When we were building the Barefoot Wine brand, we would sweat out the new year because that’s when the chain buyers and big box stores would cut out the “dead wood.” We knew that if our brand didn’t perform to their expectations, it could get discontinued. And well it should, since there was only so much shelf space. Buyers had to prune out the losers in order to make more room for the winners.  Luckily we were rarely cut out of the sets because we were doing a lot of pruning of our own!

Every year we looked at our business with a pruner’s eye. What was growing and what was dead wood? What needed more support and what needed to go to make way for new growth? Then we made some strategic pruning decisions.

We started with what was working well and realized that with more mind share, encouragement, and support it would work a whole lot better. We also realized that mind share was limited, as were funds and time dedicated to oversight. So, this additional energy, focus, and attention had to come from somewhere. Then we looked at what wasn’t working, what wasn’t producing, and what was sucking our energy, and that’s where we pruned!

This is not to say that investing in the future is a bad idea if it doesn’t pay off immediately. On the contrary. You need to invest to see a return and sometimes that investment can be a multi-year investment. But that’s where the real skill comes in. What investments in people and initiatives have gone on too long and need to be cut? How do you know when is the right time to say good-bye?

Gardeners love the winter because without the leaves, the trees and shrubs show their true structure. It’s easier to see where they are naturally headed and what adjustments are required to help them along. Many businesses slow down at New Years and sometimes for several months thereafter, giving you an opportunity to examine your structure without all the day-to-day demand clouding your view. Now is the time to get in there and make some strategic cuts that will take you in the direction you want to go. Now is the time to channel energy from losing propositions into winning ones.

When you analyze your business this winter, consider these two basic pruning principles that worked for us:

1. Protect. Decide who and what could improve with more help, guidance, or support. Ask yourself how they have demonstrated their potential to grow, and what they have brought into fruition. Discover the budding opportunities. Are they scalable? Decide if they are worth additional support.
2. Prune. What is not producing well? Who and what are sapping your resources, thus reducing your ability to support who and what are working? Make cuts in order to channel your limited amount of time, energy, money, and focus into those people and those initiatives you want to protect and nurture.

Annual pruning is really the reallocation of your resources. There will be new growth in the spring. So, get ready for it now and reap the rewards in a few months!

Here’s to a more efficient, and thereby more prosperous, New Year!

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 It’s New Year’s … So Get Out Your Pruning Shears appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Permission is a powerful idea in determining company culture. Are you giving your people permission to be creative, make decisions, solve problems, and take responsibility? Or, in the name of efficiency, structure, or compliance, are you preventing the very type of support you need?

Here are some ways to give your people permission:

Compensation. Some part of employees’ compensation should be based on sales, growth, and productivity. It will take some time to identify and agree upon metrics used to measure those key indicators, but get started now and tweak it every year until it’s right. If you offer a bonus, make it quarterly. A year is too long for them to remember, or if after a poor first half of the year, they may just give up. Quarterly is short enough to remember, and if they have a bad quarter, well, there’s a new opportunity next quarter.

Knowledge. Your staff can’t help you if you don’t tell them what you need. Many businesses believe in the “need-to-know” policy which keeps employees in the dark. We believe in the “know-the-need” policy which includes them in the company’s challenges, opportunities and triumphs. They already have your corporate knowledge and a stake in solving your problems, especially if they share in your success. We suggest quarterly meetings with sales and sales support staff (i.e., everybody not in sales) to brainstorm solutions. They will surprise you with their great ideas! 

Access. Clear the channels of communication. Don’t force interdepartmental messages go through a complex pyramid structure, and back to the department right next door. Don’t lock down creativity by allowing compliance to use fear to demand that everything goes through them. Their extensive turnaround time itself can discourage many good ideas from ever surfacing. Give your people ways to access top management directly to prevent middle managers from stopping good ideas.

Acknowledgement. Thank each of your people publically for all the good ideas they’ve produced to improve your company. This validation will make them want to do more. Their teammates will see your acknowledgement, and want some for themselves. We recommend once a year, on their anniversary, send the entire staff a memo that summarizes what that staff member did during the past year that improved the company, resulting in bigger bonuses for the whole staff. This will give everyone more respect for their teammate’s contribution and improve overall teamwork.

Mistakes. Give your people permission to experiment and make mistakes – as long as they make mistakes in a productive manner. This means that they come to you with the mistake they made and a list of documents that need to be created, altered or improved, so the mistake is less likely to reoccur. Companies that frown on mistakes force their people to hide them and the opportunity to improve the company’s policies and procedures is lost. Encourage your people to aim not blame. Aim at what they can do to prevent a reoccurrence, and don’t disempower themselves by blaming others.

Your people are looking for the limits you will allow. Some are very obvious and necessary like dependability, production and civil behavior. Beyond that, show your “personal settings” by giving them the permissions we have discussed here. The message will soon become crystal clear and they will operate within those limits. Don’t let your structure and procedures deny your people the permission they need to help you!

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 Are You Giving Your People Permission to be Brilliant? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

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

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