Innovation | The Barefoot Spirit

7 Steps to Engage Your People (And Get the Results You are Looking For)

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 17:00:53 +0000

When we sold Barefoot Wine, we received the Wine Industry’s coveted Top Brand award for multiple years, sold 600,000 cases per year in 25,000 stores, were growing in all 50 states and 28 foreign countries, had no turnover for 10 years, and did it all with just 40 employees. We got tons of awards for quality, growth, and innovation.

But it wasn’t because we were so clever, in fact we made most of the big mistakes! It was because our people were engaged and empowered to make a big difference. They came up with most of the clever solutions that got us through the tough times and over the seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They did more with less, improved our policies and procedures, and used innovation to disrupt a rather stuffy industry.

At the closing talk for the C-Suite conference in San Francisco this month, Michael shared 7 of the tools we used to build an outstanding team that was engaged, empowered, and committed to the success of our business. Here is a brief summery from the top:

1. Hire Good People, Build Great People.

Hire for hustle, integrity, and enthusiasm. Look for extrapolation learners. Test their comprehension. Be prepared to redesign the job to fit the talents of each employee. On the last interview, you do all the talking. Explain the business process and why their job is essential. Then ask for a summary by 5 pm the next day.

2. Overkill on Orientation.

When the cement is wet, you can move it with a trowel. But when it gets hard, you’ll need a jackhammer! Don’t let them develop and harbor early misconceptions about how the business works, where the money comes from, and how the customer must be serviced to get the funds that go in their paychecks.

3. The Money Map

Show them a “Money Map”. Start with the community from which the initial customers emulate. Show the transactions that starts the money moving as those customers purchase goods and services that effect your business. Show all the twists and turns that the money goes through on the way to their paychecks.

4. The Two-Division Company

Give them a second graphic that shows how your company is organized with the customer on top! Then, right under that, the only people they talk to daily, your sales and customer service people (The Sales Division). Then right under that, everybody else in the company, regardless of specialty (The Sales Support Division).

5. Know the Need

Contrary to the popular Need-to-Know basis that most companies use to keep their people in the dark, practice Know-the-Need to demonstrate respect for their intelligence and commitment to your company’s success. Share your sales and marketing challenges and ask them for help. You’ll be surprised at the results!

6. Public Acknowledgement

Communicate their accomplishment in writing. Copy the entire staff. Get more of what you are praising for. Get them the respect of other staff. Send a “message” that everyone can get the same kind of top-level acknowledgment when they perform as well as the one being singled out for admiration.

7. Staff Wide Quarterly Bonus

Reward on a quarterly basis. A year is too long (They’ll forget, sand bag, or give up). A month is too impractical (Months are more subject to anomaly and it’s difficult to get the numbers together that fast). Reward everyone to build team spirit. Make it based on sales, growth, and profitability. We used a variable 401K quarterly match.

Want more details or additional suggestions? Check out our short book on the subject, aptly named, The Entrepreneurial Culture, 23 ways to Engage and Empower Your People. It worked for us. it can work for you. You may just hear them say, “I love working here!”

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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Whatever Business You Think You’re In, You’re in The Personnel Management Business

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 10 May 2018 17:00:55 +0000

We recently had the pleasure of spending the day with 65 MBA students from Nanyang University in Singapore. 25% of the class were part-time students who were already running their own businesses. They asked most of the questions because they obviously had the most immediate concerns.

One question that was particularly telling was, “How do you to get the most out of your employees?”

We’ve given many talks and worked with many companies on this issue, plus we have our own experience building the Barefoot Wine Brand. We had virtually no turnover during the last several years before we were acquired. These were also the same years that the brand made leaps and bounds in the marketplace and overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Most of those solutions came from our own people.

“What was the most important thing that made the difference?” they asked.

We told them to “overkill on orientation.” First, your employees have to know where the money comes from and how it gets to them.

Don’t just show your new employee the bathroom, the coffee room, and their go-to person. Take orientation to a whole new level driven by two concepts:

You can move wet cement with the trowel, but when it hardens, you’ll need a jackhammer. Your people will create their own ideas of how things should be done if you don’t provide them early and often with your way of doing business. Their preconceived misconceptions are at the root of most engagement issues.
Most people can instantly grasp an image yet struggle over dialogue and written text. Use graphic simplicity to present seemingly complex ideas in pictures, charts, and process maps that are easy to understand.

Use these concepts by presenting them on day one with two such infographics:

“The Money Map”.This is like a treasure map that shows the employees how the funds to pay their salary, bonuses, and benefits come into your company. It graphically demonstrates every transaction that must occur between the ultimate end-user and all the players and stakeholders your company must satisfy in order to pass those funds up the chain, step-by-step, to your company. It shows how each player must cover his overhead, make a profit, and purchase your products and services.

The money map not only shows new employees where the money comes from, but it shows them the bigger picture. For one thing ,it eliminates the idea that the employer is some kind of a sugar daddy and clearly demonstrates how dependent the employee’s income is on the performance of the company.

By demonstrating all the key relationships, the employee begins to clearly see how they can fit in and how they can make a difference. It’s hard to engage people when they don’t understand the wider business process at play. In fact, they will make their own assumptions about the nature of things. Over time, these misconceptions will harden, and ultimately you as their employer, will need that jackhammer.

“The Two-Division Company”.Unlike the typical pyramid structure organization chart with many layers and silos indicating status divisions of labor and chain of command, we gave them a very simple organization chart with only four boxes stacked vertically.

The top box was labeled “The Customer”. The next box was labeled “Sales”. Below that was a box labeled “Sales Support”. The final box was labeled “Not Employed Here!” So, in our company, everybody who is not in Sales was in Sales Support. That included most of our employees.

This gave everybody the message that we should be listening closely to what the salespeople and the customer service people had to say about the customer and the marketplace. After all, they were the only people in the company that were in direct contact with the customer and marketplace every day. And as they learned from the money map, that is where their salary came from.

This form of orientation quickly and clearly shows your new employees how they are positioned to make a difference before they develop entrenched and counterproductive misconceptions. If they don’t get these simple concepts early on, it will be much more difficult to engage them in problem solving, innovation, and disrupting initiatives. But when they have a firm foundation and understand how it all works, they will not only be engaged, they will be empowered!

Who We Are

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

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Give Your Business “The Barefoot Spirit”

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:00:01 +0000

The Barefoot Spirit is the spirit behind the famous Barefoot Wine brand. The word “spirit” has lots of meanings, including religious connotations, although that’s not how we used it.

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

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

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Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 03:09:20 +0000

Santa Barbara has always been our favorite Southern California town – great biking, hiking, surfing and culture. But today, we discovered a whole new reason to love this gem of the Pacific Coast, The Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. This unique school takes the increasing demand for entrepreneurial education head on, and at the community college level, no less.

This afternoon, we enjoyed a wonderful beachside luncheon with Melissa Moreno, the school’s Director. She has been instrumental in the creation and development of the Center. Only three years old, it’s already getting the attention and support of several successful entrepreneurs.

Check out their fireside-chat format conversations with these notables on video at their site. These chats are jam packed with excited students interacting with real entrepreneurial successes.

Today’s entrepreneurial students want case studies from real business founders. They want to hear their story and ask them practical questions about how they overcame hardship, challenges and undercapitalization.

Our economy has proven time and again that it’s the entrepreneurs that create new businesses, new jobs, and innovation. Today, we face big challenges. For many graduates, sometimes the only source of employment is self employment.

The Scheinfeld Center provides a big head start for anyone thinking about starting their own business, whether they are looking for credit, or just want to get the latest academic disciplines or practical tools necessary for successful entrepreneurship.

Like schools everywhere, they are struggling with the economy. This seems ironic since they are one of the obvious vehicles to turn the economy around. They deserve your interest and support, so please help pass the word about the Scheinfeld Center. We need more schools like this!

We were honored to be asked to present our experience to the Scheinfeld students next March. Now we have another great reason to visit Santa Barbara. We hope the lessons we learned, sometimes the hard way, will help the next generation of entrepreneurs to achieve success!

Who We Are

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

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