Twenty-five percent of the class were part-time students who were already running their own businesses. They asked most of the questions because they obviously had the most immediate concerns.

One question that was particularly telling was, “How do you to get the most out of your employees?”

We’ve given many talks and worked with many companies on this issue, plus we have our own experience building the Barefoot Wine Brand. We had virtually no turnover during the last several years before we were acquired. These were also the same years that the brand made leaps and bounds in the marketplace and overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Most of those solutions came from our own people.

To read the complete article, please visit The Business Journals 

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 Whatever Business You Think You’re in, Your Employees Should Be Oriented on Your Customers appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

This year we hosted 120 international graduate students studying for their master’s degree in technopreneurship and innovation.

What could we give these aspiring entrepreneurs that would help them the most in their journey? How about a Countdown to Success? It’s our list of understandings necessary for a successful launch and happy landing.

FIVE: The 5 guiding principles for success (GPS)

1. Make mistakes W-R-I-T-E. (Not just right). Write down all your mistakes, and more importantly, identify all the documents that need to be created, changed or improved so there will be no repeat.
2. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. In every relationship with your people, your vendors or your customers, ask what is important to them. Then, give them what they want first to get what you want.

To read the complete article, please visit The Business Journals 

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 Count Down to Success appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

What could we give these aspiring entrepreneurs that would help them the most in their journey? How about a “Count Down to Success”? This is our best list of understandings necessary for a successful launch and happy landing:

FIVE! The Top Five Guiding Principles for Success (GPS)

1. Make Mistakes W-R-I-T-E. (Not just Right) Write down all your mistakes, and more importantly, identify all the documents that need to be created, changed, or improved so there will be no repeats.
2. Put Yourself in The Other Guy’s Shoes. In every relationship with your people, your vendors, or your customers, ask what is important to them. Then give them what they want first to get what you want.
3. Forge Strategic Alliances. Ask, “Who benefits if I benefit?” Those are your potential allies. Vendors can be bankers by extending credit and terms. Customers can be bankers by paying in cash. Threat them like partners and share your plans.
4. Sales Is King. Achieve a positive cash flow as soon as you can. Don’t expand too quickly. Start small and learn how to get your act together before you take your show on the road. Without sales, all else is moot.
5. Service What You Sell. You are not judged so much by how well you do when everything goes right, but by how well you do when there is a problem.

FOUR! The 4 stages of Business Development

1. Startup. Goal is proving the viability of the concept. Danger is chewing up investment money on overhead and production without sales.
2. Buildup. Goal is securing a few big customers that can sustain the business without more investment. Danger is having all your eggs in one basket and being discontinued.
3. Buildout. Goal is diversifying your customer base so you can sustain a significant hit. Danger is spreading yourself too thin, not servicing what you sell, and significantly underestimating the cost of sales.
4. Enterprise. Goal is continuing to deliver high quality and service until you get noticed and become an acquisition target. Danger is losing the entrepreneurial spirit and taking sales for granted.

THREE! The 3 Core Competencies of Any Business

1. Cash Flow Management. Goal is reducing your need for capital by identifying and working with strategic allies, growing slowly, and relying on cost accounting. Danger is too much debt, not enough income, too much focus on production, and inadequate sales.
2. Personnel Management. Goal is hiring good people, building great people, reducing turnover, and engaging your people in finding solutions. Danger is high turnover, and loss of communication, knowledge, and customers.
3. Distribution Management. Goal is discovering and satisfying everyone who touches your product. Danger is your product gets stopped in the system on its way to the eventual customer.

TWO! The Two Division Company. All businesses have only two divisions.

1.  Sales. The customer can only give you payment and feedback. Feedback goes to your Sales and Customer Service people. Danger is that this feedback never gets to your production and marketing people who can keep your products relevant.
2. Sales Support. Everyone who is not in Sales is in Sales Support – everyone! Everyone’s check comes from sales. Everyone’s job should support sales at some level. Danger is that non-sales people think they are more important than Sales and won’t listen to their feedback.

ONE! Have Fun!  

Don’t take yourself too seriously, lighten up and have a little fun!            Your employees, vendors, and customers will love you for it!

ZERO …IGNITION!

We wish all the Nanyang students happy launches and landings in their new businesses!

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 The Countdown to Success appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

This would be their first impression of America and American entrepreneurship, so we had to set the tone for their visit and lay the foundation to interpret the keys to successful entrepreneurship.

We decided to start with the basics by asking key questions and giving them the three core competencies necessary for success. We examine these critical issues in depth with plenty of examples and stories in our new full length course (The Entrepreneur’s GPS) designed for aspiring, startup, and growth-phase entrepreneurs.

Here’s a brief summary of some of the questions we posed in the live, in person seminar we put on for the Nanyang students:

1. Why are you starting a business anyway? Are you looking for a lifestyle, a legacy, or are you building a brand that you will one day sell? If it’s the later, that goal will have a great bearing on how you organize, strategize, and grow your business. It will greatly influence your decision-making process.

2. How will you pay your bills? Cash flow management is absolutely crucial to the survival of any successful business. You simply must make more than it costs to stay in business. Not only that, but you must find ways to reduce your need for cash through resourcefulness, strategic alliances, and fostering critical relationships that build trust.

3. How do you engage your people? The hiring process is the most important part of this process. We shared what to look for in selecting new hires and how to orient them to understand exactly how their job makes a difference in sales, the overall security of the company, and ultimately the security of their own job. We discussed how to pay them, acknowledge them, and get their insight to solve problems.

4. How do you get your product to market – and keep it there? In reality, this is the biggest single challenge a new entrepreneur will face. A popular misconception is that price, quality, and value alone will do the trick. It’s just not so! What does each person who touches your product really want? It may not be what you think. And are you ready to do their job if necessary? Who are the real owners of your brand?

All these questions and more must be answered correctly by every successful entrepreneur. When you see a big, successful company, remember, they weren’t always this way.

We tasked the Nanyang students to look for how each of the successful companies they would visit actually answered these questions. We did not give them all the answers, but we did give them most of the important questions. We hope they enjoy and learn from their exposure to successful American Entrepreneurship.

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 Ask the Right Questions to Get the Right Answers appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

One of the highlights of their visit has traditionally been a visit to the Napa wine country. Bonnie happened to be sitting next to their organizer at the World Conference on Entrepreneurship in Dublin, Ireland where we gave the keynote address last June. She suggested the students visit Sonoma County’s wine country instead this year and offered a two-hour seminar personally hosted by us.

Last Saturday they arrived in Sonoma County where we took them on a walk-and-talk. At each stop we gave them an essential lesson in entrepreneurship:

The 3 Core Competencies. No matter what business you think you are in, you are actually in 3 core businesses which you must master to be successful.

• Cash-flow Management: paying your bills with income from your business. You have to reduce your need for capital by outsourcing as much as you can, and by using your suppliers and buyers as bankers. Regular meetings and empathy for their interests are the keys to building trust and extending credit.
• Personnel Management: finding good people and building great people. This results in a reduction of turnover, the #1 hidden cost of any business. Requirements include the ability to create compensation systems for all staff based on sales, growth and profitability; public recognition for a job well done; and treating your people as an asset rather than a cost.
• Distribution Management: making every “sale” between you and your end-user. The first sale is to your own people who buy because they believe in your product and what your company stands for; next is the distributer’s or wholesaler’s ownership, who buys for strategic reasons; then the wholesaler’s sales people who buy for commissions; the retailer comes next who buys for quick turn, followed by the retailer’s clerk who buys for attention and recognition; and finally, the general public who buys for value, availability and social reasons.

The 2-Division Company. The most successful entrepreneurs think of their businesses, no matter how many divisions they have, as having only two divisions.

• Sales: Without sales there can be no other divisions because there simply won’t be any funds to support them. All income comes from the customer. The feedback that keeps your products and services relevant and marketable passes through your sales and customer service departments. They should be advising Marketing and Production, and not the other way around.
• Sales Support: This is everyone who is not in sales! This includes the administration, marketing, production, research, legal, accounting, HR, and even the receptionist. Tie part of their income to sales, such as a bonus. Have regular meetings between your sales and sales support people to discuss market changes, opportunities and challenges, and work together on solutions.

The #1 Rule. At every level of business, put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. Ask yourself how would you like it if you were on the receiving end of your own employment, sales, buying, and accounts payable policies? Empathy drives and bonds all business relationships.

We offered the students some infographics we have developed which take some of these complex concepts and graphically represent them for easy understanding. They are available to you as well with our compliments at www.barefootbonus.com.

We wish the students of Nanyang U. good fortune in their own businesses!

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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