There’s an entire industry out there blowing up your inbox with carefully worded emails promising everything from a 4-hour work week to a bestseller in a weekend, from hundreds of thousands in speaking fees to online riches in an instant. They think we all are so afraid of doing any real work, spending any real time or growing slowly but surely, that just the thought of all that work, and all the patience it requires, will surely discourage us. They think we will bite like groupers on any bait that has the promise of instant millions. They’re always sure to hold up a few examples of howling overnight successes just to get us going. It’s like the winners you always hear about in Vegas, never the vast majority who are still plugging away.

What’s really alarming is that there’s yet another industry out there. It’s higher up on the food chain, training those solicitors how to push our buttons and how to use just the right words in the subject line to get us to open that email. It’s training those solicitors how to craft the first sentence to catch our attention, how to structure the sales letter to appease common laziness and fear, so we’ll read it, and how time is running out. So buy now! Every month there are hundreds of new players, sending out hundreds of new emails, blowing up everybody’s inbox! Most of the solicitors have bought into the idea that everybody wants overnight, instant, effortless success, all at their fingertips.

It’s like a big chain letter. Don’t be the last person to buy it! Here in California we have a saying, “The people who got rich in the gold rush were selling shovels to the miners.”

We have a colleague who spent seven years building his email list to over 100,000, then over thousands of emails, funneled it down to 500 who were actually buying. But now they are buying less and less and demanding cheaper and cheaper products. And what about the 95,500 who got all those emails they didn’t want? Nobody’s talking about those relationships that have certainly been compromised.  But the people who sold our colleague the infrastructure, gave him the training, and took his money are the ones who made the real dough. And they will continue to do so as long as there is an email marketing “gold rush.”

So where is this going? We’ve already stopped opening 80% of our emails! How about you? Sure there are a lot of well-meaning solicitors out there but they are being drowned out by the sheer number of irrelevant offers. It’s hard to know who to pay attention to any more.

Most real successful people will tell you that it took many years of concentrated effort. Sure, there’s a hint, a tip, or a lesson they can share that will save you time and money, but ultimately,  success requires hard work, patience, and tenacity! It did for us. Sorry, it’s not the shiny-ball promise of overnight success you read about in your inbox. It’s the tried-and-true approach that has a much higher chance of real success. Find out what the real work is, get a good gold map, commit to a long slog, and watch out for the shovel-selling hype-sters!

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 Your Impatience is Used Against You appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

As we approach the nation’s 236^th year of independence from England and thereby Europe, we find ourselves glued to the financial news out of Europe like we were still part of it. And we are, more than ever. We worry about the economies of China and Russia as if they were our own – regardless of our political differences. Why? Because our very livelihood depends on the world’s economic and environmental health.

We live on the Pacific Coast where debris from the Japanese tsunami is now just starting to wash up from a catastrophe clear across the world’s largest ocean. Beyond our human empathy for the brave people of Japan, many Japanese products we took for granted became scarce. We were confronted with how the damage to their infrastructure affected our marketplace.

If there’s even a hint of an interruption in the supply of oil from the Middle East, we feel it at the pump. That cost trickles up into everything we buy, including the food we eat.

On the West Coast, we’re now getting air pollution from China. If the developing world continues to copy our approach to “prosperity,” we will suffer the health and environmental consequences right here in the USA.

So yes, we wave the flag and celebrate our great nation. We are thankful for the opportunities and freedoms we enjoy. We are proud to be Americans. But independence? We are all here on the same planet, all interdependent and becoming more so every year.

The good news is that the superpowers all know that their customers and suppliers in the other superpowers are too important to allow anything that would hurt their infrastructure, economy, or the world atmosphere. The bad news is that we haven’t yet realized that our economies and health are ultimately dependent on the health of the environment.

But we as individuals are not completely powerless, especially in America. Over and over again we hear that the world economy depends largely on the health of the American consumer. We all know by now that we vote with our money. In our incessant desire to get everything at the very lowest price, we can inadvertently subsidize political, social, health and environmental practices we would never allow in our own country. Every purchase we make is a vote for how it was made, the working conditions and how it got to us.

It’s hard to blame the government when the lobbyists are financed by our choices. If all politics are local, as it is often said, we can start to make changes in the way we spend our money. We can shop at the local organic farmer’s market and try to buy as many goods and services from local merchants as possible. We can avoid the purchase of single use plastics and vote for cleaner beaches. We can vote for lower healthcare costs by making healthier food choices. Every time we fill up with gas we can at least recognize where those funds are going and hope the day will come soon when we will have cleaner alternatives. Car-pooling, biking, and just plain walking are great votes for a more sustainable future.

This Independence Day let’s recognize our interdependence and how our individual choices can shape the future of not only our great country, but also the world. We are free to make independent choices in how we spend our money, thereby casting our votes. We can yet bring in the “New Order” that our nation’s founders called for by recognizing our true power right here in our wallets.

Happy Birthday USA!

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 On Independence Day, We’re more Interdependent than Ever appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.