Merchants | The Barefoot Spirit

New Entrepreneurs are Easy Prey for Dubious Merchants

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 17:00:52 +0000

In California, we have an old saying, “The only people who made money during the Gold Rush were selling shovels!” But a gold miner needs a lot more than a shovel. More importantly, he needs a map. And the folks selling shovels can’t help with that, because if they really knew where the gold was, they wouldn’t be selling shovels, they’d be mining the gold themselves.

There are way too many folks out there today selling “shovels” to the entrepreneurial “gold miners.” They’ll help you with your website, your social networking, your on-line business, and even your pitch, as long as you make all the sales.

The idea behind the “shovel” merchants is to find folks who are excited about the possibilities, hyped up by the media, and possibly over simplifying the sales process. If you are a new entrepreneur, you may be like the miner without the map. You’ll buy the shovel because you think if you’re going to mine gold, you’ll need it… assuming you’ll find gold, that is. The merchants will load you up with goods, services and applications you think you need …everything except the map. Bonnie has an expression we think is apropos, “If we had ham, we’d have ham and eggs, if we had eggs!”

Many of the products they’ll sell you are premature for your business development, based on faulty assumptions, or down right unnecessary. Many require costly subscription fees and even require “experts” to run those services. Many of these services are trying to be all things to all people, so you wind up paying for services you will never need. Still, they require a myriad of plug-ins that work around their short comings. But what do the sellers care? They got your money and they’re down the road.

The map to the gold can only come from one source: another successful gold miner! In the case of entrepreneurship, this is an entrepreneur who has actually successfully started and run a business, and is now willing to share the secrets that lead him or her to the “gold.” These are the folks you should be seeking out – especially when you’re starting out. For one thing, they can save you a ton on premature overhead and monthly fees because they too have made those same mistakes. They will help you focus on building the true client base that justifies buying any supportive services, as well as identifying exactly what kinds of services you need, and more importantly, when.

New business owners who have recently been funded are sitting ducks for the shovel sellers who prey on those looking for the “next” gold rush. Today entrepreneurship is the next gold rush. Don’t be swept up in the hype. It’s really all about getting and keeping your customers. Take a closer look at that reality first! The tools and services won’t guarantee those customers but acquiring those customers is absolutely necessary to be able to afford taking on additional overhead. And how do you acquire those customers? Talk to successful entrepreneurs who have already done so, built their business, and even monetized their brand equity. These are the folks with the gold maps!

We can’t tell you how many failed businesses we have seen that loaded up on needless overhead before they ever made a sale and just flat out, ran out of money. Today’s access to capital through crowd funding seems to exacerbate this problem. Often, neither the crowd doing the funding nor the recipient of the funding fully understand the process of achieving a positive cash flow. They are both clouded with the hype surrounding the product or service itself, and they believe taking on major overhead is a requirement for success. So they tend not to scrutinize the investments in overhead until it’s too late!

Bottom line: Buy a map before you buy a shovel!

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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Change the Future by How You Spend Your Money in the Present

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 02:00:04 +0000

How would you like to improve the world in the New Year? How would you like to really make a difference? We’ve often said, we vote with our money. Every time we make a purchase, we are “voting” for more of that product or service, where it comes from, and how it got here. We are voting for the labor practices, environmental practices, and political views of the producers of those goods and services. Our money goes into their hands to continue practices that we may have some serious issues with.

Recently we read with horror about shrimp-shelling factories in Thailand that enslave refugees and force them to work inhumane hours in virtual incarceration. The shrimp is then dumped on a very fungible market where those slave-peeled shrimp are almost impossible to track when added to other supplies of shrimp from other factories that respect human rights. Because the shrimp is used as a generic supply by brokers who sell to wholesalers who then sell to the big box stores, American consumers don’t know if their appetizers or their cat’s food has slave-peeled shrimp in it. We don’t even know which products to boycott! But it has to make us all think about buying any shrimp that cannot certify humane labor practices. At least we are asking now. And we hope that you will too. It’s the only way to change the world. We all must become more aware about the products we are buying.

Instead of acting like there’s nothing we can do about commercial practices that hurt the environment, or harm people or our health, we can take action in the New Year with our “voting” dollars. Here’s how:

Ask about origins and practices. If you don’t get an answer, go to your local farmers markets and ask them. They will answer you. We make it a point of buying most of our food from local growers we know and trust. We feel good about supporting their practices and not contributing to a fungible food supply that doesn’t know the origin and practices of their suppliers.
Reduce your dependence on petroleum. Think twice about using your gas-powered car. Look for alternative means of transportation, use technology, a bicycle, carpool or look into an electric car. Even as the world knows that we are pushing carbon emissions beyond the tipping point, drilling for oil continues as if there will never be an alternative. Terrorism runs on oil.
Don’t just buy the cheapest thing. The purchase price might be cheap but the medical bills and environmental damage is unaffordable. Do you really want to save a few bucks today by “voting” for something that results in long term-costs that will come back to you in the form of increased taxes? Who paid for the Katrina superstorm or the drought-ravaged fires in the west? We all did!

So, if you really want to change the world in the New Year, consider the power you have as a consumer. This is, after all, the world’s largest consumer economy. The world’s producers vie for a position in the American retail market. They want our money! But we may not want to give them our “vote” to prosper in the short run if we have to pay for the results of their practices in the long run. Ask more questions about where your money goes. Support merchants and producers who stand behind their products and practices. Send a New Year’s message and make your “vote” count! Here is to a prosperous – and healthy – future!

Who We Are

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

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When Success Means Being Turned Down by the Bank

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 19 May 2013 17:13:49 +0000

By Ben Steverman

You’d think selling your wine brand to E&J Gallo would put you squarely on Easy Street. As accidental wine merchants Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan found out, personal finance and entrepreneurship can make an awkward pair.

Before the mid-1980s, the married couple’s main experience with wine was drinking it. Then, while working as a consultant on office management to a wine maker without a brand of his own, Harvey learned that a winery owed her client a lot of money. She brought in Houlihan, a business consultant, who discovered that the indebted winery couldn’t pay cash — but could repay the debt with bulk wine and bottling services.

The couple developed a plan for the client to use those resources to set up a brand. When the client passed on the idea, Harvey and Houlihan took over the debt and launched Barefoot Wine in 1986. They sold the company for an undisclosed sum in 2005. Their book about the 20 years spent building the brand, “The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand,” will be published on May 21. Here are excerpts of their reflections on life and money.

Michael Houlihan: We like to say we fell backwards into the wine business. We didn’t know enough to realize what was involved.

Bonnie Harvey: Ignorance is bliss.

To read the complete interview, please visit Bloomberg News

Who We Are

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

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On Independence Day, We’re more Interdependent than Ever

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:01:11 +0000

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

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

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