Tenacity | The Barefoot Spirit

Give Your Business “The Barefoot Spirit”

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:00:01 +0000

The Barefoot Spirit is the spirit behind the famous Barefoot Wine brand. The word “spirit” has lots of meanings, including religious connotations, although that’s not how we used it.

Just as often though, it’s used to define a certain style of performance, as in, “That’s the spirit!” which refers the type of tenacity that overcomes obstacles or solves problems. “They have great team spirit!” is used to identify a social culture in which the team shoulders together to achieve a common goal. We also use the term “the entrepreneurial spirit” to define a sense of innovation, resourcefulness, and “can-do” attitude to achieve business success.

The Barefoot Spirit is a style of business that incorporates all these meanings. It’s the American entrepreneurial spirit, west-coast style and with a heart! It also incorporates a few important extras that made the difference for us and can for you as well. It’s a business style that comprehensively permeated every aspect of our company from employees to customers, from bankers to supplier, and from consumers to community. It profoundly elevated our business from form and function to relationships, lessons, respect, and – well – fun!

The basic premise of the Barefoot Spirit is building relationships with that old fashioned adage your grandmother used, “Follow the Golden Rule.” This requires that you look at every business relationship from the other person’s perspective. That’s everyone! What do they want- in detail? The answers may surprise you (they did us!) because most don’t have anything to do with your product, quality, demand or price.

Building relationships goes beyond what the other person wants; it goes into the community itself. By supporting the community in which you do business, your company stands for more than the mercantile goods and services it produces. In this way you are making the world a better place, resulting in your people feeling like they are making a difference, and making your customers happy to reciprocate by purchasing your product.

Another premise of The Barefoot Spirit is tenacity. What keeps you going when you are up against seemingly insurmountable challenges is validation, the fuel for tenacity. You will find validation in little victories and a carefully maintained tribe of advocates and cheerleaders you can rely on when times are tough. You can ask them, “ Tell me again why you think our idea is so good?”

Tenacity requires facing your fears. The biggest question we get repeatedly is, “How do you prepare to respond to the unknown?” We have developed a guidance system that provides entrepreneurs with a set of standards to hold every decision up against to help them make more right decisions. We call these collective philosophies, “The Entrepreneur’s Guiding Principles for Success” or simply, “GPS.” The GPS consists of a set of tools we have identified within 20 guiding principles responsible for our success. It may not have all the answers, but it does have the fundamental foundation required to answer most of the questions.

The Barefoot Spirit picks up where traditional form-and-function business education drops off. After the launch, it’s all about business navigation. Every entrepreneur”SHIP” that sinks was first launched. If you know where you are starting from, where you are going, and how to get there, you have a much better chance of making it successfully to port. The Barefoot Spirit’s GPS offers tools you can use to stay on course.

Today we travel the world bringing The Barefoot Spirit to aspiring, launch- and growth-phase businesses to keep them from losing their most precious assets: time and money. We offer the GPS business guidance system to help create more successful entrepreneurs in this and the next generation.

We’ve change the name of our Facebook page from The Barefoot Wine Founders to The Barefoot Spirit. Here we provide tools and updates on our constant quest to help new businesses get The Barefoot Spirit and achieve success!

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 Give Your Business “The Barefoot Spirit” appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

What Keeps Entrepreneurs Going?

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 02:30:11 +0000

Tenacity is considered to be the single most important ingredient in entrepreneurial success, but there’s something else that supports, fuels, and even justifies tenacity.

We were recently asked what kept us going when we were under-financed, ill-prepared, and monumentally challenged building the Barefoot wine brand. We were up against a staid wine culture at the time, with little appreciation for a fun approach, let alone a non-vintage upstart with a foot on the label! Our price was low, resulting in low profits. So we had to produce and sell hundreds of thousands of cases per year just to break even. We took every extra dollar and put it into expansion to keep on growing. What kept us going? Just stubbornness? Just ignorance? What was it really?

It was the same thing that keeps all entrepreneurs going – it was YOU! We were cheered on by the relatively few folks who knew about us. They kept telling us, “You guys are doing the right thing. We love it! Keep it coming!” This constant feedback, even from a limited number of customers, was more powerful than all the no-sayers, challenges, and hardships we had to endure.

When you buck the system, cut the pie a different way, or attempt to offer the market a product that is new, you become a missionary. You not only have to sell your product, but now you have to sell the reasons why there is a demand for your product. This may take years! You know that the eventual user wants it and can appreciate it, but you have to go through a well-established system of distributors and retail buyers set in its conventions. You have to convince decision makers and gatekeepers that their own customers really want what you are selling.

At first, they may not even give you a chance. You may have to sell around them for years to document the demand for your product in secondary or foreign markets. Finally, when one of the established buyers brings in your product, you had better perform quickly or you will be discontinued and not given a second chance!

But during that missionary period, what keeps you going is that your product is selling in the markets where you have managed to place it. But, better yet, your product is getting rave reviews by end-users. Without the constant positive feedback, appreciation, and encouragement we received from some of our first customers, there would be no Barefoot wine today!

So, yes, tenacity is king, but without the validation and encouragement of the folks who first bought it and supported our efforts, tenacity would be cold, tiring, and tedious. When you understand what drives tenacity, it is easier to see how it’s preserved. It takes constant encouragement from fans and their belief in you, your product, and your ability to perform to keep entrepreneurs going, year after year without instant reward.

Today we speak to colleges of entrepreneurship and to disabled veterans about what it takes to be a successful business owner. Validation, no matter how small at first, will help them secure the tenacity they need to overcome the obstacles and see their dreams become reality.

Thanks to all of you for your encouragement to help us build the wine brand and, more recently, write The Barefoot Spirit, the story of what’s behind the brand and what we learned. You are the fuel for our tenacity!

Who We Are

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

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Gaining Traction in the Marketplace takes Tenacity and Focus

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:56:50 +0000

You may hear about a brand that “just took off.” From our perspective, very few brands just take off. What’s more likely is that they started out small and sometimes took years to gain traction.

As we’ve said many times before, it’s not the quality of the product, the price, or the demand so much as it is mastering the distribution and timing.

They say you can move the Queen Mary if you exert enough pressure over time. You can push with all your might for years and then, at last, slowly, it begins to move! You finally overcame the momentum and you are gaining traction. What if you gave up and stopped pushing after the first year?

We read in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Inc. magazines about seemingly overnight start-up successes. It almost looks easy. It seems like you can have instant success with just the right product at just the right time. Although there are some examples of that kind of success, it’s the less glamorous, and unheralded, “get rich slow schemes” that are more common, and more dependable.

The number-one ingredient in start-up success is not necessarily the great idea, the great price, or even the great demand. It is tenacity!

Here are 5 Tenets of Tenacity:

1) Deferred Gratification. Sometimes you work 12 hours a day and weekends just to get your idea off the ground. You may even have to forgo vacations in the early stages. Take advantage of pop-up social opportunity? Forget about it.

2) Belief in your Concept. When you are new or different, you’ll be hard pressed to find people in the distribution channels that will give you a shot. You have to hold onto a deep-seated belief in your product and its eventual success. You have to constantly imagine your customer enjoying your product even when others try to discourage you.

3) Focus. Understanding your priorities is job one. As events unfold and the hoops you have to jump through present themselves, it’s easy to get distracted. Keep your eye on your goal and focus on the big picture. The details are tedious, frustrating, and take time, but the realization of your vision is well worth the struggle.

4) Support. Gain encouragement from the ever-increasing number of supporters you attract along the way. Starting out small, the positive feedback you get from even a relatively few happy customers will give you the confidence to press on. The support you get from other businesses that have an interest in your success will validate your concept.

5) Progress. Yes, it may take a lot longer that you thought, but you are making progress albeit ever so humble. Each little victory is one step closer to your goal. There’s nothing like actual sales to demonstrate the viability of your product. And every mistake you make, if treated as a learning experience, will improve your chances of success.

Today, tenacity has many fashionable names, like drive, charge, and the right stuff, but whatever you call it, it’s just plain old stick-to-it-ness. Starting a new business is easy and fun. But once you discover the surprising amount of time, hard work, and sacrifice necessary, it’s your tenacity that will see you through. And when you do succeed, try not to laugh when they say, “Wow! That idea just took off!”

Who We Are

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

The post Gaining Traction in the Marketplace takes Tenacity and Focus appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.