Distribution (business) | The Barefoot Spirit

Take the Time to Explain the Reasons – Part 1

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 02:49:05 +0000

Training without explaining is like trying to program a computer. The computer will only do what it’s been programmed to do. It will not know why it’s doing it and its approach to the job will be limited to what it’s been directed to do. That approach to training staff has become more and more popular, because it’s easier to explain what you want done than why you want it done. Some say anything more is just too much information and not necessary for the performance of their job. This, of course, results in robot-like behavior that is by the book. But your company will pay the price when an analytical or thoughtful decision is required of that person and they are not prepared to make it. In programming, it’s called a bug, but in human behavior it’s called a misunderstanding. Lack of comprehensive training may be a better descriptive.

In our company, we spent hours making sure that each member of our staff understood the “whys” of what we were asking them to do. This extra time and energy spent in big-picture education paid off handsomely with fewer mistakes, less misunderstandings, and more efficiency. And on occasion, new jobs were designed by our own people to improve our customer service.

Like many production businesses requiring distribution, we had a reoccurring problem with out-of-stocks. Sometimes the problem was at the retail store level and our reps would try to solve those. Other times the issue originated with our distributor. But sometimes the problem was right under our noses, in our own company, and we didn’t see it.

A previously “invisible” cause of out-of-stocks was discovered and solved by one of our own people. But, because she understood the big picture, she was able to identify it even though she was working in a totally different end of the business.

One day out of the blue, a woman in our accounting department came to us and said, “You need a traffic officer.”

“A what?” we said

She said, “You need someone to ‘babysit’ the delivery process from your wholesaler’s purchase order to the trucking company and all the way to our warehouse.”

“Isn’t that the distributor’s and trucking company’s responsibility?” we asked.

She replied, “Yesterday an 18-wheeler drove here from Minnesota to pick up a load, but because the driver didn’t have an appointment, our warehouse manager turned him away due to backed up scheduled orders. The truck drove all the way back to Minnesota – without our product! This means the work you put into getting retail placements in Minnesota will be lost.” She went on, “Last week our LA distributor’s purchase order you got verbally was lost in the vacation shuffle at his own company, so it was picked up two weeks late, resulting in run-outs all over LA.”

We made her the traffic officer the very next day!

Because our company policy was to explain the why’s, she went beyond her job description of sending out invoices for orders that were shipped. Because whatever question she or any of our staff asked was met with a relatively detailed explanation starting with the customer and working back to their job and their question, she gained an insight to our overall operation which alerted her to the problem and allowed her to present a solution.

Next time we will share some of the ways you can give your people a better conceptual understanding of the big picture so they can make better decisions and improve your bottom line. It’s not just what they do, but why they do it!

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.

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Business Beware Radio Show Interview

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:22:29 +0000

Ashley Bodi, host of the Business Beware Radio Show, interviewed Michael about the challenges and lessons learned along the Barefoot Wine journey. Go here to listen to the interview!

Who We Are

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

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Gaining Traction in the Marketplace takes Tenacity and Focus

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:56:50 +0000

You may hear about a brand that “just took off.” From our perspective, very few brands just take off. What’s more likely is that they started out small and sometimes took years to gain traction.

As we’ve said many times before, it’s not the quality of the product, the price, or the demand so much as it is mastering the distribution and timing.

They say you can move the Queen Mary if you exert enough pressure over time. You can push with all your might for years and then, at last, slowly, it begins to move! You finally overcame the momentum and you are gaining traction. What if you gave up and stopped pushing after the first year?

We read in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Inc. magazines about seemingly overnight start-up successes. It almost looks easy. It seems like you can have instant success with just the right product at just the right time. Although there are some examples of that kind of success, it’s the less glamorous, and unheralded, “get rich slow schemes” that are more common, and more dependable.

The number-one ingredient in start-up success is not necessarily the great idea, the great price, or even the great demand. It is tenacity!

Here are 5 Tenets of Tenacity:

1) Deferred Gratification. Sometimes you work 12 hours a day and weekends just to get your idea off the ground. You may even have to forgo vacations in the early stages. Take advantage of pop-up social opportunity? Forget about it.

2) Belief in your Concept. When you are new or different, you’ll be hard pressed to find people in the distribution channels that will give you a shot. You have to hold onto a deep-seated belief in your product and its eventual success. You have to constantly imagine your customer enjoying your product even when others try to discourage you.

3) Focus. Understanding your priorities is job one. As events unfold and the hoops you have to jump through present themselves, it’s easy to get distracted. Keep your eye on your goal and focus on the big picture. The details are tedious, frustrating, and take time, but the realization of your vision is well worth the struggle.

4) Support. Gain encouragement from the ever-increasing number of supporters you attract along the way. Starting out small, the positive feedback you get from even a relatively few happy customers will give you the confidence to press on. The support you get from other businesses that have an interest in your success will validate your concept.

5) Progress. Yes, it may take a lot longer that you thought, but you are making progress albeit ever so humble. Each little victory is one step closer to your goal. There’s nothing like actual sales to demonstrate the viability of your product. And every mistake you make, if treated as a learning experience, will improve your chances of success.

Today, tenacity has many fashionable names, like drive, charge, and the right stuff, but whatever you call it, it’s just plain old stick-to-it-ness. Starting a new business is easy and fun. But once you discover the surprising amount of time, hard work, and sacrifice necessary, it’s your tenacity that will see you through. And when you do succeed, try not to laugh when they say, “Wow! That idea just took off!”

Who We Are

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

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Outword Magazine Interview

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:09:10 +0000

Barefoot Wine’s Founders Do Well By Doing Good

The story of how Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey in 1986 launched a scrappy new brand that would transform the US wine industry is one of accidental opportunity and the vision and courage to seize it. “We fell into business backwards,” Harvey says today.

And seize it they did. Houlihan, a wine industry business management consultant, and Harvey, an office manager, got their accidental opportunity when one of Harvey’s clients, a grape grower, was left on the hook for three years’ worth of grape crop by a winery that turned out to be in the roes of bankruptcy.

In the course of negotiating payment for his grower client, Houlihan persuaded the winery to bottle up and repay the grower in Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc bulk wine – wine made from the very Alexander Valley grapes, it turned out, that had come from Harvey’s grower client to begin with.

That was a start, but once they had the bottled wine, they still needed a label, licenses, a distribution system and marketing, Houlihan says. “We didn’t know what we were doing. That started a period of research.”

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey toasting to your good health with one of their favorite Barefoot Wines.

They began to research the wine business, talking to government officials, suppliers and retail stores. One of the first companies they approached about carrying their as yet unbranded wine was Northern California-based Lucky Stores. A Lucky executive advised them on what type of wine would sell. The ideal label, he told them, should be visible from a 4-foot distance, should stand out from other labels, be an easily pronounceable name, and the label image should match the name.

The plan hit another snag, though, when Harvey’s grower client decided he did not want to be in the business of
marketing and distribution. The solution: Harvey and Houlihan hired him to be their winemaker.

Now that they knew a little more about what they were doing, it was time to create their label. The label image – a bare foot – came to Harvey in a vision. They sent the concept to an artist for development, but the perfect shape and angle of the foot eluded her. The perfect foot, it turns out, was at the end of Harvey’s leg. Using the biggest inkpad they could find, Harvey stamped her foot on a piece of artists’ paper, and the famous Barefoot label was born.

Meanwhile, they converted the laundry room of the Sonoma County farmhouse they rented into their winery HQ, removing the door and placing it across two sawhorses for a desk.

Now that they had their bottled wine, their licenses and their label, they went back to their Lucky Stores contact – only to come up against yet another roadblock. They Lucky exec said he couldn’t buy their unknown brand of wine until the two had spent a couple million dollars in TV advertising. Without $2 million to spend on branding, he said, “You can go out and sell to every little grocery store there is.”

So they did, starting in the Bay Area, then expanding to independent grocers in Santa Barbara, Mendocino, Lake Tahoe and Sacramento. In 1988, Lucky Stores become the first chain to carry the Barefoot brand.

Harvey and Houlihan hired Randy Arnold as Barefoot’s National Sale Manager after noticing Arnold was outselling other distributors. Shortly after joining the company, Arnold decided to come out publicly as a gay man. It was 1990, a time when AIDS was devastating the gay community, and ignorance and fear of contagion were widespread. Arnold was concerned the resulting prejudice, particularly in the conservative wine industry, might damage the Barefoot brand. “For us to hire a gay national sales manager for a food product was very gutsy at the time,” Harvey recalls.

With no marketing budget, but with a large stock of wine, Arnold expanded Barefoot’s “worthy cause marketing” plan by donating Barefoot to LGBT organizations and causes. Other staff members questioned the strategy. “Aren’t you worried that your wine will be known as the ‘gay wine?’” they asked. “We said, we’re worried that it won’t be, we are putting so much energy into that community,” Houlihan recalls.

Barefoot has also donated wine and sponsored fundraisers for environmental organizations such as the Surfrider Foundation. The strategy has paid off. Before long, the Barefoot brand was a top seller in LGBT communities and in beach communities.

Their marketing success, and the causes they support, Harvey believes, are connected to that vision she had of the Barefoot label. “When you see a bare footprint in the sand, you don’t know if it’s gay or straight, black or white, or what religion the person is,” she says. “That’s the print humans make on the earth when they put their foot down. The footprint is symbolic. We are all out here on the same beach together.”

By the time Harvey and Houlihan sold Barefoot Cellars to E&J Gallo in 2005, its sales had reached almost 600,000 cases annually in North America, Asia, and Europe. The two served as consultants to E&J Gallo for the next year, and Gallo has continued Barefoot’s tradition of worthy cause marketing as its primary means of advertising.

Today, Houlihan and Harvey are putting their branding and marketing expertise to use as consultants to start-ups and entrepreneurs and are volunteering their services to non-profit groups seeking to keep California parks open in the face of budget cuts. In their spare time, they’ve written a book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle and Heart Built A Best-Seller, which is due out later this year. Visit BarefootWineFounders.com to pre-order.

Outword Magazine May 24, 2012 Volume 25 Issue 10 No. 457
Words by Bonnie Osborn

Who We Are

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

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A Solid Business Foundation is Necessary for Success

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:41:14 +0000

When you build a house, the foundation must be laid strong and straight. If it’s not, the framers try to make up for it. When they can’t, the drywall guys try to make up for it. When they can’t, the painters try to make up for it. When they can’t, you’re going to have to live with it. So rather than cause problems all the way up your structure, lay your foundations straight and true.

It’s been said that it’s not the journey of 1000 leagues that wears down the mighty soldier, but the tiny pebble in his shoe. Here are some philosophical considerations that can help lay the foundations for your business and make the journey less wearing:

1. Have you put yourself in your customer’s shoes? Does your product add value to your customer’s life? Is it dependably available? Are you willing to do what is necessary to provide exceptional customer service? How will you gain feedback and keep your product relevant?

2. Have you put yourself in your distributor’s shoes? Do you know why he would carry your product? Are you willing to help him sell it? Do you understand the processes involved? Do you know why his retail customers buy your product? It might not be for the reasons you think.

3. Have you put yourself in your own people’s shoes? What are their goals, expectations, and aspirations? What kind of training and direction do they need? Are you willing to write down policies and procedures? What kind of culture will you provide? Will they be compensated to perform?

4. Have you put yourself in your creditors’ shoes? Are you willing to provide honest communication even when you can’t perform? Are you concerned about their payables? Will your integrity give them a reason to increase your credit and terms? Would you lend money to yourself?

5. Are you willing to take a smaller slice of a larger pie? Are you willing to share in the increased profits with those who make it possible? Are you going to reduce the cost of turnover by providing financial opportunities to stay with your company?

6. Do you know how to make mistakes right? Will people be fired because they made a mistake? Will your staff hide mistakes as a result? Or will you reward those that solve potentially reoccurring mistakes by identifying how they were made and suggesting new documentation?

7. Do you understand that sales provide all the income for your business and pay all your salaries? Will you organize you company, pay structure, and culture accordingly? Will the customer be on top, then the sales and customer service people, then everyone else?

The answers to these questions will determine the philosophical foundation of your business. Everything else that follows is influenced and shaped by those answers. Make sure you have answered them honestly before you begin to structure your business. The journey is hard and long enough without a pebble in your shoe.

Who We Are

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

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Improve Your Chances of Success by Starting Small and Carefully

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:26:18 +0000

As long as your product is not in a specific market or retailer, it can’t be discontinued. Once you are discontinued you may never get back. You’ve got one shot. Take careful aim and hit just one bullseye at a time.

The shotgun approach may get you more distribution in the beginning, but, due to complications and idiosyncrasies in the distribution system, or due to you own underestimations of labor and oversight, your product can be easily discontinued in several parts of the larger market. This will give your product a stigma with new buyers that is almost impossible to live down. Even if you are lucky, it may take years to get back in.

It’s better not to be there yet, than to be there and fail. So how can you approach the roll out of your new product when you are a small, undercapitalized start-up?

Be humble. Don’t assume anything. Remember that yours is just one of the thousands of products in the system. Regardless of how good it is, or how well it’s priced, it can be lost in the shuffle, ignored by the buyers, or squashed by the competition. It’s OK not to know it all.
Start Small. Give yourself a sales area you can easily monitor and control. You will probably find that you need to get to every retailer on a regular basis. You will be surprised at what you have to do to keep your product on the shelf.
Start Slow. Do a test market to get a feel for the distribution realities. Out of Stock is the number one cause of failure for new products. The faster it sells, the more you can run out and lose your precious shelf space.
Take notes. Start a journal that can be converted to policies and procedures, check lists and sign-off sheets for later when you expand. Don’t just fix the problem. Write it down so it won’t happen again and develop your training manual.
Don’t believe everything you hear. “It just didn’t sell, you should lower the price, and send more sales materials” are the common excuses you will hear. Many times it turns out to be that it just wasn’t on the shelf at all! It never had a chance.
Do the other guy’s job. Don’t say, “I thought they were supposed to take care of that.” Your goal is sales, not blame. At first you may have to make all the sales yourself and get most of the reorders as well. You have to be there to do that.
Build a Hot Seller reputation. It’s OK not to be everywhere as long as where your product is, be it ever so small a market, it is on fire! The leg work you put into your first small markets will give you bragging rights in the next one.

Each market is different with its own peculiarities, but all markets require vigilance that requires more manpower than your small start-up can field. You may underestimate what it really takes. Brands don’t just take off. They get pushed and pulled through a complex distribution system.

Some brands are mediocre, but readily available on every shelf in America. It’s because they have excellent distribution and the merchandising forces to keep their products there. There are many wonderful, imaginative products that expand too quickly and get discontinued. They got the reputation, “they just didn’t sell.”

They can’t sell if they’re no longer on the shelf. They can’t be discontinued if they were never there. So make every small step a winner.

The big boys are looking for proven products to acquire. Proven doesn’t necessarily mean national. With even small market penetration, with repeat and loyal buyers, you can become an acquisition target, but only if you have not been DC’d. The big guy wants to expand your success with massive market penetration because he can. In fact, he views your product as more desirable when it is brilliantly executed, and there is still lots of room for him to capitalize on a proven formula.

Avoid the urge to expand too rapidly, and remember it’s easier to give birth than to raise the dead.

Who We Are

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

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The Advantages of Being a Small Start-Up – Part 4

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:56:20 +0000

With all the challenges your small start-up faces, you still hold some impressive cards. If you play them right, you can have the winning hand! You face all the challenges of cash flow management, distribution management and personnel management, not to mention the competition, push back and resistance you get when you are new in the marketplace.

Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the advantages you have as a small, undercapitalized start-up. We hope these articles provide encouragement and inspiration for the real saviors and backbone of the economy, the little guys!

Here are a few more advantages that can make the difference and give you a powerful competitive edge:

14. Establishing a Positive Culture. Probably the most important aspect of enduring success in any business is Company Culture. The big company has already established its culture and it may have existed for generations. Unfortunately, most big company culture just evolves over time till its set in stone. When you first pour cement, you can move it with a trowel, but when it hardens, you need a jackhammer. Your small start-up has the advantage of deliberately creating a positive company culture from the outset. You are free to design the DNA and bake it in from the start. To make a sea change the big company has to undo decades of entrenched protocol and unwritten laws that determine the behavior, outlook and personality of its staff. You have the freedom to start out on the right foot on day one and you can easily correct your missteps before you get too big.

15. Company preservation is Job One. Your small start-up has hired a dedicated team that knows what they are up against and has a great deal of respect for the odds stacked against them. As they begin to succeed, they make incredible sacrifices because they see the direct effect they are having personally on the start-up success. There is an air of “we can do this thing if we stick together and all pull our weight”. “Lurking” is not an option. The big company has stratified its work force so much that personal job security often becomes job number one. Decisions can be made that are good for the employee’s protection, advancement or budget, but are actually detrimental in the long run to the company itself. What’s more, this behavior can go unnoticed by top management. You are painfully aware of this short-sighted approach to job security because it’s readily visible in your small start-up and you can’t afford to tolerate it.

16. Be an Acquisition Target. In these days of reduced IPOs and dried up venture capital, there is yet a way for your small start-up to monetize its value. It can get acquired. In fact, it may get acquired by the very big company who may have resisted your advance. You can benefit by the growing trend toward acquiring new ideas. Today, in the big company, a truly new idea can get easily smothered by short-sighted views of job preservation, turf wars or stifled communication. They tend to look outside their organization for truly new ideas that have traction in even a small portion of the market. They tend to look at small start-ups like yours.

In this series we have tried to identify some of the more subtle benefits your small start-up can enjoy over the big well-capitalized, but sometimes sluggish corporations. When it comes to originality, positive culture, or ingenuity, size matters. When it comes to resourcefulness, customer service or maneuverability, size matters. The little guy can still have the winning hand!

Who We Are

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

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The Advantages of Being a Small Start-Up – Part 3

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:34:46 +0000

By focusing on your customer, and not your big time competitors, your small start-up has the opportunity to address the market with creative and relevant products.

In this series we have examined some of the powerful advantages of being small, undercapitalized and able to turn on a dime.

These days, with lawyers running the big corporations either in fact or in fear, more and more truly game changing concepts are coming from outsiders like you.

Here, then, are a few more advantages of being a small start-up that can help you achieve your goals:

11. Being an Outsider. When you’re new and small, you naturally approach challenges with “common sense” and the experience you have gleaned from other industries and personal experiences. Not necessarily so with the big established companies. They find security in sticking to the straight and narrow. They may not even realize that they are doing things because, well, that’s how it’s always been done. In their sometimes misguided desire for job security, they don’t want to “shake the boat” and can end up doing what they have always done instead of innovating. No one has yet proven to them with financial success that it can be done differently. Perhaps the outsider will!

12. Producing Multifaceted Concepts. Being undercapitalized forces you to make every cent count and every idea solve more than one problem. Like the Swiss army knife with its many tools for many uses, your branding concepts have to embrace and satisfy a variety of needs. You simply can‘t afford to rely on conventional and expensive solutions. For instance, you have to build marketing into the brand. You have to build publicity and customer service into the culture. You have to enhance distribution with packaging design. The big boy, because of his size, divisions of labor, and convoluted communication has to simplify everything, even brand concepts. “Just tell me the one thing that this does” is the common query. They know that even a simple message can get lost in translation in their massive structures. So they attempt to “‘dumb” everything down. This results in an advantage for the little guy who produces products or services that are thoughtful, sensitive, and relevant on a variety of levels important to the consumer. It’s more than just the big blade on the Swiss army knife.

13. Flying Under the Radar. The big boys focus on their big boy competition. They generally don’t even see your small start-up’s product for years. This is usually because they expect their market share to be taken by their big competition. They don’t expect game changers who cut the pie in a different and more popular way. Your tiny company will take what ever sales it can. It can’t afford to be choosy. Many of your first buyers may be little guys themselves, also off the radar, over seas, or not registering sales to the big reporting companies. Your small start-up may not go national for years. You may be forced, for reasons of channel distribution or cash flow management, to start small and sell only in a local territory you can control. This advantage allows your small start-up to test the waters, make adjustments and get sea worthy before you take on the world.

Next time we will examine why having the freedom to establishing a new positive culture, making overall company preservation job one, and the trend to acquiring new ideas, gives you a competitive edge. With all the challenges your small start-up faces, you still hold some impressive cards. If you play them right, you can have the winning hand!

Who We Are

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

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Winning Distribution Strategies

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:26:50 +0000

Title: Winning Distribution Strategies
Location: Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA

Successful brand building hinges on diligent management of the 3-tiered distribution channel and appealing to customers at all levels. Houlihan and Jones bring extensive street smarts and proven techniques to attract trade partners and cement their loyalty. This course is designed for owners, national sales managers and national marketing managers. Register online here.

Date: Friday, February 24, 2012

Start Time: 8:00am PST
End Time: 12:00pm PST

Who We Are

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

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The Advantages of Being a Small Start-Up – Part 2

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:35:06 +0000

This is the second installment in a four-part series designed to encourage small start-ups by recognizing some of their inherent advantages.

Small start-ups face a myriad of challenges. They are undercapitalized, unproven and have no market traction. They are up against the status quo that will use its established power and influence in the marketplace to suppress any new challengers. Buyers are reticent to take a risk on anything new or unproven.

The big boys have might and muscle, but there are still several advantages the little guys have that can move them ahead:

6. Being New. The small start-up has not yet established its direction and can turn on a dime. This advantage affects everything from plans to budgets, from design to being responsive to consumer feedback. Flexibility is a big advantage when it comes to satisfying your customer and improving your product. The big corps are well established with set ways of doing things that can bog them down.

7. Closer to the Ground. If you are the little guy, survival is dependent on having your ear to the ground and in most cases, your feet as well. Starting out requires a lot of hand-selling and “missionary” work. You are painfully aware of what needs to be done in the market place. Because it’s your company, you deal with your customers up close and personal on a daily basis. You can’t afford to be isolated and insulated. You don’t have MBAs and focus groups to rely on. You rely on yourself.

8. Faster Communication. Information can cross departmental lines easily in a small start-up. For one thing, there are fewer departments. For another, staying in business is more important than “going through channels,” which can be a maze of department heads, divisions, silos, and, if you’re lucky, ending with the intended recipient. The big company keeps order by installing informational gatekeepers. They can stop, change, or delay a critical message based on their perception of priorities, and, too often, job security.

9. Out-of-the-Box Thinking. Because the small companies are usually under financed, they are always scrambling for inexpensive and effective ideas to stay in business. This apparent financial hardship forces you to discover and employ unorthodox ideas, strategies, and tactics that the big guys wouldn’t dream of. They don’t have to. In a small company, cost-saving ideas, customer retention, and marketing concepts can come from anywhere. The big guys tend to want ideas to originate from their proper divisions, which can miss or kill some gems in an effort to defend precious turf.

10. Better Risk Tolerance. Just starting something new is a big risk, and most start-ups don’t make it. Because they are desperate to survive and have less at stake, they are more risk tolerant than the established companies. Small companies tend to tell their legal advisors what they want to do, then ask how to do it. The big guys are more risk adverse and tend to be guided by their legal advisors. Risk adversity can blind companies to new, unproven concepts.

So when you feel overwhelmed by big, established competition, remember that your flexibility and freshness can help you survive. The benefits of being a start-up give you the flexibility to grow and ultimately improve not only your own company, but also your industry.

Next time we will see how being an outsider, with enhanced concepts and simplified processes can have an advantage over an insider with simplified concepts and complicated processes.

Who We Are

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

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