standards | The Barefoot Spirit

Is High MPG a Selling Point Any More?

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 17:00:36 +0000

When we heard the auto industry’s recent request for lower federal miles per gallon standards, we were stunned! They argue that since gas is so cheap, and there is such a demand for low MPG trucks that the 2025 Standards are too costly to achieve. There was no mention of the cost to all of us if we continue to burn that amount of carbon.

Are there no financial consequences to damaging our health and quality of life, or the destruction of property if we burn more? Acting like gas is going to be cheap forever and control on pollution isn’t necessary is very short-term thinking at best. The consumer will be ultimately victimized.

What about the ultimate cost to auto buyers stuck with gas guzzlers? What about the cost of lost auto industry jobs to more efficient imports? What about the cost of reduced American exports because they no longer meet the importer’s mileage standards? The auto industry is only citing cheap gas.

We guess the thinking goes that if gas is cheap, why would a consumer want to buy a high MPG vehicle? Consumers want bigger, more inefficient vehicles. So, lower the standards and give them what they want.

But the state governments may have something to say about this. For instance, if California has stricter standards, what is the cost for the industry tooling up for two markets, one that has lower standards and one that has higher standards?

We think the auto industry is underestimating the consumer.

The consumer is beginning to realize that climate change related catastrophes are expensive and the costs are ultimately borne by them through taxation and increased insurance premiums. How many more superstorms, how many more super fires, how many more floods, droughts, vector-borne diseases will it take? How much more will the consumer pay for food, clothing, and everything consumable before they all connect the dots?

There is a good reason for regulations and standards. Any organized society has an obligation to protect its own citizens and future generations from their consumers’ own short-sighted buying patterns. The auto industry has not been held responsible for these associated costs – yet. And they can always point the finger at the consumer and say, “Well, that’s what they asked for!” And in the absence of environmental and health standards there is no long-term protection. Is it OK to hurt the environment permanently along with your health and property – and that of your children – for a temporary reduction in your fuel bill? We think not.

How far do we take this laissez faire philosophy? Do we do away with warning labels and prohibitions on poisonous ingredients in our food so that industry doesn’t have to bear the cost of compliance? Let the buyer beware? “Oh, come on,” you may say, “That’s a bit of a stretch.” But we are allowing the growth of a technology we already know to be poisonous to the environment and ultimately to us? And before all those warning labels on food? People were buying and consuming products that were harmful to them.

Let’s not give up on what most of the rest of the world has committed to: Higher mileage standards. It is about saving our environment and all the long-term costs associated with losing it. We shouldn’t burn more gas because it’s cheap! We shouldn’t burn more gas, period. Not today and not tomorrow. Take a stance and do the thing that is right for the environment, your healthy, and future generations.

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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We Need More Successful Startups

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 17:00:04 +0000

Earlier this year, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, warned about the declining “birth” rate of new businesses compared with the current “death rate.” We found his Gallup Business Journal article so interesting that we think some of the statistics he quoted deserve repeating, as they underscore the increasing lack of successful startups.

According to the article, 470,000 businesses are “dying” each year while only 400,000 are “born” leaving a deficit of 70,000. This was not the case prior to 2008 when startups outpaced business closures by about 100,000 per year. The change has happened over the past 6 years according to Clifton who is analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Add to that, based on who you talk to, the chances of startup survival are only about one in 10.

New businesses have to have some basic philosophical understandings from the outset in order to have a better chance at success. Knowledge of business form and function won’t do it anymore than knowing how to build a ship will make you a good captain.

Skilled captaincy requires adherence to a set of standards, strategies, and values that we believe are teachable, albeit rarely taught in school. It also requires a certain level of experience in the real world that is either learned by doing or gleaned from other successful entrepreneurs.

This is why we are so keen on business navigational principles – beyond the launch. We discovered a set of Guiding Principle for Success we used in our business that got us through the most trying times and the most difficult challenges.

We spent a year creating a special training session specifically designed for aspiring, start-up, and growth phase entrepreneurs. Our course, Spend Less – Monetize Faster with the Entrepreneur’s GPS (Guiding Principles for Success), provides these navigational principles to help start-ups succeed. We created this program as an adjunct to the entrepreneurship and business courses now being taught, not to replace them, but to take them to a more practical level.

We put the course together as a 4-part series, each with one hour of video content followed by one hour of live Q&A each week for 4 weeks. The 4 segments include:

Starters for Start-Ups. This begins with why you are in business. If you want to build and monetize your brand equity, it will show you the proper mindset to organize your business from day one to prepare for a monetization event. This includes how you discover the metrics that make your business an acquisition target, how to organize your goals and milestones, and what records you must set up to best prepare you for acquisition.
Being Resourceful. This covers strategies to manage your cash flow so you can pay your bills and reduce your need for capital. So many start-ups fail because they run out of investor capital before they achieve cash flow. We describe how you can save money and extend your credit by forming strategic alliances with your creditors, buyers, and even your vendors’ salespeople.
Engaging and Empowering Your People. Turnover is the #1 hidden cost of business. When startups lose key people, they lose corporate knowledge, customers and vendors. This segment explores how to find, orient, and keep good people. It offers ways you can put everyone on the same team and get more involvement and productivity from your people with a sales-based, production-paid, positive company culture.
Sales is King. Lack of adequate sales is the most common reason for startup failure, yet sales training is taught only in a hand full of schools. In this segment we examine the various levels of sales that must be made between you and your ultimate customer. We look at the motives each level has to move your product. This segment also reveals the wisdom of understanding the distribution channel requirements before finishing your product and package design.

As Clifton says, “This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses.” We want to help by sharing our experience, mistakes, and discoveries with the next generation to create more successful American businesses.

Please tell your friends and associates who are thinking about starting a business, who have launched a new business, or who are growing an existing business, to check out the Entrepreneur’s GPS. It may just make the difference in their success!

Who We Are

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

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Setting Priorities is Essential to Goal Achievement

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:30:20 +0000

With the advent of computers, we began to see icons for everything. All these cute little logos were the same size. Most were for programs and applications, but one was inevitably for settings. Even though the settings button was much more important than any of the other buttons because it could really cause havoc to your computer, it was the same size as the others.

We started to see functions as icons you could click on that would call up your contacts, your email, or your favorite app; but with a similar click to a certain icon of the same size, you can change the way your whole computer works. An entire generation was born into this desktop mentality that “all-the-boxes-are-the same-size.” Has this influenced us in other areas of critical thinking?

In the past, students in English classes had to “diagram” sentences. This was a graphic mapping process which identified the grammatical parts of the sentence like the subject (the actor), the verb (the action), and the predicate noun (the person, place, or thing acted upon). This exercise forced students to think in a cause-effect manner to construct sentences that would be less likely to be misunderstood. It also taught students that the structure of the sentence was essential to effective communication. The structure could determine, like the settings button on the desktop, how the message would be received.

Today we seem take structure for granted and leave it to the programmers and operating system engineers. It’s all done for us, so why bother? But has the convenience of having all this “thinking” done for us, with all the formats already designed, and all the processes already set up, robbed us of an exercise that we used to rely on just to communicate and solve problems? Maybe we need to take another look at how to set priorities.

So the question is, what is more important than what? And how do you prioritize your goals? Sure, given the very top priority we all face, which is the limited amount of time, we could safely say that all goals are based on the time it takes to achieve them, and start there. The basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter – and the requirements to achieve them – further add to the consensus. But after that we begin to get more abstract and personalized in our goals and priorities.

In order to set priorities you must know what has to happen first and why. You must also know what the effect will be on the rest of your goals if what must happen first doesn’t happen. We used to make this point by asking the question, “What’s most important: apples and oranges, peaches and cream, or your pants are on fire?” The correct answer, of course, is peaches and cream, because you’ll need the cream to put your pants out!

But seriously, setting any priority requires a set of standards that you value and apply to the situation. Standards can help you rank your priorities and get the right ones to the top of the list. They can keep you from getting pushed off course by less important interruptions and distractions. With a structure built on standards, you can focus and concentrate on what is most important – and achieve it.

The program engineers, who are doing most of your thinking, have standards and priorities. Shouldn’t you? All the boxes are not the same size. The one called “Standards” is the “settings” button for your priorities.

Who We Are

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

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