After several years of keynote speaking, writing and coaching, we, the Barefoot Wine Founders, are happy to announce our first full-length video series on our favorite subject, entrepreneurship! We’re pretty excited!

Announcing The Barefoot Startup’s Guiding Principles for Success (GPS)TM.

This video series is designed for aspiring, startup, and growth-phase entrepreneurs in all industries who want to benefit from our considerable experience building and selling Barefoot Wine, an iconic international consumer products brand.

This is a wide-ranging collection of hard-learned lessons that are easy to understand and will be of great benefit to beginners and experienced business people alike. The lessons are designed to show you how to save time, money and precious resources.

We discuss the three core competencies that every business has to master… no matter what the business. These competencies are: cash flow management, personnel management, and distribution management. Proficiency in all three is a must for success! We provide the primary objectives of each core competency, and share with you the key guiding principles that apply to each one. We also provide the standards to guide you to better decisions in these crucial areas, these are game changers!

The videos are dynamically organized and presented in 4 modules, each one under an hour, presented each week over 30 days: (1) Starters for Startups (Start off on the Right Foot), (2) Be Resourceful (Cash Flow Management), (3) Engage and Empower Your People (Personnel Management) and (4) Sales Is King (Distribution Management). After each module, we offer a live Q&A session for another 45 minutes to answer your burning questions!

(1) Starters for Startups (Start off on the Right Foot): Thinking about our own experiences, we realized that if we knew more about where we were headed, we would have done things differently from the start. So, the first module begins by asking a lot of questions we wish, in retrospect, we had asked. For instance, why are you in business? How big do you want to become? How do you discover the key metrics that help set your goals for a capitalization event (public stock offering, an investment partner or acquisition)? How do you organize your documents – and why? And the list goes on. The answers to these questions will lay a solid foundation that you will thank yourself for later.

(2) Be Resourceful (Cash Flow Management): The cash flow report replaces the business plan on day one. Just how do you make ends meet? How can you increase your cash and reduce and extend your payments right away? The answers we have may surprise you.

(3) Engage and Empower Your People (Personnel Management): You are going to be working with people. How you treat, compensate and engage your personnel will build your business, forge and grow critical relationships with outside vendors, buyers, and lenders – AND will reduce the #1 hidden cost of business, turnover.

(4) Sales Is King (Distribution Management): Ultimately you’ve got to sell your products. That means you will have to depend on others to get your products to the ultimate end users. How you manage your distribution channel will have a bigger impact on your success than the price, quality, or demand for your products. Sales can be easily stopped anywhere in the distribution channel at any level. We will tell you what skills, attitudes and specific relationships are required to keep the pipeline full and moving.

For those first to sign up for the series, we will give free bonuses including info-graphics, Due-Diligence Checklist for Acquisition, Top 10 Questions to Ask an Investment Broker, Case Study of the Barefoot Brand, exclusive membership in the GPS Community Forum, and detailed worksheets for each module to keep businesses on course.

We will offer a free one-hour introductory webinar so folks can test drive the “The Barefoot Startup’s GPS” If you (or any one you know) would like to discover the secrets of what we’ve learned in 20 years of building a top global brand, now is your chance! This is the first time we are offering this exclusive, boots-on-the-ground information designed specifically to help others gain an edge in their industry.

Sign up now and we will notify you when our free introductory webinar will be available. You’ll receive a few of our expert business resources right away to help boost your bottom line.

We offer you the solutions that proved successful for us- against overwhelming odds! And we learned to have fun along the way! We are thrilled to now have the opportunity to share these lessons with you, to make a difference in your business and future.

To your 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.