Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey on Building a Lasting Brand

0:01 all right so uh first off I want to highlight a few things um first of all anyone who writes a book inputs any marketing budget behind it can be an Amazon bestseller at least for a moment in time in some obscure category right but you are a New York Times Best Sellers um so I think that's something really unique to highlight um right now the the wine uh Barefoot Wine sells over 600,000 cases a year in 50 states in 28 countries and after selling your business the two of you wrote the Barefoot Spirit how hardship hustle and heart built America's number one wine brand and that's the book that we were just referring to that became the the best seller right yes absolutely great uh what else would you like to add for context about uh something you think would be important for the audience to hear about your background or experience uh before we jump into the questions well I think it's interesting to note that we were not wine drinkers when we started we didn't come from a family uh that were growing grapes or producing wine and what we got us into the industry was an opportunity that we really couldn't pass up and it was a very fleeting opportunity to collect $300,000 that was owed to my client for grapes that he hadn't been paid

1:21 for and when Michael went to collect These funds he found out that the winery had just declared bankruptcy that morning so there weren't any funds to collect so Michael managed to collect bulk wine and bottling Services uh the long story is we prepared we prepared everything that was necessary to go to bottling and worked for about four months for the benefit of client and then the client said well I really can't take on another business I guess I'll just have to take the loss and we said no that's that's a lot of money this is in 1985 and so Michael says I've got an idea and I just nodded before I knew what it was all about so that's uh how we got started in the industry we took over the debt and we took over $300,000 worth of bottling services and bulk wine we thought how hard could it be and how long could it take we thought maybe 3 years maybe for well it took 20 years before we were able to turn it around and find an acquirer and sell uh and sell the business which is what we

2:40 intended because we're more business people than Wine people and that's why the book that we wrote is about business it's not really about wine although there is some wine in it just to make it more interesting it was our foot in the door you could say to talking to you all now great awesome thank you Bonnie uh Michael you want to add anything to that before we well I I just want to say that when I got into the wine industry I thought it was all about you know sip swirl you know taste say a few words in French you know talk about midn notes had nothing to do with that it was all about things like forklifts and UPC codes and people in Kansas with warehouses and trucks and you name it so um it it was a merchandising business we could have been selling hammers that's the same kind of business right I uh we became uh Federal wine importers to help the royal family of lichenstein import their wine for a couple years and we learned how brutally competitive and hard the wine space is so for those that are familiar with it we'll have that much more respect for what you've done uh 5% of businesses make it to a million dollar in Revenue 1% make it to $10 million in Revenue um you created a business that became very large and successful what what was the Difference

3:58 Maker in being able to achieve that that while most people fail in the wine space is especially challenging well I would just say taking responsibility for everyone's job knowing how to do it knowing what has to get from our warehouse to the shelf and to the consumer and not letting any of those um responsibilities drop or expecting somebody else to do it you might hire the professionals to do those jobs but you'd better be prepared to do it yourself at any moment yeah the only thing I would add to that is you know we live in a first world country you go to the store it seems like everything is there and so people have a commonly held misconception they say I don't know why people haven't thought of this idea I don't see it anywhere they thought of it they just couldn't get it into your store so it's like a distribution play anytime you got a UPC code on it anytime it is a a consumer product you're talking about distribution you're talking about physical delivery and so that's where it all breaks down so we learned that and you know it kicked our butt and then we learned our lessons and then we did some kicking of our own that's why I wear boots today yeah distribution is so Central to

5:17 so many businesses surviving expanding whether it's access to deal flow or access to investors or access to stores Central is so many when we talk about choke points and acquiring strategic choke points so often it's about securing distribution uh you know Tony Robin says that mindset and your state of mind is maybe sometimes more important than strategy if you have the wrong state of mind and I learned just by exchanging emails with you preparing for this you're pretty you know um gritty and perseverance and persistent but um what would you say was key in your mindset um that's allowed you to have this enormous success well I guess I'll go first if that's okay with you Bonnie she's the boss uh I think for me it was uh the humility to really ask questions we like to say make Friends in Low Places and what we mean is people with real dirt under their fingernails the people driving the forklift the people driving the trucks the people putting the groceries on the Shelf in the stores what's missing what could you do better what works what doesn't work and hear it from them these people have never been asked especially by a producer if remember B and I came in from the outside we weren't wine people we were business people so we went into it and we went oh my gosh look

6:36 at this we got to be licensed in every state we have to have federal state and local licenses okay it's a controlled substance so that was that was daunting enough but now the distribution system you're dealing with you know Distributors and you're dealing with big companies like like Kroger you know in 18 states and their policies and what does that mean and so this was really great for us to just back off ask questions you know they say you got two ears and one mouth you should use them in the same ratio great great um Bonnie would you add anything to that on mindset that you think really drove your success well for me um when I saw what the label was going to look like I saw it complete and Michael helped to design it which is a very interesting part of the story uh I said I can can see this being stacked in the chain stores and I pointed to the corner of our kitchen where where we were designing the label and I said this is going to sell a lot of wine this is going to be very successful and I had that feeling it wasn't just a feeling or or something I was hoping for a vision I was trying to uh create it was there I knew that

7:55 Barefoot was going to be extremely successful I didn't know why or what it was going to take but during the hard times my mindset was it is successful so we just have to keep moving and doing what is necessary we didn't have money to uh rent an office when we started our business so we looked in our laundry room and our rented Farmhouse and we saw that we had some space in the laundry room where the washer and dryer were supposed to be CU we couldn't afford a washer and dryer so we took an old table in the barn out back and washed it down to two saw horses and put that in the laundry room and uh that was the first desk in the first office of what today is the number one Winery and selling wine in the world so you can be very humble and start very small and still have very big expectations of yourself and if you don't lose that Vision along the way and become discouraged keep that feeling of success in your heart and in your mind then you then we did succeed yes great great thank you so we have a lot of people here in the audience that have uh 5 10 20 plus employees that maybe do 3

9:13 five 10 million a year in Revenue uh we have some that are doing 100 million of Revenue and they're holding to a billion plus but but most people are in that kind of middle category what would you say is counterintuitive not obvious but would be really helpful to talk about that would help people kind of break out of maybe a plateau they feel like they're stuck in or really move up to that next level um and grow exponentially because now that you had such success you probably connect with other people um who have had similar success I just wonder what you'd want to share well what we tell our clients today uh we ask him is why are you in business so that's the first question like why are you doing it and if they say oh well it's my passion you know we say well good luck with that we really can't help you or if they say well I'm going to give it to my kids well that's fine as long as the kids want to do what you want to do but the ones we like are the ones that say I want to build this brand Equity up to a point where it becomes monetized through an acquisition we say now we can help you okay because what we're going to do is we're going to sit them down with a broker who sold a business just like theirs this year they're going to find out what the metrics were at sale for that business

10:31 how many cases what states what growth year-over-year all the other metrics and we're going to put those on the wall and we're going to go you don't have the luxury to set goals they're written for you as soon as you chose a niche as soon as you chose a price point your goals were written on the wall and they were written on the wall of the escrow office that closed the last deal and you need to check in with him every year and by the way he'll buy you lunch great awesome I've never heard someone say that before so that's a great way to to phrase it and have a have a goal that's set by someone else it's very concrete and tangible and not just some madeup Revenue goal right um so what have you been doing since you sold to Gallow wow we started off by writing the book our staff and other people we'd done business with said that we had to write a book because we' done something that was quite unique starting with no knowledge of the industry and no money in creating the fastest growing wine brand in the nation so and having no turnover for seven years that was a really big deal um people can't do it themselves you need a team and we were able to have a whole team that worked together and loved working together and they worked towards the same goal so that was a real inspiration for the

11:49 success that we had um so we wrote the book and then Michael informed me that we were going to go on the road and start you know talking to University ities and conventions um uh using this book as an example and I said oh no that's not going to happen well it did for about 15 years and I really enjoyed sharing the experiences that we learned building a business with entrepreneurial students um after that when we were still traveling conventions and such we saw a lot of people coming in with earbuds because we wanted to share our experiences with everyone we said well have to take our New York Times bestseller and put it in an audio book and we did that but not just like an ordinary audio book we used Hollywood actors and sound effects and it was all in story form so it made it very interesting um and it has music uh we had a troop in Hollywood that we worked with and it turned out uh to be quite a unique production the um American public uh audio Publishers Association um gave us the award of being one of the top five business books of 2020 which we were really happy with

13:09 and they said we can do this for other people we can do a story in story form because that's what people remember they don't remember the list on the wall they remember stories and we can do this for other Founders and we can tell their principles their ethics the hardships that they went through and the trials and tribulations and how they they changed them the business and their lives and people around them and how they worked with their Community we can do this for other people and so that's what we're doing today we call it business audio theater it's 3D audio for the Mind awesome great you want to add something Michael I just want to add that uh you know for family offices especially one of the big challenges is how do you how do you capture you know Grandpa's Adventure that created this office in the first place that fueled it and how do you keep it alive and how do you keep it alive with Generations as you mentioned with very short attention span and so what we have done is said well let's give it to them in a a platform they already know which is the podcast platform which is the audiobook platform so they can listen to it when

14:26 they want where they want it's totally mobile and doing that has gotten so much great review forb said it was transformational so we're really excited about this and we're going to press the pedal to the metal on it and we want you all to have a chance to experience it so we're going to give you one of our recent Productions that was just voted top 20 Business book in the world uh and by an international group so of students by the way students and if you can get through to those people you really got it knocked and so here you are trying to hire people that identify with your principles you're trying to engage your own people uh you you want to impress your investors uh you want your suppliers to care about your company what better way than to entertain them with the real story of how you happened and what better format than to do it in audio right right I guess um one thing that we like to talk about here is how if you pass on the money without the values they'll probably lose the money and the family will stop family members stop talking to each other and it creates a bunch of conflict if you pass on only the values then they could you know have a fulfilling life create more money earn the money back Etc so the

15:44 values are more important than the money to pass on and the money can ruin them if you pass on the values it's very unlikely that the values are going to ruin them if they helped you so much so part of what you guys are doing is helping um transfer values and the adventure story of how the founder created wealth the struggles the discoveries they made along the way I guess in some sort of format people will actually digest easily that's better than a book or better than video because people can listen to audio anywhere is essentially what you're saying right right right so if you come and see us we'll give you a little QR code that you can listen to on the plane going home it's a three-hour journey by Dr Colin McDonald the founder of Specialists on call which was the Pioneer tele Medics and Company in the United States the first people to do it in 2005 quite an interesting story fax phones T1 lines you know just just old school Tech still did it and uh as a Neo as a a neurologist so you get a chance to listen to it and think gee this might be good for our business but we love to do it because like we are now Educators that's what we do and we are challenged with how you get across to people with short attention spans so when we found

17:02 out that this worked we wanted to offer it to you all great so I guess I guess part of it though is um let's say somebody is thinking okay it' be good to like explain my story to the Next Generation but part of what you said a couple minutes ago is that um you could use this to educate your suppliers your customers investors who may invest with you Etc so somebody who maybe has gotten to 50 million or 100 million of AUM or has developed you know for properties from ground up or whatever it is in their company they could use this to actually grow their business and like also will help tell the story to the Next Generation but maybe 90% of their motivation is that this is just a great way to be relatable personal and like Robert chelini says in the world of AI where you're not sure if you can even believe things you see with your eyes these days who do you trust and his answer was that it's that human engagement and if it's a genuine story that leads to meeting in person then that that makes all the difference so um can you comment on that like have have you seen the business use cases of this as more of the reason why people want it or is it more about passing on the values or how do you see that that mix well um Colin McDonald that I mentioned for whom we did this presentation uh it's a it's a three-hour production it's

18:22 called the brain Savers called the brain Savers you can find it on Audible in all platforms and and we'll give you a free free QR code you can listen to what he did is he he he works at Novant Health in North Carolina and he is their top Nero there and so he had his Nero team listen to it and The Joint Commission which is kind of like the UL of the medical business the certification group rated them the fastest most responsive neurot team in the country and that happened just within a few months of them listening to it so that's just an example of how it works also another example I think is uh when you're recruiting new employees you'd rather have someone read or listen to your history and know what your business is about what your principles and ethics about so when they come into your office for an interview they say I just love what you're doing and I want to be part of the team I love your goals instead of coming into your office and saying my girlfriend says I got to get a job right right with all the surveys I see on demographics that say the younger Generations are driven much much more by

19:39 some sort of connection to the mission or the impact or their prash in align with aligning with the company so you know uh we record videos of our core values but I could see that being helpful to our team like in our team folder we'll have a Pantheon thinking and record a video in front of the pantheon or whatever and have it there for the new team members to take a look at so I see that for sure um I have one final question to get to but before I ask that is there anything else about the business audio theater um project and what you're doing there that you want to share with the audience either on how to reach out to you and get in touch maybe you want them to come up to you in the audience or would you like them to email or text you or what would be the the easiest way to connect with you well it's Michael hulahan and Bonnie Harvey we're all over LinkedIn Mike uh we're Michael hulahan and Bonnie Harvey we're all over LinkedIn and uh we're easy to access uh we'll be sitting here we'll be here for the rest of this uh conference uh I just wanted to add one thing you can talk to young people to your BL blue about your values everybody does that every company does that but when you demonstrate and dramatize a real event that took place in history where your father or your grandfather whoever started your your family office took a very bold action or

20:58 demonstrated some real courage or showed conviction or empathy or any of these values they remember that scene because in order to put it together in their head they had to grab touchstones from their memory and those are the props that they use this is before television remember this is what was done in the in 1940s they had Radio Theater that's why we call it business audio theater so we're actually bringing back something that's very old because it works very good with our society of short attention spans and totally mobile great awesome thank you we're going to say something Bonnie I just wanted to say that we love business people we love entrepreneurs and we'd be happy to meet all of you on a onetoone basis and hear your story and have an opportunity to tell your story great excellent and um if anyone knows of the how I built this podcast you know I know tens of millions of people do uh they were just interviewed on that recently as well so you can learn more about there U my last question real quick is um what would be a million dooll piece of insight that was life-changing for you that we don't hear 40 times at every conference that people go to like what what's something unique that you could share with audience that really had a big impact on your life or business and success well while Bonnie's thinking of

22:18 it I I'll just say uh strategic alliances were the most impactful thing that happened to us when we learned that there were other people out there who were experimenting with new ideas see most people thought we were a joke you know you put a a foot on a bottle of wine you can't do that you know this is serious business here you're having fun with it well guess what Trader Joe's didn't think that it was crazy they thought that that was very cool because they were going to open 170 stores across the United States and they needed a wine label that looked like something crazy Maybe something from California right well guess what when they opened in De Mo Iowa Barefoot was stacked to the ceiling when they opened in New Orleans Barefoot was stacked to the ceiling that's a strategic Ally so who's going down the same road you are who gets Rich if you get rich who wins if you win who benefits When you solve a problem go talk to them those are your friends and if you can't figure out who they are here's a big hint when you're writing your checks the guy you're writing the biggest check to that's a strategic Ally he wants you to succeed that's why he's getting the big check awesome and I would say just thinking

23:35 outside the box and you have to be very creative if you're starting with no knowledge of your industry and no money and we found working with the communities um in their fundraisers and and working with the retailers in the markets of these fundraisers which is how we got the word out we never had paid advertising even after we did become profitable and we could afford paid advertising we continued to work with the communities around the markets where our product was sold so our product was sold by Word of Mouth not by advertising on the radio or television or any other form but by word of mouth and uh working with your community is always a great idea support the people around you and around the markets where your product or your service is Avil available great yeah that's excellent you know we started today saying that part of the point of this community is to evolve our mental models learn new strategies and many people who are raising Capital sometimes come to the investor club and they're like need to find an LP passive investor need to find a little investor but if they leave their mind open they might hear what you're saying on stage and think more creatively about it and find a JV partner a strategic Alliance a COI partner cgp partner a CPA that could

24:54 refer refer them 42 clients Etc and you might get 40 times or 20 times the results by thinking differently and not doing the same thing everyone else does or that you've always done to date to get to Leap Frog and have like a Quantum Leap to the next level so I loved your answers there uh if you want to learn more about business audio theater to scale your business and platform Andor share values with the Next Generation just find Michael and Bonnie um if you have trouble finding them or you need to run quick you can get their email address from our team and follow up with them that way I'd be happy to help you that way if you're uh watching here virtually right now live or via the recording just let us know um and while we have uh Jim White come up to the stage um we're going to be playing a video to introduce him and just a second but before we do let's give Michael and Bonnie a big round of applause thank Youk