Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey

Founders of Barefoot Wine, New York Times Bestselling Authors

  • Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

  • Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

How to Motivate People to Produce Results

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 ...

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.

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How to Engage and Empower Your People with the Two-Division Company

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 ...

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.

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The Entrepreneurial Culture

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 ...

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.

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About Keynote Speaker Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey help companies become more entrepreneurial. They co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built Americas #1 Wine Brand. The book, chosen as recommended reading for the CEO Library in CEO Forum, chronicles their humble beginnings in a laundry room in 1986 to their creation of an international bestselling wine label. With virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas and strategic alliances to overcome obstacles and create new markets. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance based compensation. They took a comprehensive view of customer service.

In 2005, they successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo. Since then, Michael & Bonnie share their experience and innovative approach as authors, workshop leaders, keynote speakers, and consultants to Fortune 500s. Their clients are among the Inc. 5000 and Inc. 500.

They are sought-after workplace culture experts in both print and broadcast media with hundreds of interviews and articles in professional and national publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Huffington Post, AMEX Open Forum, and Costco Connection. Their bi-monthly business articles are published by The Business Journals (in 43 cities). They co-author weekly, no-nonsense business blogs at: www.thebarefootspirit.com and www.consumerbrandbuilders.com Michael & Bonnie speak internationally for corporations, conferences, universities and symposiums including SOCAP (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business), The World Conference on Entrepreneurship (ICSB) in Dublin, Ireland, The Conference Board’s Consumer Experience Symposium in NYC, The C-Suite Conferences, Persistent Systems, Liberty Tax, Retail Packaging Association, Renaissance Executive Forums, and over 60 universities that teach entrepreneurship.

They are highly sought-after interview guests on radio, television, & podcasts including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Bloomberg, and others.

They are highly recommended by business leaders and professors of entrepreneurship as inspirational speakers and entrepreneurial thought leaders. Their latest book, The Entrepreneurial Culture, 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your People, was featured in Jeff Hayzlett’s C-Suite TV Network launch and The C-Suite Book Club.

Testimonials

“Michael and Bonnie were Keynote Speakers at the conference but they also gave talks at dedicated workshops for Irish Entrepreneurs and at the Women’s Entrepreneurship Forum. While each talk needed to be… Read More

Professor Thomas Cooney

Chair International Council for Small Business, 2014 Organizing Committee, College of Business, Dublin Institute of Technology

“Michael & Bonnie were the perfect speakers to help us celebrate our 25th Annual Small Business Week Awards Luncheon. With a room full of small business owners and entrepreneurs in attendance… Read More

Marice Hague

Marketing Director, Florida SBDC at UNF, Jacksonville, FL

“Michael and Bonnie brought a true sense of grassroots marketing to our franchisees. The way they developed and structured their success is nothing short of brilliant, built on hard work, passion and a love for.. Read More

Martha O’Gorman

Chief Marketing Officer, Liberty Tax Service

“Bonnie and Michael deliver a workshop that illuminates the ground breaking and practical steps they took to build what became one of the biggest wine brands in the world and revolutionized… Read More

Tricia Benn

General Manager, The Hero Club

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