Civilians are concerned about the upcoming deluge of returning soldiers. Reports of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are on the rise. How will they assimilate into our communities? Can the work force, already hurt by the recession, absorb even more unemployed men and women?

We were recently in Upstate New York speaking at Syracuse University to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities and their Families (EBV-F). During our visit we heard about a new and exciting project called Clear Path for Veterans, founded in 2011, that provides veterans and their families with support services to help them successfully reintegrate into civilian life.

We were hosted onsite by Melissa Spicer, President and Co-Founder, with whom we spent a lovely afternoon learning more about Clear Path. Melissa, a successful entrepreneur in her own right, has created and sold many businesses. She has demonstrated a level of risk tolerance envied by even the most seasoned entrepreneurs. But now she has literally bet the farm on a new type of enterprise, a non-profit social enterprise. She believes that the right environment, services, and community support can provide the bridge veterans and the community needs to work and live together to their mutual benefit.

Located on a beautifully forested hilltop, with bucolic panoramic views, the setting is peaceful and calming. A graciously rustic lodge provides the heart of the estate surrounded by gardens, strawberry farms, dog training facilities and a 9-hole golf course. Inside the main lodge are classrooms, project rooms, training facilities, with a lounge, library, dining hall and kitchen. Much of the work is done by volunteers and all of it is supported by donations. And as much as it seems Clear Path should be a government project, it isn’t. What about the USO? It’s mainly a lounge in airports these days.

Clear Path is really a first of its kind “transition facility” where the community can come to buy products and services produced by the vets, and vets can decompress and receive the training and connections they need to get on with their lives.  More importantly, it’s a place where the vets can experience support groups, learn skills needed in civilian life, and meet, get hired by, and return to the community.

Clear Path is strategically located within an hour of several military facilities and on the northern outskirts of the greater Syracuse metro area. This enables easy access by the vets and immediate adjacency to customers, housing and jobs. The center currently offers a Dog2Vets Program, an Outreach Program (for employment, legal, housing and other assistance), a Wellness Program including complimentary alternative medicine, a Wingman Program that provides peer support to “navigate” the civilian system, a Recreational Program which offers a wide variety of outdoor sports (including hiking, picnicking, horse shoes, basketball and golf), and a Culinary Program that offers lunch and culinary training. All of these offerings along with many other services are free to the veterans.

We discussed several future initiatives with Melissa, including speakers from the local business community to enlighten and encourage the vets and provide vital connections, a new green house project to provide fresh vegetables during the winter to local restaurants, and a residential volunteer initiative to provide immediate temporary housing for vets who volunteer to help out at the center.

Melissa was the initial investor and catalyst for the Clear Path concept in Upstate New York, but her vision is much larger. She views this as a pilot project to develop best practices and create a model for other communities throughout the country. Do you need a Clear Path for Veterans in your community?  For more information, check out www.clearpathforvets.com .

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 Clear Path for Veterans – Supporting the Journey Home appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

After suffering many personal tragedies, she managed to amass a sizable fortune and dedicated it to education. She built Bradley University as her gift of light to the world. Originally dedicated to the study of clock making, it morphed over the years into engineering and then into the liberal arts.

In 2007, Joanne Glasser became the first woman president of Bradley University since it was built. She saw the need for a stand-alone school of entrepreneurship and recruited one of the top pioneers of entrepreneurship education, Gerry Hills. Gerry had developed an impressive program at the University of Illinois. He also was the founder for the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (C.E.O.), created to encourage college students to start their own businesses. The C.E.O. has over 4000 members in 240 chapters in 43 states.

Joanne did not just want a stand-alone school of entrepreneurship, even though it was an innovative and relatively new concept. She and Gerry also wanted to see it collaboratively integrated with the other disciplines already in existence at Bradley. To that end, she created a committee made up of the deans of all the various schools and charged them with developing a program and sharing ideas with colleagues across the university to benefit all students. Joanne went on to raise 150 million dollars to renovate the campus and build the Turner School of Entrepreneurship in 2010, which was the first of its kind in the nation to offer entrepreneurship education to all majors.

We believe that true entrepreneurship can most successfully be taught by applying a strong background in sales and what we call business navigation. These skills require a solid foundation in the liberal arts and in the guiding principles necessary for success. The integrated program at Bradley not only offers a degree in Entrepreneurship, but also a minor in Entrepreneurship for those studying other disciplines, and even a shorter Entrepreneurship Certificate program.

This enlightened and flexible approach makes business education accessible to students who seek self-employment as well as to those who just want to better understand how business is conducted in the real world. This will give all Bradley grads a big leg-up in the work force as employers are increasingly looking for employees with some background in entrepreneurship. As they learn more about independent enterprise, students feel more confident about starting their own businesses, no matter their major.

Joanne Glasser and Gerry Hills’ dream has come true! The Turner School of Entrepreneurship is the model for the future of entrepreneurship education. Cheryl Sandberg has decried the “glass ceiling” for woman in the corporate world, but Bonnie has pointed out that there is no glass ceiling in the world of entrepreneurship. In fact when one practices out-of-the-box thinking, there is no ceiling at all.

How fitting that the vision of two women, Lydia Moss Bradley and Joanne Glasser, spanning over a century would create this great opportunity for men and woman to improve their chances at financial success.

Last week we were honored with the 2014 Distinguished Entrepreneur Speakers Award at Bradley University. Throughout the day we spoke to a number of students in various classrooms, culminating in a talk to a full auditorium of 350 students from all disciplines. At Bradley, in all subjects of study, students have the opportunity to learn how to run a business themselves. In today’s uncertain world, we look forward to seeing more universities teaching their students in this all-inclusive manner.

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 A Unique Approach to Entrepreneurship – Bradley University appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

This results in a wide variety of approaches about how to teach entrepreneurship. Some schools stress the structure and function of building a business and borrow extensively from their business school curriculums, while others are very hands-on and even give academic credit to students engaging in start-ups. Entrepreneurship is so new that there is no consensus on exactly what should be taught.

With the exception of a few schools like Babson that has been teaching entrepreneurship since 1979 and devotes 100% of their classes to it, most schools offer entrepreneurship along with their main, more established majors.

Many universities know they must have entrepreneurship on their curriculum, but what is it exactly? What are the essential courses necessary to create successful graduates? And who will teach it? Have they been entrepreneurs themselves, and were they successful? How is the success of their method of teaching entrepreneurship measured? Is it number of new businesses launched? Or the number of businesses still operating in two years? And how is the success of the graduating students measured? Is it the amount of funding their start-ups garner, the amount of jobs they create, or is it the speed with which they achieve self-sustaining cash flow? These questions have advocates on all sides, and it’s still the Wild West out there when it comes to entrepreneurship education.

Since the first part of 2013, we have been traveling and speaking at colleges, universities and centers of entrepreneurship. We have participated with entrepreneurship education organizations where professors of entrepreneurship debate best practices for teaching this course of study. In the process, we have been exposed to many different approaches.

One of the Guiding Principles for Success we promote is to ask questions. We think it’s the best way to truly understand what your customers, employees, suppliers, and financiers really want. We encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to find out who their customers are at every level, identify their needs, and ask for constant feedback to provide relevant products and services. Why should it be any different for schools who teach it?

We were recently honored to be the guest speakers at Mississippi State University where we had a truly new and unique experience. From the board of advisers to the students, from the faculty to the Entrepreneurs Club, we were asked basically the same question, “What do you think we could do better to prepare students for the real world? Since you’ve been through it yourself and seen over 20 schools of entrepreneurship, what can you tell us about what others are doing, and how do you think we can improve our program?”

We hadn’t realized before that our experience of not only building Barefoot but, more importantly to them, visiting as many schools as we have gave us a unique overview.

We are not experts and what we know is based solely on our own experiences – building a successful consumer products brand, and talking with students and professors. We respected those who asked the question, and gave them several ideas about form and function that you can read in more detail on our Brand Building site, www.thebrandauthority.net 

But one thing we did stress is the importance of the Liberal Arts and Sales Training, also known as the “Soft Skills,” because when you are an entrepreneur you are ipso facto a sales person. You must sell your own people, your buyers, their customers, your vendors and your financiers. It’s a firm foundation in the Liberal Arts that will give students a better understanding of different cultures and better communication skills, a necessity for sales. And after all, sales cures all ills!

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 to Teach Entrepreneurship – It’s the Wild West! appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

In our fast-paced world with instant answers at the tip of our fingers, it’s easier to get an “answer” quickly and then move on with rest of your work. But if you think “work” is simply cut and paste, staying busy, and putting in your hours, think again. Are the answers so easily accessible you have forgotten how to extrapolate? Don’t become an automaton! The real work is reasoning, questioning, and looking for the root truth behind the examples that you are given so you don’t continue to require them for every situation.

We work with many young people in the colleges and in the work force. The question we often get is, “How can I move ahead in my career?” We think these young folks are very bright and capable, but they have grown up with a technology that can easily become a crutch as it panders to our inherent desire to want to do things in the easiest way possible without acquiring core understandings. It also panders to our desire to want everything in short bites, tweets, texts and the favorite, “just tell me the one thing…” Like, “Just tell me the one thing that makes the airplane fly.” OK, “It’s lift! Now, go build a plane!”

If you want a raise or a promotion you will have to prove to your boss that you got it, really got it; that you are not just cookie-cutting, not just copying-and-pasting, but actually applying what you have learned to a new situation. That’s the only way you will ever gain more responsibility, stature and compensation. And, by the way, respect.

Once your boss learns that he or she can trust and depend on you, you have proven your true value. Your boss needs the peace of mind that only comes when your decisions consistently demonstrate that you know what you are doing, and more importantly, why you are doing it.

Don’t look at work as putting in your “time.” It’s not just time you’re putting in, it’s decisions. When you just want the answers with no interest in the reasons and the principles behind them, you’re not learning, you’re copying. Don’t let the technology make you so lazy that you stop using your reasoning ability. Keep asking “why” till you understand the principle. Don’t look at the example that you are given to answer your “like what?” question as a one-off or isolated application, but as part of a bigger picture.

If you want that raise or promotion, get the bigger picture. The higher your viewpoint of the organization, what it’s doing and why, the greater your opportunities for advancement. Bosses want to delegate, especially in a growing organization. In fact, companies can’t grow without it. But the folks at the top who do the delegation have to feel confident that you understand the business as well as they do, so when they give you that power, you will make decisions the same way they do, or even better!

The real work is learning the reasons behind decisions and examples, learning the principles behind those reasons, extrapolating those principles to different conditions, and using those principles to make right decisions. Only then can you earn a promotion!

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 To Get a Raise by Extrapolating appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.