Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time in that place. It’s called frustration.

One thing we learned about frustration is that it can be blinding. It can blind you to alternatives and solutions that you can’t see when all you’re seeing is red.

So much of entrepreneurship is just a grind. You have to get through a period where you seem to be putting out a lot of energy and money for very little return. It’s like trying to move the Queen Mary with one hand. You could push for years before you finally overcome the inertia and it begins to move.

This type of frustration is ongoing for most startups. It goes with the territory and is to be expected.

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 5 Ways to Deal with Frustration When Your Work is Stopped by Another Team appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Now that’s the kind of goal we wish all the grads had – a goal that positively impacts the quality of life for generations to come. As much as we would like to think people will do the right thing to protect the future of the planet, many people are simply looking for a quick financial gain. Never mind that it’s clearly costlier in the long run to keep burning fossil fuel and poisoning the ocean, people want to see the immediate benefits.

A 400-500 mile range electric vehicle would provide immediate benefits, not because of politics, not because of concern for the environment, but because of market forces. The big challenge for today’s college grads is to discover ways that pay off immediately to compel consumers to make the right choices.

Better Batteries. Today’s younger generations are inheriting a power grid that fosters monopoly and extortive billing practices. For instance, we buy electricity from our local renewable power district to augment what our solar panels produce. But another company that owns the infrastructure charges us exorbitant monthly fees to be connected to their grid. Consequently, our electric bill has tripled!

Several states in the US are so dominated by the power companies that their pricing structures discourage home owners from installing solar collectors. And these are sunbelt states, perfect for generating solar power! So, what’s the challenge here for grads? Create products that store enough power to allow homeowners to cut the cord to the greedy power companies and be independent. Can today’s grads create local, affordable, and sufficient power storage?

Bio-Degradable Packaging. In the classic 1967 movie, The Graduate Mr. McGuire takes Ben, the graduate, (Dustin Hoffman) aside to advise him about his future. He says, “I just want to say one word to you, just one word … Plastics!” In 1967, the plastics industry was heating up and soon seemingly everything was made of plastic. …And it wound up in our oceans, in our fish, and in our bodies.

Maybe now the advice should be “bio-degradable packaging.” With the explosion of individually packaged home-delivered items, we are drowning in foam peanuts, plastic blister packs, and bubble wrap. Can our new grads create a cheaper and healthier alternative?

And what about the oceans? Can the grads develop a profitable way to harvest the plastic that’s floating around and keep it out of our food supply? Can they create a demand for this type of plastic that makes dollars and sense?

Sustainable Food. With 7.5 billion people on the planet, the food business is a good bet. But what kind of food business? We obviously can’t continue to destroy the world’s lungs to feed the world’s belly. The destruction of the oxygen producing rainforests for grazing lands is not sustainable, nor is it ultimately affordable.

We need to develop locally sourced food supplies that are sustainable. They need to compete economically with fossil-fuel-intensive global sourcing. This will mean food production close to, or in the cities, reducing the cost of transportation significantly. Can the grads find ways to make this more affordable?  Can they create market forces that favor abundant, healthy, and delicious food locally produced?

Congratulations to all the grads out there. You have a lot of challenges. The whole world is watching to see what solutions you come up with. So get to work!

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 3 Big Throw Downs Challenge Today’s Grads appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Their name Enactus, stands for entrepreneurship, action and cooperation by all of us: businesses, students, educators, donors, and the community. With 550 corporate partners in 36 countries, they positively affect more than 70,500 students in 1,700 university programs. Their underlying emphasis is on integrity, the fundamental basis of trust, credit and ultimate sustainability in all successful enterprises.

Unlike many entrepreneurial education programs, they take action. Students actually create new businesses. Using video, oral, and written presentations, students take leadership roles in developing and delivering proposals that teach free enterprise to the community through sustainable entrepreneurial projects. This accomplishes three important goals: it gets students to focus on social problems, it makes students aware of their social responsibilities, and it challenges them to come up with sustainable business models to solve them. In other words, it allows the next generation of business leaders to discover how free enterprise can solve some of the pressing survival issues of our time.

Students are organized into college-sponsored teams that compete with other students in other colleges in their region and nation. National business leaders choose from among the best ideas to improve the quality of life and standard of living for people in need. Winners advance to the Enactus World Cup.

Through this competitive process, students are given an opportunity to display their imagination and communication skills. It also provides a forum for interaction and an opportunity to showcase their talents to business leaders looking for top talent and socially responsible business leaders. Through the execution of their projects, students learn the challenges and solutions of entrepreneurship with the help of volunteers, faculty, alumni, and other businesses.

The 2014 winner was a team of students from the North China Electric Power University in Beijing who brought light and power to herdsmen in Mongolia with wind and solar installations and created a sustainable company to maintain the equipment. Their project entitled “Empowering the Grasslands” happened because of one student’s awareness of the plight of more than 900,000 people who burn animal dung for light and power, exposing themselves to serious health and safety hazards. At the world competition, the team collaborated with many other teams from around the world to refine their venture.

This and thousands of other student-created ventures is made possible through Enactus. As “entrepreneurial cheerleaders,” we have spoken to tens of thousands of students of entrepreneurship around the world, encouraging them to start and grow their own businesses using what we call the guiding principles for success. Two of those principles are to put yourself in the other person’s shoes in every business relationship, and to make your business stand for more than just the mercantile goods and services it provides. Enactus is giving students, and tomorrow’s business leaders, hands-on experience with these two basic principles of entrepreneurial sustainability.

What we also like the message Enactus sends to students, and ultimately the world, that the quality of life can be improved through thoughtful and socially conscious business models which are for the most part, more efficient than government programs. Competition and the requirement to deliver products and services in a cost-effective manner are the hallmarks of successful entrepreneurship. They give people in the affected communities a livelihood making those solutions more likely to survive and prosper.

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 Enactus – Creating Sustainable Solutions Through Entrepreneurship appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.