core competencies | The Barefoot Spirit

The 4 Core Competencies of the Barefoot Startup

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 18:00:07 +0000

If you managed to survive the entrepreneurial process from ideation to monetization and you were asked to boil it all down into core competencies, what would you say? How would you even begin?

We faced this exact challenge. Our employees, business associates and clients all kept saying that we should break our journey down into its essential parts and expand upon those parts. So, for a year we kept tossing around ideas, thinking about how we could get these concepts across to startups.

Focusing on why so many startups failed seemed to be a good place to start. Did they all have something in common? What were the areas that most of the “failures” failed to master? Surprisingly, they all lacked competency in one or more of 4 key areas. So, we decided to focus on those areas and prioritize them in The Barefoot Startup’s GPS (Guiding Principles for Success). Here’s a brief summary:

Monetization Strategy. Crazy as it sounds, many startups never ask the fundamental question, “Why am I doing this anyway?” Is it a lifestyle? Is it a legacy? Or is it to monetize on brand equity? If you’re setting your course on an eventual acquisition, merger, or public offering, the steps you take at the beginning of your journey will be critical to your survival. They will determine your expansion plans and the steps you take to maximize your brand equity. This choice means that your goods or services must be scalable, and your business can run without you. It means that your files reflect your acquirer’s due diligence. And it also means that you know and establish the metrics and milestones you need to become an acquisition target or, as we say, “Get your peanut in front of the elephant!”
Cash Flow Management. The goal here is to reduce your need for capital. Do you know how identify and utilize your “hidden” assets. Ideally, your buyer’s will pay you before you need to pay for your supplies and overhead, and this is possible. But for most of us, we need to juggle! And we need to spend every dime on the bills before we pay ourselves. This is why outsourcing, reducing overhead, and pay-as-you go are so critical. This is why income and cost projections are so essential. You need to establish revenue, even if its small, before you ask for investors’ money. Do you know how to establish strategic alliances with your suppliers and your buyers, to reduce your need for capital?
Personnel Management. The goal is to reduce turnover, the #1 hidden cost of doing business, and to engage and empower your people. How you find good people and build great people are covered in our video. We believe it is essential to overkill on orientation from day one to demonstrate where the money really comes from, including all the hands, hoops and twists it has to go through to get to them. Paying for performance encourages better performance. Paying by the hour encourages longer hours, not necessarily resulting in productivity. Nurturing a culture of permission, encouraging innovation, and giving public acknowledgement for a job well done are absolutely vital to building a productive and supportive team. Sharing challenges with the entire staff on a know-the-need, rather than a need-to-know basis will unlock your personnel assets to solve problems on the fly.
Distribution management. Do you know how to get your product or service to the market, and more importantly, keep it there? Distribution is everything from supply chain management to sales. Sales is not just to your end user, but to your own people, your B2B customer, their B2C customer and eventually to their (and your) end-user. Understanding and delivering what each person in the chain requires can make the difference between access to market and being shut out. Not understanding the true cost of sales is the biggest single reason for startup failure. Start small, make your mistakes in a small place, learn from them, and get your act together before you take your show on the road. Don’t scale fast to fail fast!

Are you interested? We know that these 4 core competencies, so often overlooked, are so important that we spend an entire hour on each one in our online video course, The Barefoot Startup’s GPS (Guiding Principles for Success). Check it out.

#BarefootStartup

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post The 4 Core Competencies of the Barefoot Startup appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Save Time and Money Monetizing Your Idea

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 18:01:47 +0000

Many people have a simplistic view of how to make money on their idea. They think that if it’s good enough, someone will buy it. We have come to realize, finally, that it’s not about the idea, it’s about the business that sells the idea.

The idea might be for a great product that makes life easier. But to actually have a monetization event where you get paid for your idea, you must create a business that sells it. Now you have to demonstrate that there is a substantial and increasing market for your idea. You do this with sales.

If you intend to eventually attract an investor, acquirer, or cash infusion partner, your business must show the level of earnings they are looking for. Most businesses are valued on a multiple of annual earnings, so, in most cases, it is the earnings they are investing in, not the “idea.”

For us, it took 19 years to finally achieve the earnings and the sales necessary to attract an acquirer. For every category of consumer product and price point, there is a corresponding number of earnings and sales that your business must achieve before any acquirer will even look at you. And those numbers can change with the times and the economy. But once you know what those numbers for your particular type of business, you must grow to at least that size.

Now you are involved with growing a business and all the critical make-it-or-break-it decisions that are required daily. How will you make more right decisions? What principles and standards will you employ to hold up as a guide in every aspect of your business?

If we had known then what we know now, it might have taken us half the time to monetize our business. We learned most lessons the hard way, but now we have 20-20 hindsight. Like a Monday morning quarterback, we look at our history and realize what we did right and what we could have done better.

Many folks with great ideas who want to get paid for them are starting out just like we did: not realizing all that is involved to reach that monetization event, not realizing the long term effects of daily decisions, and not really employing a set of time-proven standards. We can help!

Our New York Times bestselling book, The Barefoot Spirit, is our story of hardship, hustle, and heart. We wrote it as a business adventure story to entertain and enlighten. It’s about the real world, not academic form and function. But now we have distilled out of it The Guiding Principles for Success that ultimately guided us, resulting in our success. We put them into a 30- day, four-part video-webinar series. Each week for 4 weeks we present a one-hour content video and 4 days later, a one-hour live Q&A. We wish someone would have sat us down and had this chat with us!

Part 1 is “Starters for Startups.” It breaks business down to the things you should know before you get started and the mindset required to overcome the challenges ahead.

Part 2 is “Being Resourceful – Cash Flow Management.” It examines the ways you can reduce your need for capital, increase your credit, and extend your terms.

Part 3 is “Engaging and Empowering Your People – Personnel Management.” It explores ways to reduce turnover (the #1 hidden cost of business) and how to motivate your people.

Part 4 is “Sales Is King – Distribution Management.” It focuses on the most important part of your business – sales. It tells how to get your product to market and how to keep it there.

We employ 20 Guiding Principles for Success to these core competencies. Stop wasting your time and money in your quest to monetize your great idea! Go to www.BarefootSpiritGPS.com for a free sample.

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Save Time and Money Monetizing Your Idea appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.