Jim Canfield | The Barefoot Spirit

Are You Ready to Be Your Own CEO? – 7 Steps You’ve Got to Take

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:00:15 +0000

With the accelerating rate of disruption out there these days, it makes you wonder if all of us will be self-employed one day. Access to technology is already empowering many of us to “hang up the shingle” and go into business for ourselves. With the explosion of new service providers, you can outsource almost every business function, and you can quickly become your own CEO.

Even though your new company may be spartan with just a few employees if any, you will still be responsible to your customers to get the job done and on time, no matter how much is outsourced. The majority of your team may work for other companies and probably will.

But how will you orchestrate all these in-house and outsourced people? How will you hold these folks accountable? How will you know when to hire and how to compensate? What form will your planning take? What will your contracts look like? How about your communications? What about cashflow, personnel, and distribution management? What about decision making? And what about leadership?

Is there an easy way to learn and apply the best practices successful CEO’s have been following for decades? And what about the most recent breakthroughs that can help you succeed? How would you like a neat little playbook that outlines and summarizes 70 of the best classic and modern CEO tools, all proven to be successful?

Our friend and associate Jim Canfield has just published such a CEO “user’s manual.” We think it should be on the desk of every CEO and every self-employed entrepreneur. It’s called CEO Tools 2.O: A System to Think, Manage, and Lead Like a CEO. Jim’s new book updates and pays homage to the famous original work, CEO Tools: The Nuts-n-Bolts of Business for Every Manager’s Success by Kraig Kramers published back in 2002.

CEO Tools 2.0 is a must have for any CEO, president, business owner, or senior executive who wants to execute easier and have more time – while increasing growth and profits. Sound like you?

Jim has a patent ability to distill complex ideas, policies and procedures into easy to understand principles and processes. Then he backs them up with tons of examples to help you get the message. His book is organized according to the seven steps of “The CEO Tools Business System”:

Set the Direction. Clarify your overall goals, vision, and action plans with a One-Page Business Plan and use it to better communicate your goals to everyone you depend upon.
Communicate to Build Trust. Ask everyone you depend on how to solve the challenges you face. They will surprise you with their solutions.
Track Metrics and Give Feedback. Identify and track key performance indicators with the Quarterly Priorities Manager (QPM) and the Trailing 12-Month Chart (T12M).
Anticipate the Future and Create It. Ensure your company’s future with tools like What’s Next and the 7 Key plans every business should have in place.
Attract, Hire, and Coach Winners. Put winners in the top 5 customer impacting jobs and make sure they agree on what constitutes excellent performance. Then empower them.
Build an Autonomous Company. Be free of day-to-day involvement with leaders who focus on long-term strategic issues and confidently keep daily issues on track.
Celebrate Successes. Spread recognition and appreciation throughout the company with programs for all team members designed to appreciate the contributions of other team members

CEO Tools 2.0 builds out each step with tools you can use and real case studies showing where and how they have been used effectively. Whether you have a big staff or work with an outsourced team, it’s teamwork that will increase your growth and profits, ease your execution, and save you time. CEO Tools 2.0 is the playbook for winning teams!

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 Are You Ready to Be Your Own CEO? – 7 Steps You’ve Got to Take appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Jim Canfield Updates Famous Executive Handbook CEO Tools 2.0

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 18:00:37 +0000

CEO Tools 2.0, A System to Think, Manage, and Lead Like a CEO was released earlier this month. The famous tool box for CEO’s by Kraig Kramer’s has been brilliantly updated by Jim Canfield, an expert at identifying, simplifying, and communicating the tactics and strategies CEO’s rely on to make the best decisions possible. The book is filled with easy to understand charts, info graphs, and process maps that update, outline, and improve classic management principles. It includes several new tools backed up by thoughtful case studies that will give any CEO the edge in this competitive market. We are thrilled to have our business chosen for the final case study. This is a great handbook, tool box, and must read for any CEO interested in understanding and using the latest CEO Tools available. Highly recommended!

Who We Are

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

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The 4 Stages of Business Growth Each Present Their Own Challenges

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 07:00:10 +0000

We like the way Jim Canfield of Renaissance Executive Forums defines the various stages of business growth. They provide a convenient classification that helps us recognize and appreciate the goals and challenges of each level of progression.

Here we apply his staging definitions to the physical consumer product business:

1. Start-up

This is the exciting phase when your business concepts are launched. First you must get through the pre-launch by raising enough capital to prove your concept. Then you must design, build, test and hone your product and marketing plan. Then you enter the real market.

Here you discover the misconceptions you had regarding what your customer really wants, and what that means to your product, package and pitch. The speed of this early course correction is critical. You must make many expensive changes at a time when you are racing the clock to achieve a positive cash flow.

Most studies put the start-up success rate at less than one in seven. The goal of the start-up phase is to prove your concept and achieve positive cash flow before running out of funds — or losing control of the company through subsequent rounds of financing.

To read the complete article, please visit The Business Journals

Who We Are

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

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The 4 Stages of Business Growth Face Their Own Challenges

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 18:00:29 +0000

Start Up. This is the exciting phase when your business concepts are launched. First you must get through the pre-launch by raising enough capital to prove your concept. Then you must design, build, test and hone your product and marketing plan. Then you enter the real market. Here you discover the misconceptions you had regarding what your customer really wants, and what that means to your product, package and pitch. The speed of this early course correction is critical. You must make many expensive changes at a time when you are racing the clock to achieve a positive cash flow. Most studies put the start-up success rate at less than 1 in 7. The goal of the start up phase is to prove your concept and achieve positive cash flow before running out of funds – or losing control of the company through subsequent rounds of financing.

Build Up. Now that you have beaten the odds and achieved a positive cash flow, you must identify and sell a few large customers. This will keep you going long enough to overcome the challenges of personnel management, cash flow management and distribution management. This is a dangerous time for most businesses because you may have all your eggs in a few baskets. Sure, you have secured a big buyer enabling you to pay your bills, but now you must service that buyer or get discontinued. This increases the cost of sales and now you are trapped. With volume purchases over time, you become dependent and then the big buyer can coerce you to lower your prices – or worse, temp you to give up on your brand equity by becoming a mere supplier of the big buyer’s house brand. If this big boy discontinues you, you are out of business. The goal of the Build Ups is to increase cash flow, maintain profitability, build brand equity and prevent discontinuance by your biggest buyer.

Build Out. Here is where you expand your branded product into other markets. This will help you diversify, thereby reducing your dependency on any single buyer. And it will give your brand the geographical recognition it needs to command the respect of future buyers. It also provides you with the commercial proof that your brand is in demand in other markets. However, now you must support those sales with local representatives, resulting in a dramatic increase in the cost of sales – which threatens your profitability. The goal of Build Outs is to expand slowly enough to afford the increased cost of sales while properly servicing multi-state buyers.

Enterprise. At last you have achieved a national brand. Now you can reduce your cost of goods by getting discounts for larger bulk purchases. Now you have brand recognition and can become an acquisition target. But now you can also suffer from the loss of the entrepreneurial spirit. Your non-sales divisions start to act like the sales division is somehow below them. Employee engagement and innovation can take a hit. Turnover can increase as “professionals” begin to use your business as a stepping stone in their careers. The thrill of those start-up days in the garage is gone. The goal of the Enterprise stage of business is to capitalize on efficiencies without losing entrepreneurial spirit.

If you make it this far, you have gained great insights into business, as well as our heart-felt respect!

Who We Are

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

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Back to the garage: How to recapture the entrepreneurial spirit

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:00:30 +0000

“Sales? That’s not my job.”

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

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.