But where do young people learn about risk tolerance and risk mitigation? Where do they learn the confidence to take on a risk and reduce the downside?

A new movement in Great Britain believes risk should be taught at a very early age, starting in the grammar schools. Some of their methods are alarming by American standards. Rather than providing playgrounds with shock absorbent pads, no sharp corners, and super safe equipment, they’re doing just the opposite!

According to Ellen Barry of the New York Times, one experimental playground near Kensington Gardens in London has a sign which reads, risks have been “intentionally provided so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.”

She goes on to point out, “Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development useful in building resilience and grit.” These are the exact ingredients required for successful entrepreneurship – resilience and grit.

Are the Brits onto something here? Have we in the US, in our desire to litigate every injury, and mitigate every potentially harmful situation, created play environments that actually prevent our children from learning the lessons they need in order to take on risk? Are we creating a generation of risk-adverse children? Are we denying them the healthy risks of childhood?

With risk comes pain. With pain comes lessons. With lessons comes risk tolerance. One of the parks in Shoeburyness, UK, includes boards, bricks, and boxes. Educators report very few injuries, mostly minor, and almost never repeated. The children there are learning lessons that protect them going forward.

Another playground in Tumbling Bay London, offers real rocks, real ground, and real sticker bushes. Authorities report that the children will touch them and learn they are spiky (and presumably avoid them going forward).

We do a lot of speaking on entrepreneurship. We encourage young entrepreneurs to learn lessons quickly, so they can move ahead and mitigate the risks they must face. We like to say, “Never waste a perfectly good mistake!” If you’re never allowed to make a mistake, you certainly can’t learn how spiky the bushes are and how to avoid them.

Children who are exposed to risk early and often learn how to learn. They remember the pain caused by their mistakes. They are more likely to stop and analyze any painful situation knowing that there is some action they can take to prevent its reoccurrence. They are less likely to blame others and be victimized. In other words, they are more likely to take responsibility for their own behavior.

When you make mistakes in business, you have choices. You can ignore them, you can minimize them to the point of convincing yourself and others that they were not important, or you can seize upon them as a learning experience. In this latter case you may ask, “What did we learn here?” You may ask, “What steps do I need to take next time to make this mistake less likely to reoccur?” Or you may ask, “What policies, procedures, checklists, sign-up sheets, job descriptions, signage, labeling, or contract clauses need to be created, changed, or improved?”

This is the positive, creative, and practical approach to mitigating risks, improving the odds for success, and ultimately moving forward in the risky world of entrepreneurship. Are people born with risk tolerance or do they learn it in the schoolyard? How did you learn risk tolerance?

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 We Creating a Risk Adverse Generation? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

What’s going through your mind? Short-term security with a good “solid” job and get-by retirement, with apparently little risk? Or a much bigger risk but a giant paycheck for building and selling a business?

Before you take the plunge, take stock of your philosophies. That’s right, your philosophies, how you think about stuff, how you make decisions, and how your judgements are formed. More than any other single factor, success in entrepreneurship comes down to making more right decisions. What influences those decisions? What standards do you hold up as guides and measures? In entrepreneurship it is your decisions that can make or break you.

Do you think, for instance, that if your idea is good enough, your quality high enough, or your prices low enough, sales will take care of themselves? In other words have you bought into the popular notion that it’s all about the product or service? We did! And boy were we surprised! This is a commonly held misconception! Sure, you must have a great product at an attractive price, but actually getting it to the ultimate customer is a much bigger challenge than producing it in the first place.

Do you think that those who have a financial interest in seeing your product stay in stock and reordering it, will keep selling it? We did! Wrong again! They have too many other products to sell to put much energy in to a new, unproven one. Especially in the critical early stages, we found that we had to sell it for them, over and over again. In fact we had to do so much of what we thought was the other guy’s job that we wound up with our own sales team, and that cost us plenty.

Do you think you need tons of money to get started? In retrospect, we found that being undercapitalized actually forced us to be resourceful and innovative. If we had been “properly financed” we would have never discovered how to get the word out about our product through worthy cause marketing. We would have just thrown lots of money at advertising, the common approach to marketing.

Do you think your vendors are trying to squeeze you for payments?  We actually increased our credit when we were late on our payments! How? By treating our vendors the way we wanted to be treated, with a friendly heads-up call in advance of a late payment, along with a plan to bring our account current. We met with them bi-monthly to appraise them of our progress. Your vendors can be your strongest strategic allies!

Do you think salespeople are out to unload merchandise on you or somehow get over on you? If you do, you will lose one of the best sources of information about your competitors and the market changes. Vendors and salespeople know what’s going on and they can share it with you.

Where do these inaccurate business philosophies come from? It could be your childhood, what you have heard from others, or assumptions you have made about the market. For instance, you may think no one has come up with your great idea yet because you haven’t seen it. In fact, you may not have seen it for sale because the original developers may have been unable to bring it to market. Don’t be like them.

We can help by sharing the lessons we learned most often the hard way. Get the big picture before you take the plunge!

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 Thinking About Taking the Plunge into Entrepreneurship in the New Year? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.