Prohibition | The Barefoot Spirit

How to Teach Entrepreneurship – It’s the Wild West!

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:44:14 +0000

Schools and courses in entrepreneurship are popping up all over the country. Each school has a slightly different approach to teaching this relatively new class study. Some schools have a few specific courses, while others have full curriculums devoted to entrepreneurship.

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.

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How the Irish Got Barefoot

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 14:53:28 +0000

Over one hundred years ago Michael’s grandfather, John Francis Houlihan, left his hometown of Limerick, Ireland, heading for the port city of Cork where he boarded a cattle steamer bound for America. The only passage he could afford was above deck, so in order to stay warm he had to huddle near the smokestack. It was there that he met and fell in love with Nelly Donohue from Donegal. When they finally arrived at Ellis Island they were incarcerated by United States Customs in separate dormitories, where they remained until they could document gainful employment for themselves inside the United States.

John Francis, being a horseman by trade, was able to secure a job cleaning the recently constructed Sutro Stables in San Francisco, California. That’s where the newly created San Francisco Police Department, which replaced the Vigilante Committee, kept their horses and those of the mayor and other public officials. Then, after two more months of correspondence he was finally able to secure a job for Nelly as a washerwoman and cook in a rooming house on Fell Street in San Francisco across from acres of sand dunes that would later become Golden Gate Park.

Nelly and John were married in the 1890s shortly after they moved to San Francisco. They both worked very hard to save enough to make a down payment on a flat in the then Irish ghetto of San Francisco known as the Mission District. Nelly did laundry and John was promoted from cleaning stables to Head Stable Keeper. In 1906 a terrific earthquake hit San Francisco and broke the underground gas mains, causing many huge fires, including one that destroyed Sutro Stables. John Francis, being a resourceful Irishman, only had time to save a few horses from the flames, so he chose to save the mayor’s prized Percherons. The mayor was so grateful that he asked John what he could do to show his appreciation, to which he replied, “I want to be the police officer who walks the beat in my own neighborhood,” and that’s what he did until he retired in 1941. During those years he watched the ghetto change, from Irish who had lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps into civil service jobs, to Italians who were refugees from WWI.

John Francis knew everyone in the Mission, so when Prohibition came to America, John was quick to make peace with the Italian families who brought their family tradition of winemaking with them from the Old Country. He saw the Great Depression and both world wars. He spoke with a thick brogue ‘til the day he died at the ripe old age of 98, surrounded by his wife Nelly, his only son John Charles and his four grandchildren, John, Michael, Mary Ellen, and William.

John Francis and Nelly used their savings to give their only child, John Charles, the best education possible. He graduated from the University of San Francisco School of Law and married Emily L’Heureux, third generation Californian. John Charles went on to have a brilliant legal career and was instrumental in the development of containerized shipping. He helped build the Port of Oakland, which was one of the first container ports in the world. Shipping containers revolutionized world commerce by cutting losses and insurance costs to a fraction of what they had been when cargo was loaded and unloaded by hand. They go from factory, to truck, to ship, to rail, sealed and safe. John Charles traveled throughout the world promoting the idea of containerized shipping ports, and today these containers are a part of our lives.

One of John Charles’ sons, Michael, got into the wine business with Bonnie Harvey in 1986. They were put off by the snobbery and the pretension of the wine business and wanted to create a product that had a more friendly and approachable image. They named their winery “Barefoot Cellars” in memory of the way grapes were originally crushed, barefoot, by those Italian families in their bathtubs in the Mission District. Plus, in California, being barefoot was a sign of fun and freedom. It meant you had the day off, the weather was fine, and you were relaxed and happy at the beach, enjoying life. Barefoot Wines became very popular in California especially with the young at heart.

By 2005, Barefoot Wines were being sold across the U.S. and in 28 foreign countries. When the wines finally made it to Ireland, they came in through the same port Michael’s grandfather left as a young man, and in the same shipping containers Michael’s father, John Charles, helped to promote.

… And That’s How the Irish Got Barefoot! Cheers!

Who We Are

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

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