Fascinating Growth Case Study – Forecasting 50

(0:00 – 1:20)
They became very famous in the 90s and 2000s. They created the brand Barefoot and Barefoot Wine and they have a book called the Barefoot Spirit, which I recommend everybody read. It is one of the greatest business lessons of the last hundred years.

I’ve heard them speak numerous times. Caught them speaking at the McCormick Place in Chicago last November. They are very sought-after speakers and a lot of their talk is based on their life story, their book, which is their autobiography of the story, but they have such a profound story because their story, it’s unbelievable.

This is a couple that got a phone call I think mid 90s roughly and so I’m gonna do this with the license that I haven’t heard Mike and Bonnie tell this story in a couple few years. So if I’m off by a year or two or this or that I’m asking for the freedom of the license of the point of the story. So the point of the story is in the mid 90s Mike and Bonnie get a very interesting phone call from a friend that basically says I’m in trouble.

(1:20 – 1:58)
I think he even mentioned possible bankruptcy or this or that and Mike and Bonnie said, oh my gosh, don’t do that. Let us see if we can help you and it turns out that his challenge or frustration was he had a, you know, like a winery. He had a, he was a vintner and it wasn’t called Barefoot at the time and he just was not making ends meet and what he was currently sitting on was a tremendous amount of vats of grapes with no ability either to pay the last year’s bills or get a new brand created or hit the market in time.

(1:59 – 3:17)
You know, he hit, he hit a cash flow challenge. And so Mike and Bonnie made some sort of a business deal where they put in some money and they were able to save his bacon if you will and all of a sudden with no experience Mike and Bonnie Houlihan in the mid-90s found themselves in the wine business and I want to repeat they have no experience at this time. None whatsoever and Mike and Bonnie’s story of how they got Barefoot which is what they changed the name of the company to Barefoot.

Have you ever seen a wine or had a wine where somebody’s right footprint is on every label? That’s Bonnie Harvey’s right foot and that’s excellent wine actually. And now that I’ve said this if you go to the go to any store I go from a gas station to a high-end liquor store and see if you’re pressed not to see Barefoot wine now that I’m mentioning it. So, but the point of this podcast is again, the overarching theme of this series is that the internet often blinds us and Mike and Bonnie’s story has been picked up in at least a hundred major magazines.

(3:18 – 4:41)
They’ve been on the news. I don’t know how many times they’ve coached and counseled. I don’t know how many business owners and what they were able to accomplish and their story is so relevant because they did it number one completely offline.

I don’t know. I don’t know if they have any sales online but they ended up selling what was at that time the largest wine brand I believe in the world and I think the numbers were something like a hundred hundred and thirty hundred and thirty thousand cases of wine per year something like it was extraordinary Gallo ended up buying their brand and so not Barefoot is now a subsidiary of Gallo,