It’s very easy in this role to focus on everything that needs to be fixed, and there’s always something that needs to be fixed. But if you balance it and acknowledge and be thoughtful about the things that are going right, sometimes that helps the momentum.”

John added that her methods are now being adopted by company leaders. “I would hope that the people that I’m sending these emails [or texts] to are also then turning and doing that for their own organization,” she said.

After working with other toy makers such as Mattel and Hasbro, John joined the customizable stuffed animal retailer in 2013 and is now designing toys geared towards adults—like Pokémon, Harry Potter, and Stranger Things collections to tap into millennial nostalgia.

Her ideas appear to have been working as Build-A-Bear recorded third-quarter profits in December and announced that they were expecting total revenues for the full year up to $495 million, Fortune reported. Moreover, all of the company's 525 physical stores are now profitable, up from 80 percent over the last 10 years.