Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey

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.

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.

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.