When we ask, “Why,” we usually get answers like, “Well, to get rich, of course!” or “It’s always been my passion” or even, “I’ve always wanted to be my own boss”. Yet none of these popular answers really address the only three practical reasons why you can be in business: You can create a job for yourself; you can start a legacy; or you can build a brand and monetize its brand equity.

If you create a job for yourself, your “paycheck” is only as good as your time “on the clock.” If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Sure, you can hire people to work for you to keep the business going in your absence, but this type of business is limited to trading time for dollars. You may build up some equity which someone may pay you for. But essentially, you have created a business that is operating on daily income and profits, with no long-term plan to monetize the brand equity through a sale or merger.

People who choose this kind of business usually tell us they are following their passion and well they should. But many also say they never want to sell and act like they can go on forever. If and when they do decide to sell, it’s usually because they have to due to age or health, or they finally tire of the work. Selling for them is an afterthought to achieving a business that expresses their passion.

The other group that “has no intention of ever selling” are the folks who think they are starting a legacy. Their plan involves their kids becoming vested in their business and wanting to continue their legacy.  This is a wonderful way to include your family’s future in your business. But only a small percentage of planned legacy businesses succeed beyond the first generation.

The last group, in which we count ourselves, is interested in monetizing their brand equity. They want to use their ideas, concepts, and products to build a viable business that attracts an acquirer. They take acquisition of their business very seriously.

These are the people we can help the most. These are the kinds of businesses that are designed from the get-go to have all the hallmarks of an acquisition target. They grow into something saleable. They can run without the owner. And they are set up from day one to satisfy their acquirer’s due diligence.

One of the guiding principles of the Barefoot Spirit approach to doing business is to ask yourself why you are in business in the first place. If your answer is to build and monetize your brand equity, then you must assemble a short list of who would want to buy your company, why and when. You must organize your books, records, and reports to reflect your acquirer’s due diligence. You must reinvest your “profits” into expansion. And you must determine how, when, and where you expand to get your peanut in front of the elephant. We share what we learned about this fine art in our Guiding Principles for Success.

We’ve been through it, from ideation to monetization. These are just some of the business decisions that become heavily influenced by your early decision to eventually sell. if monetizing your brand equity is why you are going into business, we can help!

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 Why Are You Going into Business? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

This year we hosted 120 international graduate students studying for their master’s degree in technopreneurship and innovation.

What could we give these aspiring entrepreneurs that would help them the most in their journey? How about a Countdown to Success? It’s our list of understandings necessary for a successful launch and happy landing.

FIVE: The 5 guiding principles for success (GPS)

1. Make mistakes W-R-I-T-E. (Not just right). Write down all your mistakes, and more importantly, identify all the documents that need to be created, changed or improved so there will be no repeat.
2. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. In every relationship with your people, your vendors or your customers, ask what is important to them. Then, give them what they want first to get what you want.

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 Count Down to Success appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

According to the article, 470,000 businesses are “dying” each year while only 400,000 are “born” leaving a deficit of 70,000.  This was not the case prior to 2008 when startups outpaced business closures by about 100,000 per year. The change has happened over the past 6 years according to Clifton who is analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Add to that, based on who you talk to, the chances of startup survival are only about one in 10.

New businesses have to have some basic philosophical understandings from the outset in order to have a better chance at success.  Knowledge of business form and function won’t do it anymore than knowing how to build a ship will make you a good captain.

Skilled captaincy requires adherence to a set of standards, strategies, and values that we believe are teachable, albeit rarely taught in school. It also requires a certain level of experience in the real world that is either learned by doing or gleaned from other successful entrepreneurs.

This is why we are so keen on business navigational principles – beyond the launch. We discovered a set of Guiding Principle for Success we used in our business that got us through the most trying times and the most difficult challenges.

We spent a year creating a special training session specifically designed for aspiring, start-up, and growth phase entrepreneurs. Our course, Spend Less – Monetize Faster with the Entrepreneur’s GPS (Guiding Principles for Success), provides these navigational principles to help start-ups succeed. We created this program as an adjunct to the entrepreneurship and business courses now being taught, not to replace them, but to take them to a more practical level.

We put the course together as a 4-part series, each with one hour of video content followed by one hour of live Q&A each week for 4 weeks. The 4 segments include:

1. Starters for Start-Ups. This begins with why you are in business. If you want to build and monetize your brand equity, it will show you the proper mindset to organize your business from day one to prepare for a monetization event. This includes how you discover the metrics that make your business an acquisition target, how to organize your goals and milestones, and what records you must set up to best prepare you for acquisition.
2. Being Resourceful. This covers strategies to manage your cash flow so you can pay your bills and reduce your need for capital. So many start-ups fail because they run out of investor capital before they achieve cash flow. We describe how you can save money and extend your credit by forming strategic alliances with your creditors, buyers, and even your vendors’ salespeople.
3. Engaging and Empowering Your People. Turnover is the #1 hidden cost of business. When startups lose key people, they lose corporate knowledge, customers and vendors. This segment explores how to find, orient, and keep good people. It offers ways you can put everyone on the same team and get more involvement and productivity from your people with a sales-based, production-paid, positive company culture.
4. Sales is King. Lack of adequate sales is the most common reason for startup failure, yet sales training is taught only in a hand full of schools. In this segment we examine the various levels of sales that must be made between you and your ultimate customer. We look at the motives each level has to move your product. This segment also reveals the wisdom of understanding the distribution channel requirements before finishing your product and package design.

As Clifton says, “This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses.” We want to help by sharing our experience, mistakes, and discoveries with the next generation to create more successful American businesses.

Please tell your friends and associates who are thinking about starting a business, who have launched a new business, or who are growing an existing business, to check out the Entrepreneur’s GPS. It may just make the difference in their success!

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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 We Need More Successful Startups appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

When we visited the Gold Coast campus, one of five Griffith campuses in Southern Queensland, we were very impressed. The campus itself was mostly new, state of the art, and much larger than we expected. The architecture and grounds are as progressive as its heritage. The student body is international, and the vibes are exuberant. Everyone we met was truly excited about the future, itching to get out there and make a difference. What a great culture for a big university!

We spoke at one of the regular Student Guild events for grad students. It started with an hour of networking, complete with delicious appetizers and beverages. Then we all went into the new amphitheatrically-designed auditorium for our talk.

What would be best for us to share with these young Australian and international students that they could take with them into their careers? Some were keen on starting their own businesses. Others were studying medical research or other technical sciences and would wind up working for others. But we knew that they all faced challenges in their futures. So we focused on challenges and how to meet them using our Guiding Principles for Success (GPS).

Our #1 principle for success is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Find out what others want, and help them to get it, and in the process you will get what you want. We gave several examples from our own history starting what is now the world’s #1 wine brand.

Another principle we shared is the concept of making mistakes “write,” not just “right.” We all make mistakes, so what do we do about them? Do we see them as an opportunity to improve our processes or do we try to hide them? If we fix them as fast as we can, move on and pretend like they never happened, the business does not improve. We write them down, and then change our procedures and processes so the mistake will be less likely to reoccur.

We also shared another secret to our success. We didn’t follow our passion. We followed our opportunity – passionately! Opportunities present themselves more often than the perfect job or business that suits your passion. But, if you take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself, even if it is not your “passion,” you may find, as we did, ways to employ your passion in that opportunity.

We, for instance, were not looking to go into the wine business, but it was the opportunity that was presented to us. Our passion was conservation and human rights. We found a way to use Worthy Cause Marketing (supporting local non-profits that were focused on those conservation and human rights issues) in the hopes that the members of those non-profits would buy our products. It worked very well for everyone!

We salute the Griffith Gold Coast University Student Guild for all they do to create and nurture a culture of positive enthusiasm among the students by providing a fun, educational, recreational, and inspirational university experience. This is a great place to study and learn!

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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 Griffith University Stays True to its Founders’ Progressive Ideals appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.