wine industry | The Barefoot Spirit

Get the Word Out With Worthy Cause Marketing – Entrepreneur

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 07:00:07 +0000

First published on Entrepreneur.com on 09/02/2017

When we started Barefoot Wines, the big chain and box store buyers refused to put it in their stores unless we advertised heavily. You couldn’t blame them. We were unknown at the time. What made matters worse, we were having fun with a foot on our label at a time when the wine industry was staid and exclusive.

So, we had to get started selling to corner store “mama-papas,” independents and small chains. But they had the same concern: Nobody ever heard of a wine called “Barefoot.” So, understandably, they threatened to discontinue us if we didn’t show significant sales in a matter of months.

To read the complete article, please visit Entrepreneur

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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University of Lethbridge Teaches Marketing and Management with Real World Experience

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 18:00:23 +0000

This week we were the Executives in Residence at one of Canada’s premier universities, the University of Lethbridge, with campuses in Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge. In addition to delivering keynotes to several hundred students, faculty, and business leaders, we are also speaking to individual marketing and business management classes about the lessons we learned building the Barefoot Wine brand.

One professor asked us to speak about how we conducted marketing research and acquired information before the launch of our product.

When Barefoot started, we didn’t have a preconceived idea about what we wanted to do. We knew only that it was going to be a wine product. Barefoot Wines was the end result of our efforts to collect a long over-due debt for a grape farmer. Instead of cash, we did a trade for bulk wine and bottling services.

Now we just had to transform the raw materials into cash to pay the debt. But not so fast! This meant that we had to find a buyer for a finished, branded product. We had no idea what was needed or how it should look, but we knew that the chain stores were buying wine in huge quantities, so that was where we started.

We did something that in retrospect seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to any marketers with previously designed finished products. Rather than pitch the features and benefits of what we created, we asked the largest buyer in our region what he needed. What he told us was the key to accessing the market in the first place. Never mind the way the brand developed and succeeded. It had to get into the market first.

We acquired the critical marketing information we needed, not from pouring over piles of data, not from extensive focus groups, and not even from interviewing successful brand owners in our industry. We didn’t have the funds nor the time for that approach.

Instead we asked the consumers what they wanted, the warehouse workers how to assure correct deliveries, the clerks what products got the greatest reorders, and the bottling line managers what labels they bottled the most. We asked the retail buyers what price the market would bear for what kind of package and product. Then we worked backwards to develop our product, logo, and budget.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but due to our time pressure and being industry outsiders, we actually collected better, more current, and more relevant marketing information than if we had approached the challenge in a more traditional way.

In fact, the Barefoot brand concept could not have originated from within the wine industry at that time, nor could it have originated from any conventional approach to marketing research. It would have been prejudiced by the way questions were formulated and the way things had been done in the past. In an effort to copy or compete with other successful brands in the space, Barefoot would have turned out just like them. Barefoot was out-of-the-box because it’s founders where never in the box and had the audacity to ask everyone who touched their product for advice. They collected marketing information from the people who physically dealt with products in their category every day. Most had never been asked before.

We laud the management and marketing curriculum at Lethbridge University because it incorporates the experiences and learnings of real-life successful entrepreneurs who overcame the toughest challenges in new and creative ways. We are honored to be a case study and adjunct to their commitment to create the next generation of business leaders.

Who We Are

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

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Forbes Magazine Article

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 20:13:12 +0000

The Incredible Story Of Starting The World’s Largest Wine Brand, Barefoot Wines

I was recently speaking with Michael Houlihan, co-founder of Barefoot Wines. This is the story of how two people overcame remarkable odds and built a beloved brand that transformed the wine industry. It is hard to believe that such an iconic brand as Barefoot Wines began in a laundry room of a rented farmhouse in the Sonoma County hills. Even more surprising is that the people who started it were just an average business couple, Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey. From the start, with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and strategic alliances, while pioneering Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo in 2005 and Barefoot is now the largest wine brand in the world. (ref The Drinks BusinessJune 2014 London)

TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT FORBES

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Doubt the Doubts Interview with Paul Blais

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:04:57 +0000

EPISODE 95 MICHAEL HOULIHAN

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Paul Blais

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Michael Houlihan, author of the New York Times bestseller The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand, started the Barefoot Wine brand with Bonnie Harvey in their laundry room in 1986, made it a nationwide bestseller, and successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo in 2005. Starting with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles and create new markets.

Pioneers in what they termed “worthy cause marketing” and performance-based compensation, they held a comprehensive view of customer service that resulted in the National Hot Brand Award for outstanding sales growth in 2003 and 2004.

Michael now shares their experience and innovative approach to business as a consultant, author, speaker, mentor, and workshop leader. His book, The Barefoot Spirit, chronicles the history and lessons learned building the popular Barefoot Wine brand.

Who We Are

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

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VinoPRO makes the 2013 Inc. 500!

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 02:45:47 +0000

VinoPRO, a consulting client of Houlihan & Jones’, was honored this month to be listed in the top half of the Inc. 500 list. To qualify for this coveted honor, award recipients had to show growth of more than 918% since the beginning of 2010. VinoPRO now shares this prestigious achievement with the likes of Intuit, Zappos, Microsoft, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Clif Bar, Oracle and dozens of other notable alumni.

All this growth is coming from a company that looked very different just 3 years ago. It was even called by a different name, “Provino.” It was struggling with payables, turnover, and legal challenges. Its main business was brokering wine products. This involved the onerous process of buying wine from a myriad of producers, carefully storing it in an air-conditioned, appropriately licensed warehouse, calling clients who had private wine cellars, making sales over the phone, then packaging the wines and delivering them respecting each state’s compliance regulations, billing the clients, collecting the money and then paying the producers, all the while financing the payables.

Of all the business functions required with the broker model, making sales over the phone was what they excelled at. The company was founded by Jeff Stevenson, whose Silicon Valley background enabled him to create proprietary software to master, as Stevenson says, “an ancient form of communication: the telephone!” With the assistance of Houlihan & Jones, VinoPRO reorganized and did ONLY the two things they did best: programming and telephone sales. In this way, VinoPRO perfected a vital service to their clients: real-time in-person relationship selling.

VinoPRO is now the wine industry’s premier outbound, out-sourced call center; it represents and provides incremental sales to scores top wineries . Using its strengths, its “personal wine stewards” establish, grow, and maintain individual relationships with hundreds of thousands of high-end wine lovers.

But more than just trumping on its strengths, VinoPRO put into practice the guiding business principles we talk about in our blogs and in our book, “The Barefoot Spirit.”

1. Make Mistakes Right. They documented every mistake, saw it as a learning experience, and developed policies and procedures, checklists and sign-off sheets for all business processes. Starting with virtually no written policies, they now have procedural manuals for hiring, training, accounting, troubleshooting and more. They have improved their programs, contracts, and organization, all on the backs of mistakes made right.

2. Pay for Performance. With the positive mindset to “take a smaller slice of a larger pie,” they have no cap on commissions. Non-producers can’t afford to work for them and performers can’t afford to quit. Sure, it was tough going at first to find the right people who could work on commission, but they soon attracted those who preferred it. The resulting increase in sales has greatly exceeded their winery client’s expectations.

3. Have Fun! Games and contests abound and they are real and tactile. Sales numbers could be on a big display screen, but not at VinoPRO. Each rep physically posts his or her own sales several times during the day on one communal wall. On another wall, monthly best sellers write their numbers on a placards that are prominently placed in ascending order for all to see. Top sellers get their pick of workstations.

4. Grow Strategic Alliances. Beyond the sales service they provide, VinoPRO is generous and proactive with their considerable programming and software skill sets. They regularly help their winery clients achieve better data collection, order processing, and logistic support. This added value helps everyone work more efficiently.

Applying these guiding business principles, it is no wonder that VinoPRO was voted last week as one the top 20 places to work in the North San Francisco Bay region!

Congratulations to VinoPRO, the latest member of the Inc. 500!

Who We Are

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

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The Wine Business is a Hospitality Business

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:20:25 +0000

We’re often asked if we miss the wine industry. First off, we still have clients in the wine industry and we are helping them with what we’ve learned building a bestselling wine brand. But we have branched out into other industries, and we are speaking to schools of entrepreneurship with aspiring business owners in all industries. Still, we are not producing and marketing our own wine brand any more. Now it’s mostly business ideas and philosophies.

One of the big changes for us is that for the first time, we actually get to go to and enjoy wine events as guests rather than as hosts! It’s nice, after so many years, to be on the other side of the tasting table. We didn’t realize until now how much fun the wine country can be with all of its wonderful events! We were head down, doing our best to help produce these events and were active participants. As one of our reps put it, after a particularly long day serving wine at a tasting event in the ballroom of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, “It’s hard to be congenial after standing on a marble floor for 10 hours!” But stand there we did for hours on end in hundreds of tastings and events all over the country. Now we attend events as guests. Imagine that?

We supported hundreds of non-profits with our wines and sent our people to set up, pour and break down. We often didn’t have time to go ourselves. But now we do! Recently we attended the Mountain Play production of The Sound of Music in the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre, at Mt. Tamalpais State Park. They have been producing live outdoor theater for 100 years. The amphitheater sits on the top of Mt. Tamalpais and has an incredible view of San Francisco. The Mountain Play is a cultural non-profit, surviving on donations, ticket sales and volunteers. What a treat that was!

When we attend a wine tasting event now, we have the utmost appreciation and respect for what it takes to pull it off. Aside from all the licenses and permits required to serve alcohol, wine is heavy, perishable, and requires special handling. You need glasses, ice, towels, openers, trash boxes, signs, tables, tablecloths, and don’t forget the indispensable duct tape! You need to get there early to set up and stay late to clean up after the guests have left.

What we do miss about those events is the great feedback we got that helped us improve our products, and the messages of support that kept us going when the times were tough. We also miss the camaraderie of the wine people themselves. Unlike many industries, the wine industry is cooperative and friendly toward their so-called competition. If we needed a pin or a pen, an opener or strips of, yes, duct tape, our colleagues from the other wineries were always there to help.

It really is a hospitality business and requires many hours of planning and logistics before any event happens. Then, at the events, many hours of standing and being congenial are required, along with responsible vigilance.

As we go into the full swing of the wine tasting season, let’s offer a toast to the people that make the wine events happen: the winery representatives, the pourers, and the volunteers. Thank you for your tireless hospitality! Cheers to you!

Who We Are

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

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Unified Wine & Grape Symposium

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:26:24 +0000

Today, Michael will be attending The Unified Wine & Grape Symposium

Built with the joint input of growers, vintners and allied industry members, the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium is held annually in Sacramento, California and is the largest event of its kind in the western hemisphere. Serving as a clearinghouse for practical information important to wine and grape industry professionals, the Unified Symposium also hosts a trade show with over 650 suppliers displaying their products and services to the more than 12,400 people who attend annually.

Please check out their website

Who We Are

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

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