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Building Barefoot Wine: Michael Houlihan on Innovation, Storytelling, and Brand Success
89 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans chats with Michael Houlihan, co-founder of Barefoot Wine, about the accidental journey that led to one of the most recognizable wine brands in the world.
Michael shares how creative grassroots marketing, a commitment to listening to customers, and a unique positioning strategy helped Barefoot thrive in an industry dominated by high-end, elitist brands.
He reflects on the lessons that he and his wife, Bonnie Harvey, learned from building and scaling Barefoot, the challenges of distribution, and how they turned social advocacy into a powerful marketing tool.
Michael also discusses life after Barefoot, including the creation of The Barefoot Spirit, a business adventure book and audio theater series.
Tune in to discover Michael’s advice for entrepreneurs navigating today’s competitive markets and his insights on climate change-driven opportunities for the next generation of innovators.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and Guest, Michael Houlihan
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, where we dive into the stories, insights, and strategies of entrepreneurs, CEOs, and marketing leaders. Today, I have a special guest, Michael Houlihan, the co-founder of Barefoot Wines. And this episode is a backstory that I think you'll enjoy. A while back, I was listening to an episode of How It Works with Michael and his wife, Bonnie Harvey, and they shared their journey of building Barefoot Wines from the ground up.
00:00:33
Speaker
I was inspired by their story and how they embraced creative grassroots marketing and turned Barefoot into a powerhouse brand.
Origin Story of Barefoot Wines
00:00:41
Speaker
Their journey and insights were so compelling that I felt compelled to write about it on LinkedIn.
00:00:46
Speaker
And shortly afterward, I received an email from Michael himself thanking me for the post. In true marketer fashion, I took the opportunity to ask if he'd be interested in joining me on Marketing Spark to explore his journey, Bonnie's journey, and the lessons he and Bonnie have learned along the way. So here we are. I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Hulan to the podcast. It's great to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.
00:01:10
Speaker
Why don't we go back to the beginning of Barefoot Wine? It's an amazing story story of how two people stumbled into entrepreneurship and created something really amazing. What inspired you and Bonnie, especially at a time, and this is not that long ago, when traditional high-end brands dominated the market?
00:01:31
Speaker
We weren't really wine people. We love the wine country. We love the rural-style living. We are both urban refugees, if you will. Will the last person please lock the door? We are conservationists, without a doubt. We love the country where we live. We have the Russian River. We have the beaches on the beautiful Pacific Ocean. and We have the wine country itself. She moved here from Portland. I moved here from San Francisco, and we met here.
00:01:57
Speaker
and the but The industry here is the wine industry. You get sucked into it like a vortex, whether they're your client or whatever you're doing, you wind up working with wine people.
Creative Debt Solutions and Wine Industry Entry
00:02:09
Speaker
Bonnie was working with some wine people and she was straightening out their offices and overseeing their supplies. She noticed that they were owed about $300,000 from one winery that ah they hadn't been paid for in three years.
00:02:23
Speaker
She and I met about a year before this, and I was also a consultant in the wine business, but I had a history working with the government. I was not only not afraid of working with government bureaucrats, but I used to be one. I understand how to get things in their face and get them to take action and do things. That was my business. I was helping people with subdividing their property or refinancing with a government loan. anyway She comes to me one day and I remember we've only been together for a year and she says, I noticed that my client is owed $300,000 from this winery. Would you go over there and collect?
00:03:02
Speaker
I thought, jeez, I just met you and you're asking me to go collect $300,000. It's like marrying the mob type deal. I said, okay, I'll go talk to him. I went over. When I got there, the guard stopped me and says, I hope you're not here to collect money. He says, we just declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning. You can take your ticket and wait your turn.
00:03:22
Speaker
I already had a meeting, but that didn't help my positive attitude going into it. Sat down with these guys who were the secure debtors who are now on the board. I said, listen, maybe we can work something out here. I know you don't have any money, but what if you gave us wine in bulk and bottling services to pay the debt?
Research and Brand Development
00:03:45
Speaker
In other words, you can pay it with wine and glass bottles.
00:03:49
Speaker
We'll come up with the label, we'll come up with the compliance, we'll come up with the marketing scheme, we'll come up with the logo. Besides, how hard could that be? How long could that take? I went back to Bonnie and I said, hey, I think I've got something for us here. It's a trade. She says, well, that's not going to pay any bills. but We got to go out and market that now. You created another problem. We spent the next six months doing research. There are a lot of businesses you can go into, it but if you go into alcohol beverage business, even in Canada, you have different laws.
00:04:20
Speaker
in every province and in in some states like Texas, every city. It's not just an easy sell. You have to understand how to do it without breaking the law. You also have to deal with supermarkets, and they all have their own protocols for how they will do business. You have to learn all those.
00:04:38
Speaker
And then there's different kinds of taxes and licenses and all that stuff. We worked for about six months, did all the research on that stuff. In the process, I went to a guy that I'd been to school with who is now a buyer for a major supermarket in California with about 200 outlets.
00:04:57
Speaker
ah He would give me a ah meeting at first and finally did as a favor to me and he goes, okay, what do you want? I said, I've got all this wine and bottling service. I can put any kind of a label on it. Just tell me what you want and we'll sell it to you. We'll clear the debt and I'll pay our client and we'll be down the road. Plan A.
00:05:16
Speaker
but He looks at it, he says, he says, nobody's ever asked me what I wanted before. So I'll tell you, he says, give me a salt and pepper act. He says, ah put it in a pig, make it better than Bob and cheaper than Bob. I'm listening to this and I'm writing it down as fast as I can. And I'm wondering what language is this? Is this some kind of jargon that's used in the wine industry?
00:05:39
Speaker
And later I translated it because I had a friend who was in the industry and yes, it was jargon. So a salt and pepper act, that means one label with a red and a white white. And then better than Bob, Bob was Robert Mondavi and then put it in a pig. A pig was the big fat magnum, the 1.5 liter, not the 750 milliliter, also known as a fifth.
00:06:03
Speaker
So twice the size. On my way out of his office, he says, oh, and one more thing he says, the label, he says, make it visible from four feet away so she can see it when she's pushing her cart. Make the name the same as the logo and make the logo something that people can relate to.
00:06:22
Speaker
I wrote all that down. Now I know what I have to do. I have to come up with a brand that has the logo. It's the same as the name, Barefoot. and a bare It has to be visible from four feet away. It's a rather large Barefoot, right on this label. Four feet away. While she, which means a woman buyer, is pushing her cart, right? In many states and in some places in Canada, you can actually buy wine in supermarkets.
00:06:52
Speaker
So it is a female buyer. 75% of the shoppers are females. So who is this woman? She's 37 and a half years old. She's got two and a half kids. She wants to buy every week staples that are dependable. They have to be priced the same. They have to taste the same. This is interesting because wine doesn't always taste the same. Sometimes one image is different than another.
00:07:17
Speaker
So this gave us a completely different picture. So now if I hadn't gone and talked to my friend at the supermarket, I wouldn't have got that key access to market. He gave me a complete wine marketing and merchandising lesson in about 37 seconds. It's important for context here. The wine industry in the United States and Canada was dominated by European wines. The benchmark was French wine.
00:07:47
Speaker
U.S. wines didn't at the time probably have as big a profile as they do now. You hadn't been a winemaker. I don't know whether you and Bonnie had thought about launching a winery. In many cases, some of the best success stories happen because entrepreneurs stumble into them or they did they become accidental entrepreneurs.
Challenges and Early Marketing Strategies
00:08:06
Speaker
At what point did you realize that this was something that you wanted to do, not only to pay the debt, but because you were passionate about it and you thought, here's a huge opportunity to go after a particular market with a particular type of wine and see if we can make a success of that. When did that realization happen?
00:08:26
Speaker
It happened shortly after that meeting when I was given the keys to the kingdom because as this buyer was kicking me out, he was telling me exactly where there was a missing piece in the market. And so that's what really made me feel good. All of a sudden I thought, wow, there is a void. There's a gap. There's a place where we're not going to be competed with. It's at the 1.5 liter size.
00:08:52
Speaker
and it's the house wine, it's the everyday drinking wine. say So that's where he knew that the market needed more entrees. So that's when I began to feel good about it. But I didn't feel really good about it until about five years late because I had to learn all the lessons that you learn ah in business? How do you build a brand? How do you expand a brand? Do you expand it too fast? Do you have to retrench? What about mistakes? How long do they take to undo and all of that kind of stuff? How do you hire people? How do you train people? How do you articulate what you want in terms that other businesses can understand? How do you write a contract?
00:09:36
Speaker
It goes on and on. So that took me some while to really get good at. After five years, I was pretty good at it. Because remember, we already had backgrounds in business consulting. It wasn't like we were strangers to the written word.
00:09:54
Speaker
or or to to rules and laws and regulations. But it was an interesting journey, let's put it that way. The other thing I think that made me feel good was when we started to gain traction in the marketplace, where we were starting to sell truckloads at a time. And some big organizations like some of the larger supermarkets in the United States were buying like four and five truckloads at a time.
00:10:24
Speaker
Once we had that kind of cashflow, we realized that we were a solid business. Let's wind the clock back because at that point in time, that's a lot of work time and effort that goes into it. But let's wind the clock back to the early days when you're a company that's got a new product positioned in a market that you think there's an opportunity, but you don't have a lot of money. One of the things that you Discover is that there's a lot of community events or looking for sponsorships. These are you know cheap and cheerful events where you may donate a few bottles or a few cases of wine. Do you discover that's where you can do some testing. That's where you can find whether there's an appetite for your wine. Talk about how that marketing opportunity emerged and what you learned from it, from seeing the positive reaction to Barefoot when you sponsor these events.
00:11:16
Speaker
Back in the early days when, as you say, we fulfilled the format that we were challenged to fulfill. We gave them exactly what they wanted. They wouldn't buy it. Nobody would buy it. They wouldn't buy it because there wasn't any advertising behind it. And it was outrageous to put a foot on a bottle of wine in those days. They were all apologizing for not being French enough. It it was interesting. Then I get a call.
00:11:42
Speaker
from a guy ah yeah at ah at a ah fundraising event in San Francisco. He wants to raise funds for a community park to keep the kids off school after off the streets after school. And he wants money for swings and slides and sands, jungle gyms and sandboxes. And he calls me up, he goes, hey, he says, you're a very wealthy winemaker up there in the wine country, and I only need $50,000 to complete this park.
00:12:10
Speaker
Do you have the right number? I don't have 50,000. I doubt if I have five. I said, but I could give you some wine. You can use it at your fundraiser, maybe to loosen some people up. They'll write a bigger check, or you could maybe you could you could auction it off and use the money to buy the slides and the swings and sandboxes. and he He begrudgingly took the wine because he was looking for cash, but he served it.
00:12:35
Speaker
We didn't hear from him again. About four or five weeks later, we noticed there was a big surge in sales in his neighborhood. This was in San Francisco when we first started. And so we wanted to know why, and we realized, wow, this is the same neighborhood that we donated the wine to the fundraiser in.
Positioning and Market Strategy
00:12:55
Speaker
I wonder if the members that went to that fundraiser, tasted our wine, recognized it, and went out and looked for it in the stores that were in that neighborhood.
00:13:05
Speaker
And so we said, let's try it in another neighborhood. So we tried it in another neighborhood. They were trying to raise money there to clean up a creek. And so we provided the wine, but we also, this time we said, you got to say what our name is and you get, here's where you can buy it in your neighborhood and those kinds of things, interpretive information. And well, I weren't there too. And we thought, this is interesting because the reason the stores wouldn't take it, remember, was because we didn't have enough money for advertising.
00:13:34
Speaker
So he thought, well, maybe we've discovered a different way to advertise. And we did. We realized that we had given the members of the nonprofit a social reason to buy our product. It was stronger than a mercantile reason. So mercantile reason might be, oh, it tastes great. Oh, it's a low price. It's a gold medal winner. Those are all mercantile reasons. But how about this? They helped us raise funds for our park. There are members.
00:14:03
Speaker
These are our brothers. Let's help them. And so we actually turned our customers into advocates. So it became the best form of advertising. Just imagine, here's your wine for sale in a neighborhood where you're sponsoring the nonprofit that's trying to improve the neighborhood.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's classic influencer marketing. In many respects, Barefoot changed the wine industry with its affordable, accessible approach. What was the strategic thinking behind positioning Barefoot as a casual, fun brand? And again, in context, as you as you mentioned, the standard was French wine, very highfalutin, fancy, elitist,
00:14:50
Speaker
brands and products and you were coming at the market in a different way, in a new way. Was that on purpose or did you, did it just, what's just, what was the thinking? Did you realize this was the way that you were going to break into the market? When the buyer said, so she can see it when she's pushing her cart, we did some research and we found out that 75% of supermarket shoppers are women.
00:15:18
Speaker
So when the guy says what's for dinner, honey, what he's really saying is take the money in the credit cards and go make all the branded decisions. So we knew that if we could give her what she wanted, that we would be the brand that she would look for and be a regular item. Now the high price wines, that's Saturday night wine. but You buy a bottle, or you brag about the Appalachian, maybe the vintage.
00:15:44
Speaker
You talk about the winemaker, you sniff it, swirl it, talk about midnotes, say some things in French. That's fine. But there are six Tuesdays in the week, and we were Tuesday night wide. So we realized that there was a much bigger market in volume, even though our price wasn't there. The volume was incredible if we could address it and create a loyal following, which we did. But yes, that was deliberate. We deliberately addressed
00:16:18
Speaker
a portion of the market that had here to Ford not been identified. You have to remember in those days, all the wine buyers were men in those days, and they didn't even think about the women. They just thought, some guy's going to be bragging about this wine. It better be from a special appellation or this or that. So that's how they were looking at it.
Acquisition by Gallo and Continued Influence
00:16:40
Speaker
It's very interesting the way it developed because We had a winemaker who really was in France. He studied over there. He studied winemaking. And he said what he loved was the leaders that were on the table of Van de Tabbe. They were easy drinking, soft on the palate, fruit forward, true to varietal character. And he wondered why we didn't have that, just that much in the United States. See? Yeah. Everybody, why don't we have a good $5 cigar? See, that kind of thing.
00:17:12
Speaker
Why don't we have a good $5 bottle of wine? I can tell you one of the reasons is it's very expensive to make it. And you don't make a lot of money on it. So you got to be half whacked to go into it. But then you have to be really driven to get the volume. It's not something you can do in the neighborhood. You have to do this internationally or not at all. You sold Barefoot to Gallo in 2005.
00:17:39
Speaker
The obvious question is, what was it like for you and Bonnie? The two of you had worked hard for nearly a decade, building Barefoot from scratch into a high volume, popular brand. I'm sure the deal was exciting. Whenever the thing that you build, somebody wants it and they want to pay a lot of money for it, it must be very exciting. What was your experience or how did you feel post acquisition?
00:18:01
Speaker
Did you enjoy jumping off the bandwagon after so much hard work or did you miss the action and being an integral part of the winemaking business? It's a great question. Let me just answer this way. We never wanted to be in the wine business. We were both people who made mistakes right, and that's W-R-I-T-E. When we made mistakes, we'd write them down. And we took notes all the time, so we had like manuals and policies and procedures. Everything was written down in our business.
00:18:33
Speaker
So we were not only performing the business, but we were looking at it as a laboratory for how businesses run altogether. What are the general principles that businesses have with each other? And in that process, we were so glad to have made the sale to such a group as Gallo because they were smart about merchandising. They realized that it was all about shelf presence in the stores.
00:19:02
Speaker
and they really policed that shelf present and presence and and enforced it. And that's what we did. We couldn't do it to the level that Gallo did because they had thousands of people more than we did, but we had enough to press it in the stores where we were. They were able to scale the brand and they actually hired us as brand consultants to help them with things like teams that were dedicated to the brand and things like worthy cause marketing. And we're happy to say that they took it and made it the number one brand in the world. And so for us, we couldn't have made a better sale because we were in the business consulting business in the first place. After we sold, we're still in the business consulting business, except that now we've been through a real life
00:19:57
Speaker
adventure of building a world-class brand for 20 years. It's one thing to sit there and talk and pontificate and debate about business principles, but it's quite another to go into a supermarket and see it or go into a warehouse and see it or talk to a trucker or talk to a producer or a grower. It's ah it's an education that you can't get in school.
00:20:24
Speaker
so We took that knowledge and we were encouraged by people who worked at Gallo and also our former employees and many of our customers and suppliers write a book. Why don't you guys write a book about this? So we wrote a book and we pretty much finished with it. and we were It was so boring, we threw it right in the garbage. That's awful. So then we said, nobody's going to listen to this. So we decided to rewrite it and we wrote it as a business adventure story, a white knuckle rocket ride where you're not sure
00:20:59
Speaker
If they're going to make it from chapter to chapter, it becomes a real page turner. And we weren't so interested in prescriptive texts like, here's the three things you got to do, the five things to never do, the 20 things your customer wants from you. You start talking to people like that, they're going to fall asleep in item number two. And we said, how about the guy walks into the store in a rainstorm?
00:21:21
Speaker
And he gets blown around the parking lot because he's holding on to this piece of foam core like cardboard that's five feet by five feet. And he has a four foot high purple foot on it. It's like a big square rigger. He's being blown in the storm down south and then he gets hit with buckets
The Barefoot Spirit and Business Audio Theater
00:21:38
Speaker
of rain. He still shows up in the store, right? He still wants to make the sale. But all he can hear is wet mop up front over the microphones.
00:21:47
Speaker
because it is a mess and you have to really want to do it. It's a moniker for the whole idea of the barefoot spirit, which is it's one thing to have a great product. It's quite another to understand how to sell it. And then it's really quite another to do what you have to do to make that happen because you have to do things that are apparently humiliating, see? But they they certainly are not what you expect.
00:22:18
Speaker
Was the book a way to transition from running barefoot to life after barefoot? Did it give you a chance to look back at all the experiences and the lessons that you had learned over the years and internalize them and then share them with the world? Was that the biggest value of the book or were there other things that you were hoping to do that the book would help you launch into? That's a great question too.
00:22:46
Speaker
two answers. One is, yes, the book helped us launch our business education career and our career as business consultants because now people were hiring us to help them with distribution management and hiring and how you pay people and all of those kinds of like nuts and bolts things. But on the other hand, because of the book, we were speaking all over the world. We spoke at 60 schools to teach entrepreneurship, including Europe and Asia. And here we are talking to young people who are very keen on getting into business, and they would like to know what it's like from the ground floor. We don't go in there with the silver spoon in our mouth
00:23:32
Speaker
on the ivory tower. And as a matter of fact, we go the exact other way. We go in there and we say, listen, this really knocked us on our butt. Here's the biggest mistake we made. We thought this was it, but no. The real story was this, but we were too proud to admit it, or we were too stubborn to admit it. And here's what happened as a result. Once that started to happen, we realized that people really wanted story.
00:23:58
Speaker
They didn't want to be told about business. They wanted to experience a story where they would learn about it by entertainment, basically, and following the story. And that's how we got into business audio theater. So we took our book. We noticed about seven years ago that everybody was showing up for these talks we were giving all over the world. They were all wearing earbuds, like, what's with the buds all of a sudden? Everybody overnight.
00:24:26
Speaker
And, oh, I'm listening to a podcast. Oh, I'm trying to improve my business. Or, I'm listening to War and Peace. The thing's so thick I can't sit still for it, and I've got to keep moving in my day. So we looked at each other. We said, we have to do that. So let's do an audiobook. So we did an audiobook, but we didn't like it, just like the print book.
00:24:46
Speaker
And we turned it into a business adventure story in like 25 minute segments like podcasts. We basically married the idea of an audio book with a podcast, but introduced Hollywood. And so we brought in actors and sound effects and music. And it's like a 1945 radio
Advice for Modern Entrepreneurs
00:25:05
Speaker
show. So it's exciting and you can listen to it when you're biking or hiking or working out and when you want to. It's not sit down. We're going to show you a film about our company.
00:25:16
Speaker
And it's not, here's a book about our companies. Here you go. This is free. Enjoy it. See what you think. And so now we're doing it for others. And we just got one done. It was was rated top 20 business books in the world for a doctor out of Harvard who was really the guy who pioneered interstate enterprise telemedicine.
00:25:40
Speaker
And so it's his story. And his group was just raided by the joint commission. That's like the the good housekeeping seal of approval for the medical industry as the fastest neuro-response group in the country. After listening to this,
00:25:57
Speaker
Clearly you have a love for entrepreneurship. You've gone through the battles and the wars and you've come out the other side very successfully. These days, entrepreneurship is the new black. Everybody loves the idea of being an It's a very sexy thing to think about. A lot of people jump into it. It's not for everybody. Having been an entrepreneur since 2008, I can tell you that there's more than enough ups and downs. What do you think the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make today. What's your advice on how people can avoid these mistakes? Good question. I would say the number one biggest mistake that I see is an oversimplification of the sales and distribution process.
00:26:48
Speaker
You can't just come up with a great idea and the world is gonna knock down doors and beat down walls just to get to you. That's not gonna happen. Even if you sell it online, you're going to have to advertise. You're gonna have to put money into it. You're gonna have to figure out a way to get influencers to talk about it. You're gonna have to spend an awful lot of time, much more than you make,
00:27:15
Speaker
for the first few years, just promoting it. That's the biggest mistake they make is they underestimate what it takes, even a great idea. I like to say if you were selling bars of gold at the supermarket for $3.99, you'd still have to merchandise them.
00:27:32
Speaker
You'd still have to bring them out from the back room so people could see them. You'd still have to put a sign on it that said this is pure gold. It's worth $45 million. dollars It's only $3.99 today. It's crazy, but it's true because we have such a limited attention span. So I think that would be my first piece of advice is do some research on how it is that your idea or process or device or product is going to actually Can't market it. How's it actually going to get delivered? In my world, B2B SaaS, it's so easy to get into the business these days that there are dozens, if not hundreds of competitors in every single vertical. But the reality is if we build this, they will come.
00:28:22
Speaker
ah approach to running a business, they don't realize that sales and marketing are such a key part of the business. that You cannot have a product they and expect people to beat down your door.
Future of Marketing and Digital Tools
00:28:33
Speaker
It really is about spending the time to drive brand awareness and make people aware that your products exist and they need it. It brings me back to another question that I wanted to ask you about Barefoot, which was built in the era before digital marketing.
00:28:46
Speaker
If you had to do it all over again, if Barefoot was a brand that was being launched today with all the digital marketing tools at your disposal, how would your approach to building the Barefoot brand change? What would your strategic and tactical approach be to taking a brand, building it, getting people to have affinity for it, spread the word, all the things that brands have to do today?
00:29:16
Speaker
I would evolve some of the things that we did in the non-digital world into the digital world. For instance, we were the official wine of the Surf Rider Foundation pretty much from the time they only had three chapters until they had over hundreds in lots of countries. But gaining that credibility ah that many people who are interested in saving the surf, saving the beach, cleaning up the ocean, stopping the pollution of the rivers, those people seeing us as supporting them, maybe on their website or writing blogs or taking their message to places that they can't you they can't get to, is how I would do it today. It's basically the same old idea. It's just that now you work
00:30:10
Speaker
by promoting their message online. So you find groups that resonate with what it is that you stand for and what it is that you're doing, see? And those are the groups that you help. And the way you help them is you promote them on your website and through your and through your newsletters in the hopes that their members will have a social reason to buy your product.
00:30:37
Speaker
and to also advocate for it. So that's what I would do today. So same philosophy. It's in the sphere of into one influencer marketing or advocate marketing. The other way to look at it, it's almost like a one to many approach. You try to embed yourself into communities and communities these days.
00:30:56
Speaker
in the B2B SaaS world are everything. Everybody talks about community, but what you did in the early days and what you would probably do today is you embedded yourself in communities and became partners with them or allies as opposed to what
Focus on Climate Change and Entrepreneurial Challenges
00:31:11
Speaker
you said earlier. It wasn't a transaction relationship. It was a partnership.
00:31:15
Speaker
That's one of the things I do miss about the the time period that we had barefoot is we were able to meet and work with and see groups being successful, everything from education to conservation throughout the United States and Canada and even in Europe. So that was something that is higher on the scoreboard than just how many cases you sold.
00:31:46
Speaker
Final question, curious about projects or focus areas that you and Bonnie are exploring these days. What gets you excited? What makes you wake up in the morning and tackle new projects or new business initiatives? but You just have to look out the window. The climate is changing regardless of what some people believe or say. Fires are happening, floods are happening, winds are happening, droughts are happening.
00:32:15
Speaker
And there's a tremendous opportunity right now for products and services that address and mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change. For instance, there are so many houses that exist in the United States and Canada that are close to forests. And these houses were built 20, 30 years ago.
00:32:41
Speaker
How do you protect them for fire? What can you go buy that will do that? There's a whole line of products for people to go into. We're very excited about that. What about floods? How do you get away from a flood? How do you protect your house from a flood? Those are the kinds of things we're really excited about.
00:32:59
Speaker
So, there are some major trends going on right now, but climate change is the existential change and threat of our time. And no matter what we say, in 10 years it will become very obvious that it was, even now. It's it's obvious to me, you just have to look in the newspaper.
00:33:19
Speaker
But the thing is, the businesses right now who get involved, because insurances are going to go away, government assistance is going to go away. So it's going to come down to the individual homeowners to protect their homes.
00:33:34
Speaker
What kind of products and services are they going to buy to do that? And this is the real challenge to today's entrepreneur. You want to have a business where there's a real demand? This is it. The demand's only going to get greater. The question is, what do you have to help out? How are you going to address them? How are you going to solve their problem? If people want to learn more about what you and Bonnie are doing, where do they go? What do they read? Where do they get more information?
00:34:02
Speaker
We're all over LinkedIn. ah We have a couple of great websites out there. One is called The Barefoot
Conclusion and Call to Subscribe
00:34:09
Speaker
Spirit. b a r e foot spirit On that site, you'll find over a thousand articles we've written on all aspects of business. If you are in the CPG world, we have a site for that and it's called consumer brand builders. Our new business that we have, which is called Business Audio Theater. You can go to www.businessaudiotheater.com and see what we're doing there. It's exciting. You can listen to samples of some of the stuff we did. It's top-rate Hollywood stuff. Of course, there's our books, The Barefoot Spirit and what have you. Look for us, Michael Hulhan, Bonnie Harvey. We're easy to find.
00:34:51
Speaker
product is—our basic business is called the Barefoot Spirit. That's the spirit with which we executed the Barefoot brand. It's what we took out of it. It's what we've been discussing today.
00:35:03
Speaker
Thanks, Michael, for a terrific conversation. Appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. I also wanted to thank everybody for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and leave a review. It really helps others to discover the show. If you're a B2B SaaS company looking to accelerate your growth, overcome marketing challenges, or refine your strategy, I'd love to help.
00:35:22
Speaker
As a fractional CMO and strategic advisor, I work to create tailored marketing plans that deliver results and contact me through LinkedIn or visit my website, marketingspark.co, or you can email me at mark at markevans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.