The Expo Authoring Area on Tuesday, June 5 from 2 – 3 p.m.

Booth 2035:  June 6 from 3 – 4 p.m., and June 7 from 2 – 3 p.m.

Go here for more info: http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/home/

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 Book Expo America appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

The shotgun approach may get you more distribution in the beginning, but, due to complications and idiosyncrasies in the distribution system, or due to you own underestimations of labor and oversight, your product can be easily discontinued in several parts of the larger market. This will give your product a stigma with new buyers that is almost impossible to live down. Even if you are lucky, it may take years to get back in.

It’s better not to be there yet, than to be there and fail. So how can you approach the roll out of your new product when you are a small, undercapitalized start-up?

1. Be humble. Don’t assume anything. Remember that yours is just one of the thousands of products in the system. Regardless of how good it is, or how well it’s priced, it can be lost in the shuffle, ignored by the buyers, or squashed by the competition. It’s OK not to know it all.
2. Start Small. Give yourself a sales area you can easily monitor and control. You will probably find that you need to get to every retailer on a regular basis. You will be surprised at what you have to do to keep your product on the shelf.
3. Start Slow. Do a test market to get a feel for the distribution realities. Out of Stock is the number one cause of failure for new products. The faster it sells, the more you can run out and lose your precious shelf space.
4. Take notes. Start a journal that can be converted to policies and procedures, check lists and sign-off sheets for later when you expand. Don’t just fix the problem. Write it down so it won’t happen again and develop your training manual.
5. Don’t believe everything you hear. “It just didn’t sell, you should lower the price, and send more sales materials” are the common excuses you will hear. Many times it turns out to be that it just wasn’t on the shelf at all! It never had a chance.
6. Do the other guy’s job. Don’t say, “I thought they were supposed to take care of that.” Your goal is sales, not blame. At first you may have to make all the sales yourself and get most of the reorders as well. You have to be there to do that.
7. Build a Hot Seller reputation. It’s OK not to be everywhere as long as where your product is, be it ever so small a market, it is on fire! The leg work you put into your first small markets will give you bragging rights in the next one.

Each market is different with its own peculiarities, but all markets require vigilance that requires more manpower than your small start-up can field. You may underestimate what it really takes. Brands don’t just take off. They get pushed and pulled through a complex distribution system.

Some brands are mediocre, but readily available on every shelf in America. It’s because they have excellent distribution and the merchandising forces to keep their products there. There are many wonderful, imaginative products that expand too quickly and get discontinued. They got the reputation, “they just didn’t sell.”

They can’t sell if they’re no longer on the shelf. They can’t be discontinued if they were never there. So make every small step a winner.

The big boys are looking for proven products to acquire. Proven doesn’t necessarily mean national. With even small market penetration, with repeat and loyal buyers, you can become an acquisition target, but only if you have not been DC’d. The big guy wants to expand your success with massive market penetration because he can. In fact, he views your product as more desirable when it is brilliantly executed, and there is still lots of room for him to capitalize on a proven formula.

Avoid the urge to expand too rapidly, and remember it’s easier to give birth than to raise the dead.

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 Improve Your Chances of Success by Starting Small and Carefully appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

In this post, we want to share some of the principles that guided us and helped us survive.

We started it all in the laundry room of our old ranch house in West Sonoma County. We turned what seemed like a novelty wine label into one of the most awarded and most recognized brands in America. At the time, the industry was not amused. In fact, they seriously disliked our playful use of a foot on the label and really hated how we helped demystify wine. As our friend Larry Martin says, “Where there is mystery, there is margin.” So I guess they thought we were out to hurt their margins.

Ironically, 10 years later, those same wineries were calling to thank us for all the new wine lovers they had coming into their tasting rooms. Many of those people started with Barefoot. When most wineries were apologizing for not being French enough, Barefoot made wine approachable, affordable and accessible to the average American. Barefoot made wine fun!

So our first point here is that you really have to believe in your idea. You have to visualize its success even when you are being pooh-poohed, even when you are broke, even when you are confronted with what seems like insurmountable obstacles, unfathomable laws and a stiff and stuffy status quo. What kept us going is what we call the “Barefoot Spirit.” The constant encouragement from loyal fans let us know they loved the fun approach, the price, the popular taste, and more.

Whatever your idea or your service is, you have to keep the faith. This blog will examine what helped us keep the faith and it will cover a whole range of other essential topics in hopes that our experience will help you and your business. These days, sometimes the only form of employment is self employment. It is our sincere hope, that everyone, especially young people, will be entertained by what happened to us and by what we learned. We hope you can apply these principles to your own ventures.

Some of the topics our blog will cover in future posts include:

• Keeping the Faith
• The Advantages of Being Undercapitalized
• Straight Up – The Fastest Way Out-Of-The-Box
• Distinguishing Your Space
• Attracting the Right Allies
• Incorporating Your Core Values
• Building a Team
• Building a Culture
• “Worthy-Cause Marketing”
• Outsource Everything Except Quality
• Getting “Feet” Back
• Paying for Performance
• Parenting / Mentoring
• Advice Management
• Making Mistakes Right
• The Seven Sales
• Knowing What Questions to Ask of the Data
• Your Exit Strategy.
• and many many more

We look forward to your comments and questions.

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 Barefoot Spirit – Getting Started appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.