Priorities | The Barefoot Spirit

What Does Your Dashboard Look Like? … and Why?

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 17:00:40 +0000

It’s not about the data. It’s about what questions you have that can be answered by the data. Startups especially must ask the right questions, and ask them often, just to survive. We have seen many businesses fail because they didn’t know what questions to ask, or didn’t ask often enough, or they were paralyzed by the overwhelming volume of it all.

Why does this happen? Often, it’s a preoccupation with the business plan and securing financing. Many founders believe their business plans will get them the financing they need. If it does garner them that capital, both the founder and the financier could be in big trouble.

The founder may get the wrong idea about the importance of the business plan if it does attract an investor. They may think it has been validated and deserving of even greater status. The investor who buys into the plan by itself has oversimplified views of the revenue process and is surprised when he winds up having to throw good money after bad.

When we started our business, most of our data came from the accountant. We would constantly ask him for what he called “special reports.” Usually, by the time he got around to doing them, it was too late. We were in crisis mode …again!

He constantly chastised us for not being able to read a set of books. He would say, “Everything you want to see is already there! Just learn how to read the reports.” And “Accounting is a language.” He was right, it was a language, a foreign language designed to categorize and file past events. The only problem was that we wanted to see the future! After a long, dangerous period of flying blind and being surprised by crisis after crisis, we finally demanded that the “special reports” become part of our regular reviews. And that saved us! We had the beginnings of an early cash flow warning system.

It wasn’t until much later that we were fortunate enough to hire a cost accountant who understood what information we needed of the data. He helped us build a proper dash board. Every month we would get a new indicator that would help us not only stay in business, but minimize our need for cash, control our inventory, and keep us from growing faster than we could afford.

Think of trying to drive your car using the rear-view mirror. That was the old “special reports.” Our cost accountant gave us a windshield, and a dashboard. Now we were driving the business with projections based on historical data as well as what we just learned.

The first report we would review was aptly named “the cliff report” because it showed us how much time we had before we went over the cliff and couldn’t pay our bills. For years, it was never more than three months away! This simple rolling cash flow projection ran our business and identified our priorities. So much for our well thought-out business plan…

Finally, with a cost accountant, we became more sophisticated and confident. We began to develop a dashboard that was relevant, critical, and timely. We had the right data, in the right format, and got it in time to take appropriate action.

When we sold our business, we had 10 key factors we looked at every month. We never did learn how to read a set of books, but we did build a heck of a business, thanks to the cliff report!

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 What Does Your Dashboard Look Like? … and Why? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Setting Priorities is Essential to Goal Achievement

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:30:20 +0000

With the advent of computers, we began to see icons for everything. All these cute little logos were the same size. Most were for programs and applications, but one was inevitably for settings. Even though the settings button was much more important than any of the other buttons because it could really cause havoc to your computer, it was the same size as the others.

We started to see functions as icons you could click on that would call up your contacts, your email, or your favorite app; but with a similar click to a certain icon of the same size, you can change the way your whole computer works. An entire generation was born into this desktop mentality that “all-the-boxes-are-the same-size.” Has this influenced us in other areas of critical thinking?

In the past, students in English classes had to “diagram” sentences. This was a graphic mapping process which identified the grammatical parts of the sentence like the subject (the actor), the verb (the action), and the predicate noun (the person, place, or thing acted upon). This exercise forced students to think in a cause-effect manner to construct sentences that would be less likely to be misunderstood. It also taught students that the structure of the sentence was essential to effective communication. The structure could determine, like the settings button on the desktop, how the message would be received.

Today we seem take structure for granted and leave it to the programmers and operating system engineers. It’s all done for us, so why bother? But has the convenience of having all this “thinking” done for us, with all the formats already designed, and all the processes already set up, robbed us of an exercise that we used to rely on just to communicate and solve problems? Maybe we need to take another look at how to set priorities.

So the question is, what is more important than what? And how do you prioritize your goals? Sure, given the very top priority we all face, which is the limited amount of time, we could safely say that all goals are based on the time it takes to achieve them, and start there. The basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter – and the requirements to achieve them – further add to the consensus. But after that we begin to get more abstract and personalized in our goals and priorities.

In order to set priorities you must know what has to happen first and why. You must also know what the effect will be on the rest of your goals if what must happen first doesn’t happen. We used to make this point by asking the question, “What’s most important: apples and oranges, peaches and cream, or your pants are on fire?” The correct answer, of course, is peaches and cream, because you’ll need the cream to put your pants out!

But seriously, setting any priority requires a set of standards that you value and apply to the situation. Standards can help you rank your priorities and get the right ones to the top of the list. They can keep you from getting pushed off course by less important interruptions and distractions. With a structure built on standards, you can focus and concentrate on what is most important – and achieve it.

The program engineers, who are doing most of your thinking, have standards and priorities. Shouldn’t you? All the boxes are not the same size. The one called “Standards” is the “settings” button for your priorities.

Who We Are

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

The post Setting Priorities is Essential to Goal Achievement appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Gaining Traction in the Marketplace takes Tenacity and Focus

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:56:50 +0000

You may hear about a brand that “just took off.” From our perspective, very few brands just take off. What’s more likely is that they started out small and sometimes took years to gain traction.

As we’ve said many times before, it’s not the quality of the product, the price, or the demand so much as it is mastering the distribution and timing.

They say you can move the Queen Mary if you exert enough pressure over time. You can push with all your might for years and then, at last, slowly, it begins to move! You finally overcame the momentum and you are gaining traction. What if you gave up and stopped pushing after the first year?

We read in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Inc. magazines about seemingly overnight start-up successes. It almost looks easy. It seems like you can have instant success with just the right product at just the right time. Although there are some examples of that kind of success, it’s the less glamorous, and unheralded, “get rich slow schemes” that are more common, and more dependable.

The number-one ingredient in start-up success is not necessarily the great idea, the great price, or even the great demand. It is tenacity!

Here are 5 Tenets of Tenacity:

1) Deferred Gratification. Sometimes you work 12 hours a day and weekends just to get your idea off the ground. You may even have to forgo vacations in the early stages. Take advantage of pop-up social opportunity? Forget about it.

2) Belief in your Concept. When you are new or different, you’ll be hard pressed to find people in the distribution channels that will give you a shot. You have to hold onto a deep-seated belief in your product and its eventual success. You have to constantly imagine your customer enjoying your product even when others try to discourage you.

3) Focus. Understanding your priorities is job one. As events unfold and the hoops you have to jump through present themselves, it’s easy to get distracted. Keep your eye on your goal and focus on the big picture. The details are tedious, frustrating, and take time, but the realization of your vision is well worth the struggle.

4) Support. Gain encouragement from the ever-increasing number of supporters you attract along the way. Starting out small, the positive feedback you get from even a relatively few happy customers will give you the confidence to press on. The support you get from other businesses that have an interest in your success will validate your concept.

5) Progress. Yes, it may take a lot longer that you thought, but you are making progress albeit ever so humble. Each little victory is one step closer to your goal. There’s nothing like actual sales to demonstrate the viability of your product. And every mistake you make, if treated as a learning experience, will improve your chances of success.

Today, tenacity has many fashionable names, like drive, charge, and the right stuff, but whatever you call it, it’s just plain old stick-to-it-ness. Starting a new business is easy and fun. But once you discover the surprising amount of time, hard work, and sacrifice necessary, it’s your tenacity that will see you through. And when you do succeed, try not to laugh when they say, “Wow! That idea just took off!”

Who We Are

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

The post Gaining Traction in the Marketplace takes Tenacity and Focus appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.