Beyond the start-up phase

Then, if they are fortunate, dedicated, and diligent, they progress beyond the startup phase and into the buildup phase. Now they have a few solid customers that keep them going. Their volume picks up. They begin to see some pressure on production, customer service, and supply chain management. In an effort to satisfy these demands, and in the name of efficiency, they begin to specialize their use of human resources. Thus begins the degradation of the entrepreneurial spirit.

To read the complete article, please visit The Business Journals 

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 How to Keep The Entrepreneurial Spirit as Your Business Grows appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

It’s not how you get the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s how you lose it!

Companies can reverse engineer the entrepreneurial spirit back into their companies by returning to the backbone of that spirit — sales.
Every garage startup must have the entrepreneurial spirit to survive. Many successful businesses were once garage startups, and they once had that spirit.

But somewhere in the four stages of businesses growth our friend Jim Canfield of Renaissance Executive Forums calls “startup, buildup, buildout, and enterprise,” the entrepreneurial spirit can lose its luster.

The entrepreneurial spirit is the spirit of the entire team, and is represented by their commitment to customer service, resourcefulness, and going the extra mile to make sales happen.

To read the complete article, please visit The Business Journals 

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 Back to the garage: How to recapture the entrepreneurial spirit appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Just as often though, it’s used to define a certain style of performance, as in, “That’s the spirit!” which refers the type of tenacity that overcomes obstacles or solves problems. “They have great team spirit!” is used to identify a social culture in which the team shoulders together to achieve a common goal. We also use the term “the entrepreneurial spirit” to define a sense of innovation, resourcefulness, and “can-do” attitude to achieve business success.

The Barefoot Spirit is a style of business that incorporates all these meanings. It’s the American entrepreneurial spirit, west-coast style and with a heart! It also incorporates a few important extras that made the difference for us and can for you as well. It’s a business style that comprehensively permeated every aspect of our company from employees to customers, from bankers to supplier, and from consumers to community. It profoundly elevated our business from form and function to relationships, lessons, respect, and – well – fun!

The basic premise of the Barefoot Spirit is building relationships with that old fashioned adage your grandmother used, “Follow the Golden Rule.” This requires that you look at every business relationship from the other person’s perspective. That’s everyone! What do they want- in detail? The answers may surprise you (they did us!) because most don’t have anything to do with your product, quality, demand or price.

Building relationships goes beyond what the other person wants; it goes into the community itself. By supporting the community in which you do business, your company stands for more than the mercantile goods and services it produces. In this way you are making the world a better place, resulting in your people feeling like they are making a difference, and making your customers happy to reciprocate by purchasing your product.

Another premise of The Barefoot Spirit is tenacity. What keeps you going when you are up against seemingly insurmountable challenges is validation, the fuel for tenacity. You will find validation in little victories and a carefully maintained tribe of advocates and cheerleaders you can rely on when times are tough. You can ask them, “ Tell me again why you think our idea is so good?”

Tenacity requires facing your fears. The biggest question we get repeatedly is, “How do you prepare to respond to the unknown?” We have developed a guidance system that provides entrepreneurs with a set of standards to hold every decision up against to help them make more right decisions. We call these collective philosophies, “The Entrepreneur’s Guiding Principles for Success” or simply, “GPS.” The GPS consists of a set of tools we have identified within 20 guiding principles responsible for our success. It may not have all the answers, but it does have the fundamental foundation required to answer most of the questions.

The Barefoot Spirit picks up where traditional form-and-function business education drops off. After the launch, it’s all about business navigation. Every entrepreneur”SHIP” that sinks was first launched. If you know where you are starting from, where you are going, and how to get there, you have a much better chance of making it successfully to port. The Barefoot Spirit’s GPS offers tools you can use to stay on course.

Today we travel the world bringing The Barefoot Spirit to aspiring, launch- and growth-phase businesses to keep them from losing their most precious assets: time and money. We offer the GPS business guidance system to help create more successful entrepreneurs in this and the next generation.

We’ve change the name of our Facebook page from The Barefoot Wine Founders to The Barefoot Spirit. Here we provide tools and updates on our constant quest to help new businesses get The Barefoot Spirit and achieve success!

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 Give Your Business “The Barefoot Spirit” appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Many countries, we find out, have cultures that actually discourage people from starting their own businesses. Their families remind them of the many who have tried and failed. They encourage them instead to go for the security of employment with the government or a large corporation. Some actually view starting your own business as foolhardy and bound for failure. If the young person’s enterprise does fail, they are too often chided with “I told you so.”

By contrast, in the United States we not only understand that our economy is supported by entrepreneurship, but we have deep respect and admiration for those who have taken the risks, suffered the sacrifices, and had the tenacity to see their entrepreneurial concepts become a reality. In the United States, entrepreneurs are often revered like folk heroes, with movies celebrating their challenges and accomplishments; on television shows like Shark Tank; and publications like Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Inc.

American public and social media increasingly offer articles and tips on the hows and whys of successful entrepreneurship. Sure it’s risky and many enterprises fail, but in the United States we view failure, as Edison once said, as successfully discovering what doesn’t work along the path to success.

This week we were honored to be keynote speakers at the Western Region EO Alchemy annual conference held in Las Vegas. This event brought together members from chapters of Entrepreneurs’ Organizations from the western United States. For the Entrepreneurs’ Organization to choose Las Vegas for this conference was both fitting and symbolic. These are the real gamblers, betting on themselves, betting on their teams and betting on their enterprises.

Simply put, it was all about mitigating risk with proven methods, attitudes, and processes that give these gamblers a fighting chance. At EO Alchemy, as it is called, we heard from entrepreneurs of all ages, sharing their lessons and best practices. That’s right, they were here sharing their secrets, and helping each other to succeed! Far from the classic view of dog-eat-dog competition, these EO members had one goal: sharing their experiences so that all their members would find the success they’ve found.

The event’s culture of support for entrepreneurs attracted several entrepreneurs from other countries including the Netherlands, Mexico and India. Those delegates told us how much they appreciated the unselfish sharing, stories of challenge and success, and the concrete practices they can’t wait to get home and try in their own businesses.

The entire experience made us proud to be part of the American entrepreneurial culture that says, “We did it. You can 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.

The post The Whole World Looks to the United States as the Cradle of Entrepreneurship appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.