Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey Founders of Barefoot Wines

Look at branding from all sides and the different ways it will be used, viewed and maybe, booed! Whatever is missing will stick out like a sore thumb and will open the door for a competitor with a more comprehensive approach to the market. It takes true leadership to insist on authenticity.  Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey impart the essentials of branding and marketing, including the technique they pioneered called Worthy Cause Marketing to create strategic partnerships with nonprofits, without paying a dime in advertising. 

Turning the pyramid structure upside down by having a two-division company of sales and sales support. Having customer service and sales inform all the other departments and promote true innovation in the company culture through permission, acknowledgement and building success on the backs of mistakes. 

As our world gets smaller, more and more entrepreneurs are going global. But just what does that mean in terms of entrepreneurship? Sure, it seems easy enough when marketing through e-commerce.  It’s almost a given that entrepreneurs will be selling internationally as the Internet is boundless. But what about selling a real product with dimensions and weight in international commerce? Michael and Bonnie discuss the top 5 challenges of going global, and boots-on-the ground tactical information on how to overcome them:

1.       Compliance: Foreign agents, licenses, agencies, labeling, metric weights, measures and trademarks

2.       Shipment: Freight forwarders, ocean-going freight, container sizes, pricing, and product temperature

3.       Receivables: Extending credit and risks, Letter of Credit, escrow accounts, recommended documents

4.       Duties and Dollars: Crucial timing of duties; taxes, tariffs, exchange rates and stable pricing

 5.       Brokers: International brokers and exclusive rights to foreign markets; retail outlets and sales reps

What happens when you fit every employee in your company into one of two divisions: sales or sales support? Suddenly, everyone knows his or her “real” job is to create customer and coworker experiences that drive sales. This shift in perception will drive every decision your employees make. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey built the iconic Barefoot Wine (a top global brand) using this simple business structure. In this presentation, they’ll reveal their secrets, including:

1. Why a sales-focused culture produces the kind of results that foster and sustain customer loyalty
2. How to look for the entrepreneurial spirit in every applicant
3. How to orient all new employees toward sales on day one
4. How to enforce the sales support relationship with sales through:

·         Performance-based compensation

·         “Know-the-need,” not “need-to-know”

·         Leader/employee relationships based on permission, acknowledgment, and validation

Michael and Bonnie attribute their success to their people, who came up with innovative, effective, and disruptive solutions—solutions enabled by Barefoot’s “sales-positive” culture.

 All of these lessons are conveyed through their own entertaining, real-life stories and proven strategies that will engage and empower your audience. Attendees will walk away with practical, workable tools they can start using immediately.

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey started Barefoot, a top global brand, in their laundry room with no money and no industry knowledge. They now share their tried-and-true formulas to reduce your need for capital and engage allies to get the most bang for your buck!

YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO: 

• DISCOVER AND MAKE THE BEST USE OF YOUR HIDDEN ASSETS

• IDENTIFY AND WORK WITH YOUR STRATEGIC ALLIES

• USE YOUR SUPPLIERS AND BUYERS AS BANKERS

• DRIVE RESULTS WITH PERFORMANCE-BASED COMPENSATION

• OUTSOURCE TO REDUCE YOUR COSTS AND INCREASE YOUR QUALITY

• PREVENT TURNOVER (THE #1 HIDDEN COST OF ANY BUSINESS)

 • GET THE WORD OUT AND GAIN LOYAL CUSTOMERS WITHOUT COSTLY ADVERTISING

A company is only as strong as its relationships. Think about it. You rely on consumers, clients, staff, contractors, vendors, suppliers, bankers, and distributors (just to name a few!) to take actions that keep your business humming along and making money. Imagine what would happen to your performance if instead of doing enough to get by, these key players really turned on their work ethics and innovative abilities?

You can’t force, threaten, bribe, or cajole anyone into working and thinking on a higher level.  What you can do is generate the same spirit that fueled the iconic, top-selling Barefoot brand to engage and inspire people to produce amazing results. The brand’s founders, Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, can teach you how:

STEP 1: Identify and appreciate each participant for their function in the larger framework of your own goals.

STEP 2: Seek to understand and respect the objectives of every participant.

STEP 3: Demonstrate that you have their best interests at heart.

STEP 4: Achieve your goals by helping them achieve theirs.

Michael and Bonnie use entertaining and memorable stories from their real-life experiences building the world-famous Barefoot Wine brand. They reveal how they knocked down overwhelming obstacles by putting themselves in the other person’s shoes and thinking creatively about how to help them succeed, being the ultimate assistant buyer in every relationship, over-delivering and exceeding customer expectations, and more.

Audiences will learn how to engage and empower every business relationship to forge dynamic strategic alliances and partnerships. They’ll take away innovative tactics they can immediately employ to achieve results with clients and staff, distributors and suppliers, jobbers and middlemen, retailers and clerks, and the community and the general public.

Barefoot beat the odds in a heavily controlled, competitive industry to become a top global brand. You can follow in their (sandy) footprints. The secrets Michael and Bonnie share apply to industries across the board. By infusing your company with its own version of the Barefoot Spirit, you’re making the kind of high-impact changes that supercharge motivation and get incredible results quickly. 

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, Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, had no money and no real knowledge about the wine industry.

They successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo, and Barefoot is a top global brand. 

Michael and Bonnie discuss the massively complicated industry they embarked on, and setbacks they regularly encountered along employing innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, creating new markets and strategic alliances, while pioneering Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. 

Those hardships, that hustle, and their heart, are the essence of the Barefoot Spirit. They discuss the cornerstone business and lifestyle philosophies that made it, ultimately, an enduring success and are applicable to any business. Presentation complimented by purchased copies of their New York Times bestseller, The Barefoot Spirit.   

If any business is to thrive in the global marketplace, its employees must think like owners. Problem is, few employees know how. The job of company leaders is to train them to think this way. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey know how to create the conditions that draw out and nourish people’s inner entrepreneurs. They take the principles that empowered their own tribe of productive, creative and loyal employees to beat the odds; and boil those principles down into poignant lessons business owners can put into practice right away to boost the bottom line:

•       How to remove roadblocks to the entrepreneurial spirit

•       Why everyone at your company must ask questions (including you)

•       Why your people should embrace mistakes

•       How to find and hire people with entrepreneurial DNA

•       How to foster innovation by getting out of your people’s way

•       How to drive results with performance-based compensation

•       How to increase well-being in your people with acknowledgement and permission

•       How to prevent turnover (the #1 hidden cost of any business) 

 They take everything they know about the spirit of entrepreneurship and help startups, leaders and corporations infuse it into their company cultures to engage and empower their employees. 

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey discuss the fundamentals of a strategy they pioneered called Worthy Cause Marketing that enabled their brand to stand for more than its mercantile value and help numerous nonprofit causes at the same time. It not only gave their employees a sense of pride that they were making the world a better place; it gave the membership of those non-profits a compelling social reason to choose their product and spread the word. This ingenious method didn’t cost a dime in paid commercial advertising, and built the Barefoot brand state by state and country by country to the iconic status it holds today. It worked so well, that even when they had the money for paid conventional advertising, they continued with Worthy Cause Marketing while helping causes like conservation, human rights and clean oceans and beaches.