From Bankruptcy to Barefoot: A Journey Through Wine Industry Hard Knocks

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I got $300,000 worth of wine and bottling services.

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How do you want it done? And he goes, wow. He says,

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nobody ever asked me what I wanted. You come in here, you

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ask me what I want. I'll tell you what I want. He says, take

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this down. So I'm writing. And he says, he says, give me

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a salt and pepper act. He says, make it better than Bob, cheaper than Bob,

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and put it in a pig. You got that? I'm writing it down. Salt, pepper,

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Bob. I'm looking at it. I'm thinking, what language is this? He says, can you

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do that? I said, yeah, I can do that. I had no idea.

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Sit back and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks

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with Paul Kaye. Hey,

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welcome to Wine Talks with Paul Kaye, available on your favorite podcast hangout,

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Google Play, iVoox, Talk Radio, Pandora, and you name it.

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We're on the road today. We are up in the Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley. It's

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105 degrees and we are outside today, but it's beautiful,

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beautiful wind blowing through. But more importantly is the guest

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list today, and we are with Mike Houlihan and

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Bonnie Harvey, who established the largest, isn't it the

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largest wine brand in America? Is that what ended up happening? We

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built it to be one of the largest wine

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brands in America, and we had it in 28 states, but

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it's, when we sold it to E&J Gallo, they made it

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the largest wine brand of all time. Amazing, so. In the world.

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In the world. So this is Mike Houlihan and Bonnie

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Harvey. Now, My first question is, how many

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podcasts have you guys been on lately?

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Since September, we've been on 75. 75. And how many of

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these podcasts— I'm setting you up, by the way, just so you know— how many

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of these podcasts are from a

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gentleman that Mike actually made a sales call on in

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1989? Absolutely zero,

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Paul, except for this one. Oh, hey, wait a minute. That's the first one, an

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entree, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I want to talk about those

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days and what you thought you were doing, and then we're gonna talk about

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contemporary things that are happening at the Barefoot Spirit, which is a fascinating story as

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well. But I remember, and I had a small office in

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Lomita, California, just inside the beach cities of Torrance.

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I was upstairs in this rickety warehouse. The guy was

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selling, I think, Knorr Swiss dried cereal outta

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there, Swiss soups or things. And my dad had rented a small part.

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And I get this call from a Mike Houlihan who has this

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idea of barefoot sellers.

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Right. Do you remember this? Yes, I do. I do, Paul. You know, I've

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been telling Bonnie all along, I said, I know this guy, I know this guy.

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So yes, we went, I remember it was rickety.

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It was rickety. It was tiny. And

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here they are and they have this Wine of the Month Club, you know, and

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I don't know how old that was at the time. Well, we started '72, but

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what was different then, and we're gonna talk about what happened in the world of

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wine 'cause you saw it all. You know, we used to be like, for instance,

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UPS would pull up and you would handwrite 15 on a page

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boxes. You could throw 100 boxes on there or 200. They never counted, who cared?

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You just shipped it out of there. But you came to me with this idea.

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It's called Barefoot Cellars. Right. About how long had you

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been doing this already? Well, we started at 3 years.

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We started in '86. We actually had the concept in

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'85 and we put it in the bottle in '86.

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And in '87 and '88,

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we sold it mostly out of the tasting room at

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Davis Bynum. In winery, um, and we made— we had a deal

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with him. And, uh, we had a few brokers

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around the country, but we hadn't really expanded.

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When you met me, we had two distributors

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in California, one in the north and one in the south. Really? Yeah.

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Okay, so, and how did— go back, you got to go back a little further.

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We started in '86. What were you thinking is the question? And how

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did you guys meet? Well, okay, so, so Bonnie and I

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Why don't you tell the story, Bonnie? Sure, sure.

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So Michael and I had moved to Sonoma County independently, and we

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were both business consultants, but neither of us were really

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wine drinkers, strangely enough.

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I had clients in the wine industry, and so did Michael, because

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that's the major business here. I had a grape grower

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who hadn't been paid for his grapes in 3 years,

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I discovered. And so I sent my new boyfriend

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here. Mr. Michael Houlihan out

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to collect the funds, which were $300,000. So

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you're the strongman in this? Well, you know, it's like— Yeah, he's the muscle man.

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Like, did I marry the mob or what? Yeah, right. I just met this gal

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and she's got me out collecting 300 large. Okay, that's funny.

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Well, that's a lot of money though, back then, particularly for— Oh gosh,

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it still is a lot of money. But yes, it was even more in

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1985 when this took place. So Michael went to the

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winery. It was Souveraine Winery at the time. And

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they had, had coincidentally just

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declared bankruptcy that morning, just filed for.

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So there was no money to be paid to anybody. But

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Michael, being the clever businessman that he is— clever,

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clever, clever— he, he was looking around for an

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opportunity. He was looking for some kind of resources,

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something that he could come home with. He had to bring home the bacon, right?

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So he saw that they had a bottling machine.

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He asked him if it worked. Yeah, it works. And they had tanks that were

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full of wine, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. So

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he was able to turn that $300,000

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worth of debt that was owed to my client, the grape

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grower, into a trade, bulk

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wine and bottling services. So

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St. Supéry, St. Supéry? No, Souverine. Oh, Souverine. So. Yeah,

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it was before it was Château Souverine. It was just Souverine

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Winery at the time. So the farmer was owed the money or was

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it the Souverine both? Yes. The farmer was owed

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the money and Bonnie worked for the farmer. I see, okay. She was

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doing. So now you find this juice and all this equipment. Well, what I, I

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wind up getting a trade out of him and I come home, you know, and

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I'm thinking, well, you know, it's better than a poke in

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the eye. And we come up with a

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label, we learn the distribution system, we learn all the

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laws in the 50 states. Yeah, sure. We get alcoholic beverage

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licenses. How hard could it be? Yeah, how long could that take, right?

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So Bonnie and I go to work. Let me just

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interrupt you for a moment. The grape grower, after we'd

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done all the research, developed the label, and gotten all the licenses for the

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grape grower, who was owed the money, he said, you know, I'm a full-time

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winemaker as well as a grape grower, and I can't take

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on another business. And we said, now wait a

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minute, we've just spent 5 months putting all this

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together, and now you say you can't handle

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it? So Michael quickly said, tell you what, we'll

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do it. The grape

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grower says, I guess I'll just have to take the loss. And that was not

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acceptable. To us. That is— Yeah.

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So you're going, wait a minute. Yeah. How did we get ourselves into this already?

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Yeah. Yeah. So we took advantage of

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a $300,000 opportunity and with no

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other money and no knowledge of the industry,

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we jumped out there and we decided we'd take it over.

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We'd pay him $0.01 on the dollar and

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we'd bottle it all up and sell it to a chain and, you know,

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pay him back. How hard could that be? Yeah. How long

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could that take? That was plan A. Yeah, that was plan A. And so

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the name at that point, I kind of remembered that this would,

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the name was out there already. It had already been used at some point. Well,

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you know, there's a story behind it. We, when

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we got started, we went to John Brown, who was the

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buyer for Lucky Stores at the time in Northern California. Lucky Stores, that name just

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rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? He's quite a character. In fact, in our audiobook,

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it's played by— Ed Asner. The Ed Asner. Really?

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And he's just as snarky as John Brown was.

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So Don, you know, I went into him and I said, look,

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you know, I mean, I'm hat in hand here and I'm saying, I got

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$300,000 worth of wine and bottling services. How do

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you want it, Don? And he goes, wow. He says, nobody ever

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asked me what I wanted. Everybody comes in here, you know, they've

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got their logo design, they got their name, you know, they got their prices,

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they're giving me benefits, they're giving me features, you know, they've got

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pricing programs. You come in here, you ask me what I want,

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I'll tell you what I want. He says, take this down. So I'm

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writing and he says, he says, give me a salt and pepper act.

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He says, make it better than Bob, cheaper than Bob, and put it in a

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pig. You got that? And I'm writing it down. Salt, pepper, Bob. I'm looking at

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it. I'm thinking, what language is this? Sounds like an outdoor

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barbecue. So I— he says, can you do that?

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I said, "Yeah, I can do that." I had no idea. You didn't know what

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you're talking about. No. So I went to my friend who'd been in the

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industry, he's a couple generations, and I said, "Tell me something." I said, "What's

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a salt and pepper act?" He says, "Oh," he says, "That's like

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Cabernet Sauvignon, you know, like pepper, and salt like Sauvignon Blanc."

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I said, "Oh, that's interesting." A red and a white variety. A red and a

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white varietal under the same— 30 years, I've never heard that comment. Well,

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you gotta get beyond the warehouses. This is the way they talk.

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Up in the buyer's office. I see. And so—

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So that's the salt and pepper. I said, so tell me, I said,

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who's Bob anyway? He said, oh, Bob, you know, that's like

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Robert Mondavi. You know, Bob Red, Bob White. I said, oh, Robert

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Mondavi, huh? Make it cheaper than Robert. And better. And

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better. I said, that's a tall order. No kidding. I said, pray tell me one

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last thing. I said, what is a pig? He says, oh, a

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pig. He says, that's the big fat bottle of wine. That's the 1.5

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Magnum. That's not the 750 that everybody thinks of as a

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fifth. Wow. It's twice the size. Yeah. I said, oh,

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I get it. Salt and Pepper Act. Better than Bob, cheaper than Bob, and put

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it in a pig. That's where this buyer had room

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on his shelf. So he needed 1.5s of inexpensive

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wine. Right. And he didn't care what he called it. No. Well, he

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did. He said the name has to be the same as

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the logo, the image. Really? He had that

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opinion about it? Well, yeah. He said, make it in plain English. I

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don't want any French. Don't give me any châteaux. And he

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started getting a little upset about it. He said, no bridges, no hills.

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No ridges, no— Yeah, I've got enough of those. He says, I got enough

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of those. Yeah. He says, oh, and "You know, make it visible

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from 4 feet away so she can see it while she's pushing her cart down

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the aisle." And I thought— This is one merchandiser, this guy. In

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37 seconds, this guy's giving me the equivalent of a master's degree

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in wine merchandise. Totally. And I mean, he's

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been in the business for about 25 years at this point. This is one of

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the guys who put together Bottle Barn. That was his business. Oh, I

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remember that, yeah. So I had a lot of respect for Don even though

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he was rather snarky and cranky. But he was giving me the

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straight skinny. And so we went back and we were thinking

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now the name the same as the logo.

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And then we thought, you know, Davis Bynum used to have a wine

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years ago called Barefoot Bynum, a screw top. He sold it

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to the hippies back in Berkeley days. I said, I wonder if he would

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part with that. So we went to Davis and— He hadn't produced it in 12

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years. Yeah, and he says, I want a big number for that,

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you know? And I said, but Davis, I said, it's sitting there, you haven't used

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it in 12. He goes, It's worth it because you want it.

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And so I said, okay, I'll tell you what, we'll buy it from you,

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but you know, I don't have any money, so you know, we'll have to work

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it out some way. So we figured out a way to work it out and

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that's how Barefoot gets started and that's where the label comes from. What

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a good story. Yeah. I remember Barefoot buying them. Now it might've predated me

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as a functional thing, but I was working in my dad's store in the '70s.

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Yeah. You know, through '82, so. Yeah, '72. I remember that brand. So now

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it connects. This is really fascinating. All right, so you got a bunch of juice.

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You know how to bottle it. You have a— you think you came up with

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a name and an image. You haven't sold anything yet.

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No, no. But one of the deals that

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I got with Davis was that I could pay

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him by paying him $1 a case

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for every case that sold through his tasting room. And I would

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sell it to him. So he was making like 50%

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margin. You know, and he started selling it and

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he sold it so well that after about a year and a half, you

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know, he decided to DC it out of the tasting room. And that

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forced us to get serious about distribution. So how long did it take to

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go through that first bunch of, you know, were they 1,500-gallon

220
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tanks or, I mean, how much did you have? Well, we got 18,000 cases

221
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worth. Oh wow, that's, that was a tall order.

222
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We started off as a medium-sized winery. Yeah,

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like everybody does, right? Right. But the irony of it is,

224
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is when you're selling wine for $4.99, $5.99, you better

225
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sell a lot. You better sell 18,000 cases just to keep the lights on

226
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because the cost of the glass and the foils and the corks is the same

227
00:13:52,310 --> 00:13:55,990
for a $90 bottle of wine as it is for a $5 bottle of

228
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wine. That's right. Davis Bynum used to say,

229
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"Yep, we're losing money on every case, but we're making it up in

230
00:14:03,230 --> 00:14:06,820
volume." Yeah, well, I know that side of it. Yeah, yeah. He also said—

231
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That's a good business lesson for sure. He said, You know,

232
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he said any fool can go into the wine business,

233
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but they have to be a tireless fool. Yes. Well, I'm gonna tell you

234
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my impressions. This is especially seeing you guys on the

235
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different podcasts you've been on in the YouTubes. And I

236
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told Sandra, I said, he came in and he was

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enthusiastic. Maybe that's not the right word. Maybe it was

238
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aggressive. What's the word I'm looking for? But you came in, you were convinced. You

239
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were convinced you had this product. And I don't remember since it was '89, and

240
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where you were in the sales volume. I had never heard of it at that

241
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point. But this idea for you was gonna be, this was

242
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a serious idea. I didn't know if you were still trying to figure it out

243
00:14:51,790 --> 00:14:54,630
at that point, like 3 years into this. Well, we were very

244
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sure that we had discovered a market that

245
00:14:58,910 --> 00:15:02,310
was unrecognized and

246
00:15:02,310 --> 00:15:04,470
unattended. You see, in

247
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1986,

248
00:15:06,983 --> 00:15:10,720
75% of the wine

249
00:15:10,880 --> 00:15:14,720
in California was purchased by women, not men, but

250
00:15:15,120 --> 00:15:18,760
100% of the wine buyers were men. And the

251
00:15:18,760 --> 00:15:22,160
men were interested in the vintage date, the

252
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appellation, you know, the pedigree and the

253
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heritage of the wine. The women were interested in

254
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consistent flavor. They wanted a Tuesday night

255
00:15:33,560 --> 00:15:37,240
wine that didn't taste funny next year. And they wanted it to be on the

256
00:15:37,240 --> 00:15:40,060
shelf when they came back to buy it. Play it a second show. That's important.

257
00:15:40,300 --> 00:15:44,060
Yeah. 'Cause Trader Joe's at that point was doing the fearless flyer,

258
00:15:44,060 --> 00:15:47,820
2,000 cases. And when it's gone, it's gone. You can't ever get it again. Right.

259
00:15:47,820 --> 00:15:50,860
Buy or buys. Yeah. Yeah. So what we did is

260
00:15:51,580 --> 00:15:55,300
we started off, you know, the big chains wouldn't take

261
00:15:55,300 --> 00:15:58,940
us 'cause we went back, we went back to Don

262
00:15:58,940 --> 00:16:01,740
Brown. You know, it's in the audio play.

263
00:16:03,340 --> 00:16:07,020
And you know, he said, I can't take this.

264
00:16:07,020 --> 00:16:09,820
He says, are you kidding me? He says, you put a foot on it? He

265
00:16:09,820 --> 00:16:13,560
says, He said, "Nobody's ever heard of anything

266
00:16:13,560 --> 00:16:17,400
called Barefoot." After all this, after all I told you.

267
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I said, "But you know, the name is the same as the logo. It's

268
00:16:21,680 --> 00:16:25,080
in a pig. She can see it from 3 feet away. What do you want?"

269
00:16:25,320 --> 00:16:28,880
He goes, "Yeah," he says, "but are you gonna put $1 million into advertising in

270
00:16:28,880 --> 00:16:32,400
this?" And I said, "A million dollars?" I said, "I don't know that I have

271
00:16:32,400 --> 00:16:36,200
$1,000." He says, "Well, I'm not gonna take it. No big box store, no chain

272
00:16:36,200 --> 00:16:39,800
is gonna take it 'cause it's unknown." I said, "What am I gonna do? I

273
00:16:39,800 --> 00:16:43,600
bottle it all up for you." He says, Well, I guess you're just going to

274
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have to go out and sell every mom-and-pop and independent and corner grocery

275
00:16:47,320 --> 00:16:51,120
store until you make a name for yourself. I think you just answered that question.

276
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And I said, are you kidding me, Don? I said, that will take

277
00:16:54,720 --> 00:16:58,240
years. He said, that's right, whoo-hoo,

278
00:16:59,520 --> 00:17:03,120
you better get started. You got a real

279
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crash course in how tough this business is. And what I mean, you just

280
00:17:06,960 --> 00:17:10,600
literally that one story hit almost every aspect of the wine

281
00:17:10,600 --> 00:17:14,260
marketing business, which everyone's had to try and figure out and can't figure it

282
00:17:14,260 --> 00:17:17,900
out. And it took your persistence to figure this thing out. 'Cause I

283
00:17:17,900 --> 00:17:21,500
remember that the, it wasn't, I wanna say it wasn't desperate. It was just like,

284
00:17:21,580 --> 00:17:25,181
I've got this stuff and this is the brand. Passionate. Yeah, it was passion. Oh,

285
00:17:25,181 --> 00:17:28,940
I like that. We were passionately convinced that

286
00:17:28,940 --> 00:17:32,780
we, well, because we were doing tastings and the women would line

287
00:17:32,780 --> 00:17:36,460
up and they would take the bottle and they'd say, I just

288
00:17:36,460 --> 00:17:39,860
love this wine. And they would use the love word. And you know, it was—

289
00:17:39,860 --> 00:17:43,330
They'd hold it close. They'd hold it close. And where was it tastings? In the

290
00:17:43,480 --> 00:17:47,240
stores or? No, this, we entered every competition

291
00:17:47,240 --> 00:17:50,680
we could because we needed third party. First time working with the first juice, the

292
00:17:50,680 --> 00:17:54,440
first special juice. First juice, yes. In fact, you know, a guy that you know

293
00:17:55,080 --> 00:17:58,200
in Southern California at the International Wine Competition,

294
00:17:59,320 --> 00:18:00,600
let me see, what's his name?

295
00:18:02,760 --> 00:18:06,520
He's passed away now. Anyway. Gorman, I mean, the LA

296
00:18:06,520 --> 00:18:10,290
Times guy or Balzer or? Yeah, one of those guys. One of those

297
00:18:10,290 --> 00:18:14,050
guys. Yeah. Nate Cromen. He said it

298
00:18:14,050 --> 00:18:17,650
was the silver lining in the wine business. He said,

299
00:18:17,730 --> 00:18:21,490
this is a great bridge. It's gonna increase the

300
00:18:21,490 --> 00:18:25,010
size of the wine aficionado envelope.

301
00:18:25,170 --> 00:18:28,810
You know, these guys at Barefoot, they're not going after wine drinkers,

302
00:18:28,810 --> 00:18:32,610
they're going after beer drinkers. Yeah, what a thing to say to two people

303
00:18:32,610 --> 00:18:35,170
that didn't know what they were doing when they got started. And all of a

304
00:18:35,170 --> 00:18:38,371
sudden one of the great, you know, judges of LA is telling you,

305
00:18:39,090 --> 00:18:42,770
We think you've got something. That's right. And we got, you know, people

306
00:18:43,010 --> 00:18:46,850
started writing about us up in Seattle and in other cities

307
00:18:47,490 --> 00:18:51,330
in the wine columns. And, you know, we were just hustling. The

308
00:18:51,330 --> 00:18:55,090
name of our book is, you know, "Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart

309
00:18:55,570 --> 00:18:59,410
Built America's Number One." Well, hustle is—

310
00:18:59,890 --> 00:19:03,610
Hustle, here's an example of hustle. Hustle is when you get

311
00:19:03,610 --> 00:19:07,410
the gold medal at the LA Wine Competition and the next day you have

312
00:19:07,410 --> 00:19:11,150
gold medal stickers on every bottle in LA. That's hustle.

313
00:19:11,150 --> 00:19:14,870
Yes, hustle. You guys are out there going for it. So he's out making

314
00:19:14,870 --> 00:19:17,710
sales calls and you guys are trying to figure out what to do with all

315
00:19:17,710 --> 00:19:21,550
this inventory. Right. You think you have a good idea. What

316
00:19:21,550 --> 00:19:25,310
are you doing? Are you hustling too? Are

317
00:19:25,310 --> 00:19:29,070
you just calming him down when he gets back? I'm a juggler. Yeah. I'm juggling

318
00:19:29,070 --> 00:19:32,750
payables and receivables. And believe me, that was

319
00:19:32,750 --> 00:19:36,590
challenging. Yeah, receivables. I was also on the

320
00:19:36,590 --> 00:19:40,150
bottling line. I had to learn everything about glass

321
00:19:40,660 --> 00:19:44,500
corks, foils, labels. And then I had

322
00:19:44,500 --> 00:19:46,740
to make sure that the right product,

323
00:19:48,260 --> 00:19:51,780
the right supplies came in for the right varietal on

324
00:19:51,780 --> 00:19:55,540
bottling day. Big surprise to find out that, you know, it was

325
00:19:55,540 --> 00:19:59,300
the wrong labels. Yeah, or there's a clear glass instead of all the green,

326
00:19:59,300 --> 00:20:03,020
dead leaf green or whatever. So I just, I discovered that

327
00:20:03,020 --> 00:20:06,580
they were different sized bottles and different shapes

328
00:20:06,660 --> 00:20:09,300
and different colors. This is shocking. Wow.

329
00:20:10,340 --> 00:20:14,080
And I discovered that you had to to coat the paper on the

330
00:20:14,080 --> 00:20:17,880
label for this particular bottling machine because it was

331
00:20:17,880 --> 00:20:21,520
a wet line. Oh, you find out what happens if you don't

332
00:20:21,520 --> 00:20:25,160
coat your label on a wet line real quick. Boy, I had a

333
00:20:25,160 --> 00:20:28,040
huge amount of lessons to learn. Yes. So

334
00:20:28,880 --> 00:20:32,360
let's fast forward a little bit because this is— that those lessons are

335
00:20:32,360 --> 00:20:36,000
invaluable and they can be very expensive. So now you've

336
00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:39,350
got the brand. When did you think

337
00:20:39,990 --> 00:20:43,030
that maybe there is some traction in this idea?

338
00:20:43,750 --> 00:20:47,550
Well, we really thought it was gonna sell like hotcakes before it ever

339
00:20:47,550 --> 00:20:51,310
went in the bottle. When we were still thinking about

340
00:20:51,310 --> 00:20:54,950
the label, I came up with what the label looks like one

341
00:20:54,950 --> 00:20:58,630
night. And I knew it was gonna be a very

342
00:20:58,630 --> 00:21:02,350
big seller, a very hot seller immediately. Just like that

343
00:21:02,350 --> 00:21:06,190
was— Well, that was it. It was faith. Let

344
00:21:06,190 --> 00:21:09,950
me Filter that question. When did sales look like?

345
00:21:10,110 --> 00:21:13,070
That's a good question. You're looking for proof, are you?

346
00:21:13,950 --> 00:21:16,590
Yeah, I'm looking for proof. Wait a minute. When you woke up one morning, you

347
00:21:16,590 --> 00:21:20,310
looked at each other, wait a minute, this like, maybe we have something. Okay, I

348
00:21:20,310 --> 00:21:23,950
think it was because I was in Los Angeles

349
00:21:24,510 --> 00:21:28,350
and I was out there, you know, in the Pasadena area.

350
00:21:28,910 --> 00:21:32,670
And the salesperson I was with said, there's a wacky

351
00:21:32,670 --> 00:21:36,510
person out here that I want you to meet. He's got a little shop.

352
00:21:36,910 --> 00:21:40,610
Everybody thinks he's crazy. He calls the manager

353
00:21:40,810 --> 00:21:44,610
captain. He calls the clerks mates. He's got nets

354
00:21:44,610 --> 00:21:48,250
on the wall. He's got, you know, beluga,

355
00:21:48,330 --> 00:21:51,930
whatever, from Russia. Hawaiian shirts. Hawaiian shirts.

356
00:21:52,410 --> 00:21:56,250
I said, really? I said, that sounds like a lot of fun. He said,

357
00:21:56,250 --> 00:21:59,530
yeah. He says, your wacky label is perfect for him.

358
00:21:59,850 --> 00:22:03,610
So we went in there and we made the presentation to him, and

359
00:22:03,770 --> 00:22:06,890
he agreed to buy it and put it in two of his stores. He was

360
00:22:06,890 --> 00:22:09,960
building his third store. That was Trader Joe's. Joe Cologne.

361
00:22:10,910 --> 00:22:13,950
And so here we are. Was it Bob Burney you were talking about? Yeah, Bob

362
00:22:13,950 --> 00:22:17,550
Burney. Yeah. Wow. And so Bob takes Barefoot

363
00:22:17,950 --> 00:22:21,670
and he blasts it out with Trader Joe's

364
00:22:21,670 --> 00:22:25,310
all over the country as they grew. So there's people

365
00:22:25,390 --> 00:22:29,190
who live in places like Des Moines, Iowa. Hey, honey, let's go down

366
00:22:29,190 --> 00:22:32,990
to the mall. They're opening a Trader Joe's. We'll see what they're

367
00:22:32,990 --> 00:22:36,670
doing in California, you know, and the world is coming to us right

368
00:22:36,670 --> 00:22:40,447
here. So we would have big stacks, you know,

369
00:22:40,447 --> 00:22:43,940
in the Des Moines Trader Joe's. That's phenomenal. Yeah. And

370
00:22:44,100 --> 00:22:47,620
so that's how we led out into the United States

371
00:22:47,620 --> 00:22:51,460
was by having a strategic alliance with another wacky

372
00:22:51,460 --> 00:22:55,140
person. Well, Bob was not an easy buyer. He was a great guy. He passed

373
00:22:55,140 --> 00:22:58,781
away years ago, as you know. Oh yeah. His daughter Christina Koulerides is

374
00:22:58,781 --> 00:23:02,300
still selling to Trader Joe's. I did not

375
00:23:02,300 --> 00:23:05,980
know that that's what happened. And so that's what they had to be

376
00:23:05,980 --> 00:23:09,660
the trigger for. When that happened, we said, okay, wow. I

377
00:23:09,660 --> 00:23:13,300
mean, we were faced with an awesome reality,

378
00:23:13,300 --> 00:23:17,060
which is, wow, if Trader Joe's is gonna be in Des Moines, Iowa, who's

379
00:23:17,060 --> 00:23:20,300
gonna go into the stores? Who's gonna check the pricing? Who's gonna make sure it's

380
00:23:20,300 --> 00:23:24,020
on the shelf? Who's gonna, you know, pick up the spoils and who's

381
00:23:24,020 --> 00:23:27,300
gonna be there, you know, to police it? And you know, how are we gonna

382
00:23:27,300 --> 00:23:30,740
get people into the Des Moines, Iowa store to buy those

383
00:23:30,900 --> 00:23:33,940
products? And what other stores are in Des Moines, Iowa

384
00:23:36,080 --> 00:23:39,040
that we could sell? And so that, led to Kroger's. Another huge

385
00:23:40,400 --> 00:23:43,520
distillation. Exactly. So here we are and

386
00:23:44,240 --> 00:23:48,000
Kroger's goes like this. All right, we're gonna authorize you guys for

387
00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:51,680
5 states and we're gonna put you on sale for $5.99.

388
00:23:51,920 --> 00:23:55,240
Can you meet that price in all 5 states? We said, yes, of course. Of

389
00:23:55,240 --> 00:23:58,200
course you can. Then we go find out what the taxes are in the 5

390
00:23:58,200 --> 00:24:01,200
states. And in some of those states— Transportation. $1 a

391
00:24:01,890 --> 00:24:05,450
bottle. Oh no. Yeah. But it

392
00:24:05,450 --> 00:24:09,250
sounded good when you got asked the question because Santa

393
00:24:09,250 --> 00:24:13,090
here's in charge of all the excise taxes now. Well, you know

394
00:24:13,090 --> 00:24:16,930
exactly what I'm talking about. And it's ridiculous, right? Oh yeah. Well, the cost

395
00:24:16,930 --> 00:24:20,490
of doing business, I would say the biggest mistake that people

396
00:24:20,570 --> 00:24:24,330
make is they understand the cost of

397
00:24:24,330 --> 00:24:27,850
goods, but they don't understand the cost of sales.

398
00:24:28,760 --> 00:24:32,560
Because the cost of sales are different in every state. And

399
00:24:32,560 --> 00:24:35,480
for instance, if you do business in South Carolina,

400
00:24:36,360 --> 00:24:39,960
your cost of sales are way less than if you did business in New York.

401
00:24:40,680 --> 00:24:44,440
Way less, like half. You know, so we wound

402
00:24:44,440 --> 00:24:48,200
up expanding Barefoot in the southeastern United

403
00:24:48,280 --> 00:24:51,640
States first. So you had to find a

404
00:24:51,640 --> 00:24:55,400
distributor? Found distributors down there. 'Cause how did Bob do it to those stores?

405
00:24:55,400 --> 00:24:59,080
Did he ship it himself? No, no, he bought it through distributors in those

406
00:24:59,080 --> 00:25:02,360
states. I see, okay. So at that point you've got sort of a distributor network

407
00:25:02,360 --> 00:25:06,200
going on and you're sort of sorting it out and it feels like, have

408
00:25:06,200 --> 00:25:09,760
you sold through this first 18,000 cases yet? We sold through,

409
00:25:09,760 --> 00:25:13,600
yeah, we sold through it in the first year. Less than a

410
00:25:13,600 --> 00:25:17,000
year. Less than a year. And we did it with mom and papas mostly in

411
00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:20,720
San Francisco and in Santa Barbara. We went to Santa

412
00:25:20,720 --> 00:25:24,520
Barbara because, you know, I had gone to college down there

413
00:25:24,520 --> 00:25:28,240
and I knew that it was a recreational beach town and

414
00:25:28,460 --> 00:25:32,300
I knew I knew that Los Angeles people went there and we thought, well,

415
00:25:32,300 --> 00:25:36,100
they could play on the beach and discover Barefoot on the beach. And then

416
00:25:36,100 --> 00:25:39,300
they would take a taste for it back to LA. And when we introduced it

417
00:25:39,300 --> 00:25:42,980
in LA, they would know it. And so that was the strategy. Yeah.

418
00:25:42,980 --> 00:25:46,820
'Cause you had, did you have the socks then? 'Cause I think you walked in

419
00:25:46,820 --> 00:25:50,580
with socks or something or some kind of sales things. We

420
00:25:50,580 --> 00:25:54,180
had a holiday back card. Yeah, that was a

421
00:25:54,180 --> 00:25:57,820
stocking with the foot coming out of it. Yes. Knock your

422
00:25:57,820 --> 00:26:01,600
socks off. We had it in the store at some point. Point. Yeah, we had

423
00:26:01,600 --> 00:26:05,200
the socks. This guy's got a good memory. I almost

424
00:26:05,200 --> 00:26:08,680
forgot about the socks. I want to spend some time on the barefoot spirit, so—

425
00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:12,240
but this— I had to uncover the, the, the wine part just because we had

426
00:26:12,240 --> 00:26:15,840
history together, so to speak. And now that I know that you had Bob Bernie

427
00:26:15,840 --> 00:26:18,760
on your side, and he and I were good friends when he was alive, so

428
00:26:18,760 --> 00:26:22,480
I just found that— I find that really fascinating. And this is a very

429
00:26:22,480 --> 00:26:25,960
difficult business. It's no— it's no easier today.

430
00:26:26,200 --> 00:26:29,920
It's probably even harder I'd say, yeah. With the types

431
00:26:29,920 --> 00:26:33,640
of things that you can do. And I can't imagine what's going to happen to

432
00:26:33,640 --> 00:26:37,080
the winery business during COVID here, because so many people are going to

433
00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:40,920
find themselves with no cash. And maybe, you know,

434
00:26:40,920 --> 00:26:44,720
maybe there's a, hey, wait a minute, maybe there's a $300,000 debt on some

435
00:26:44,720 --> 00:26:48,560
juice out there that you start this whole project over again. No, no,

436
00:26:48,560 --> 00:26:52,320
no. So once is enough. Did you decide at some point

437
00:26:52,320 --> 00:26:55,880
that this was too big, too hard, too busy that you

438
00:26:55,960 --> 00:26:59,650
saw got Gallo's involvement or that kind of happened on its

439
00:26:59,650 --> 00:27:03,330
own? Well, the profit margin

440
00:27:03,330 --> 00:27:06,850
was so low in the first place that we knew that we had

441
00:27:06,850 --> 00:27:10,610
to bottle and sell 500,000 cases

442
00:27:10,610 --> 00:27:14,130
a year in order to get the attention of a buyer. Yes. Because

443
00:27:14,130 --> 00:27:17,850
there's no profit until you've got that volume there. So

444
00:27:17,850 --> 00:27:21,050
we admired Gallo because they had merchandisers out there

445
00:27:21,530 --> 00:27:25,370
that were working their tails off in the stores and

446
00:27:25,850 --> 00:27:29,270
their products were selling faster and had more shelf space than

447
00:27:29,270 --> 00:27:32,830
anybody else. So we were watching what they were doing from the

448
00:27:32,830 --> 00:27:36,670
beginning and trying to copy them by putting our

449
00:27:36,670 --> 00:27:40,270
own salespeople out there in the stores to merchandise the shelves.

450
00:27:40,270 --> 00:27:43,790
Because we found out pretty quickly the bottle that wouldn't

451
00:27:43,790 --> 00:27:46,550
sell was the one that never made it to the shelf. Yeah.

452
00:27:47,830 --> 00:27:51,030
And our biggest problem was being a fast seller

453
00:27:51,350 --> 00:27:54,950
because when we were, we'd empty the shelf. And then

454
00:27:54,950 --> 00:27:58,590
again, you can't sell if there's no product there. So you had to have our

455
00:27:58,590 --> 00:28:02,110
salespeople in the stores like Gallo did to

456
00:28:02,190 --> 00:28:05,910
be replacing the product. Basically merchandisers who are

457
00:28:05,910 --> 00:28:09,750
fronting the merchandise, which was my job at the liquor store. Exactly. You

458
00:28:09,750 --> 00:28:13,510
know, so Bonnie and I, we were outsiders, as we say. So we

459
00:28:13,510 --> 00:28:17,230
are learning every day. And so when we see how Gallo

460
00:28:17,230 --> 00:28:20,990
is operating, we say, oh, there's a lesson. Now people

461
00:28:20,990 --> 00:28:24,760
in the industry would kind of reject that idea.

462
00:28:24,760 --> 00:28:27,960
They'd say, "Oh no, the distributor's gonna take care of that. Don't worry."

463
00:28:29,080 --> 00:28:32,120
The retailer will take care of it. Oh, the retailer will take care of it,

464
00:28:32,120 --> 00:28:35,000
they would say. We worried. Yeah.

465
00:28:35,880 --> 00:28:38,960
'Cause we had 500,000 cases to sell. We used to give a course up at

466
00:28:38,960 --> 00:28:42,200
UC Davis and it was called "Don't Be the

467
00:28:42,200 --> 00:28:45,480
Winemaker from the Bankrupt Winery. They'll Blame You."

468
00:28:45,960 --> 00:28:49,320
And we gave it at the OIV, which is the organization

469
00:28:50,190 --> 00:28:53,950
International Viticulture, a French or international

470
00:28:54,110 --> 00:28:57,790
organization. We have about 150 people. It was 4 winemakers.

471
00:28:57,950 --> 00:29:00,750
Yeah, in the class. And so we come in there and

472
00:29:01,870 --> 00:29:05,310
we tell them about wine merchandising. Now,

473
00:29:06,030 --> 00:29:09,830
if you ask a winemaker what the label should look like, they'll step right up

474
00:29:09,830 --> 00:29:13,390
to the plate and tell you. Yeah, sure. See, but they have never really

475
00:29:13,470 --> 00:29:17,150
dealt with merchandising and will it be visible from 4 feet

476
00:29:17,150 --> 00:29:20,830
away and will it stand out from the other 1,000 labels.

477
00:29:22,030 --> 00:29:25,750
So that's the kind of stuff you learn hard knocks. Like,

478
00:29:25,750 --> 00:29:29,550
you make friends with people that have dirt under their

479
00:29:29,550 --> 00:29:32,990
fingernails. We say make friends with people in low places. We mean the people that

480
00:29:32,990 --> 00:29:36,750
stock the shelves. Sure. People doing the work. People doing the actual work.

481
00:29:36,750 --> 00:29:40,550
Truck drivers, forklift operators. They were telling us stuff that

482
00:29:40,550 --> 00:29:44,350
was real insightful. And we were going, oh, yeah, that's right.

483
00:29:44,510 --> 00:29:47,730
But Gallo, So what they were showing us was

484
00:29:48,050 --> 00:29:51,290
he who merchandises wins. Well,

485
00:29:51,970 --> 00:29:55,690
that's what I think their guerrilla marketing

486
00:29:55,690 --> 00:29:58,610
was known for, was bumping that thing. Because the other day I was in the

487
00:29:58,610 --> 00:30:02,450
market, she's like, what are you doing? And so I took my phone, I put

488
00:30:02,450 --> 00:30:05,890
it on selfie mode, and I'm looking over my shoulder. I'm telling my

489
00:30:05,890 --> 00:30:09,650
customers, look, the reason these wines are at eye height is

490
00:30:09,650 --> 00:30:13,330
because of the merchandising. It's like salad dressing and

491
00:30:13,330 --> 00:30:17,010
toothpaste. You're not gonna get in the way of Procter Gamble trying to sell Crest,

492
00:30:17,010 --> 00:30:20,530
right? I mean, so there's a reason why all of a sudden Snoop Dogg's, you

493
00:30:20,530 --> 00:30:24,210
know, criminal wine is right in your eye. He's not in the wine

494
00:30:24,210 --> 00:30:27,810
business. Who cares what Snoop Dogg drinks? But he's got the best next

495
00:30:27,810 --> 00:30:31,610
to Apothic Red. That doesn't happen by accident, right? Oh, you learned this

496
00:30:31,610 --> 00:30:35,090
part. Oh yeah. So you're out there now trying to like,

497
00:30:35,090 --> 00:30:38,720
you're colliding with Gallo almost in the sense of you're trying But with

498
00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:42,360
a great deal of respect,

499
00:30:42,360 --> 00:30:44,440
I remember, this is a true

500
00:30:46,680 --> 00:30:49,400
story, I was up in Minnesota and I was

501
00:30:50,520 --> 00:30:53,880
in a store up there, I think it's called

502
00:30:54,520 --> 00:30:58,320
MGM, and it was in St. Paul. And there was this guy

503
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:00,880
in a suit and tie, he was walking down the aisle and he had two

504
00:31:00,880 --> 00:31:04,560
other guys walking with him and they were in suits and ties.

505
00:31:04,560 --> 00:31:07,720
And I saw him and he was pointing things out and going like this with

506
00:31:07,720 --> 00:31:11,520
his finger. And he was very concerned about, you know,

507
00:31:11,520 --> 00:31:15,200
what was next to the products that he was selling and whatnot. And I could

508
00:31:15,200 --> 00:31:18,720
see that they were Gallo products, but I didn't know who it was. He was

509
00:31:18,720 --> 00:31:22,480
asking a lot of questions. About 2 weeks later, I'm in

510
00:31:22,480 --> 00:31:25,400
Tallahassee, Florida, in a, in a Publix store down

511
00:31:25,960 --> 00:31:29,760
there. And I'm pricing items, right? Taking my own

512
00:31:29,760 --> 00:31:33,410
wine out of the box. I'm the I'm the president and CEO of this

513
00:31:33,890 --> 00:31:37,571
company, right? You can throw in chairman. It doesn't matter. And merchandiser.

514
00:31:37,571 --> 00:31:41,290
I'm merchandising, you know, I'm pricing items, right? So I'm pricing my

515
00:31:41,290 --> 00:31:43,530
own items 'cause I know if I don't price them, they won't get on the

516
00:31:43,530 --> 00:31:47,329
shelf. They don't get on the shelf, they don't sell. They don't sell, scan doesn't

517
00:31:47,650 --> 00:31:51,170
show. They don't scan, doesn't show, then you're outta there.

518
00:31:52,450 --> 00:31:56,210
So I see the same guy walking down the aisle. And so I

519
00:31:56,210 --> 00:31:59,050
say to the salesman that I'm with, I said, who is that guy anyway? I

520
00:31:59,050 --> 00:32:01,340
think I just saw him. I saw him up in Minnesota a couple of weeks

521
00:32:01,420 --> 00:32:04,660
ago. Wow. He goes, "Oh, that's Joe Gallo." I said, "You gotta be kidding me.

522
00:32:04,660 --> 00:32:08,420
Not the Joe Gallo." He says, "Yeah." He says, "He likes to

523
00:32:08,420 --> 00:32:12,180
get information on the street. He likes to stay on top of the

524
00:32:12,180 --> 00:32:15,660
market." Wow. I went home and I said, "Bonnie, you

525
00:32:16,060 --> 00:32:19,780
know, all this work we're doing out in the marketplace, I guess we're not crazy,

526
00:32:19,780 --> 00:32:23,420
you know, because I just saw Joe doing this." And Bonnie

527
00:32:23,820 --> 00:32:26,300
says— What part of this don't you think is

528
00:32:28,140 --> 00:32:30,700
crazy? Yeah. In other words, you guys are both crazy. You're both

529
00:32:32,290 --> 00:32:35,610
crazy. That is really fascinating. So a model that

530
00:32:35,610 --> 00:32:39,450
you adopted, that you're starting to adopt, and then did

531
00:32:39,450 --> 00:32:42,770
you approach Gallo and say, look, we're out there on the street

532
00:32:43,330 --> 00:32:46,969
together, we're competing for the shelf space, I've got this brand, we're in however

533
00:32:46,969 --> 00:32:50,690
many states you're in, are you interested in us?

534
00:32:50,690 --> 00:32:54,450
We went to a broker. You never go to the buyer directly. Oh, you went

535
00:32:54,450 --> 00:32:58,290
to a broker. Absolutely. That maybe had connections with Gallo prior?

536
00:32:58,290 --> 00:33:02,050
Well, they had sold him a product that they, or a business that

537
00:33:02,050 --> 00:33:05,210
they were happy with. With. Yes, we already had a good

538
00:33:05,610 --> 00:33:09,330
relationship. But fast backwards, long before that, we

539
00:33:09,330 --> 00:33:13,010
placed our item in several distributors across

540
00:33:13,010 --> 00:33:16,850
the United States where they were selling, and

541
00:33:16,850 --> 00:33:20,370
where they were the primary product. Press the pedal to the metal

542
00:33:20,370 --> 00:33:23,730
in those distributor ships so that the

543
00:33:23,730 --> 00:33:27,370
distributor salespeople would say to their reps, look,

544
00:33:27,610 --> 00:33:31,290
this Barefoot is really selling, you know, you guys got to check

545
00:33:31,290 --> 00:33:34,890
this out. The sort of a grassroots, you know,

546
00:33:34,890 --> 00:33:38,010
response to Gallo's hearing about you guys through

547
00:33:38,370 --> 00:33:42,090
non-normal channels, not through a broker, just through, hey, little, you know, hallway

548
00:33:42,090 --> 00:33:45,770
water cooler stuff. But you know, we couldn't have sold to a better

549
00:33:46,330 --> 00:33:50,090
company. I mean, they are family owned. Their 5-year plan,

550
00:33:50,090 --> 00:33:53,930
I mean, I know the industry has some issues, but their 5-year plan lasts

551
00:33:53,930 --> 00:33:57,650
5 years. You know, you go to these publicly traded wine companies,

552
00:33:57,650 --> 00:34:00,910
their 5-year plan is 3 months long. Who

553
00:34:01,870 --> 00:34:05,510
knows? You know, the industry's rife with all kinds of craziness right now.

554
00:34:05,510 --> 00:34:09,270
And there's, we just left what would be the exact opposite of

555
00:34:09,270 --> 00:34:12,670
what Barefoot might've been at the time. We just left Trombetta, a nice family just

556
00:34:12,670 --> 00:34:15,470
up the road here. Oh yeah, the Trombettas. And she makes the beautiful Pinot Noirs.

557
00:34:15,470 --> 00:34:18,750
They make 1,200 cases. And it's a similar

558
00:34:19,070 --> 00:34:22,590
conversation in that what's happening today in the marketplace is very difficult to

559
00:34:23,070 --> 00:34:26,870
understand. There's a billion labels now. Your idea, which

560
00:34:26,870 --> 00:34:29,720
I love this concept, Sandra, about like you'll see it from 4

561
00:34:29,720 --> 00:34:33,449
feet away. But it's a tough place right now.

562
00:34:34,489 --> 00:34:36,969
So after you sold, because we don't need to— those details aren't

563
00:34:39,289 --> 00:34:42,889
important, you created this. I mean, the

564
00:34:43,289 --> 00:34:47,129
persistence and let's use the book, the hardship, the hustle, and the heart

565
00:34:47,129 --> 00:34:50,849
to do that is a marketable product in itself. That's it.

566
00:34:50,849 --> 00:34:54,569
You had to say, all right, I'm gonna focus on this thing and really

567
00:34:56,009 --> 00:34:58,249
explain this And I'm gonna say it this

568
00:34:59,849 --> 00:35:03,129
way, the position you took when you called on me is in this

569
00:35:03,609 --> 00:35:07,449
book because I remember this telling my dad

570
00:35:07,449 --> 00:35:10,489
'cause he was still hanging around then. He's still alive, but he was working with

571
00:35:10,569 --> 00:35:14,289
me. I said, this guy came in today and he was just, he wanted a

572
00:35:14,289 --> 00:35:17,969
sale and I hadn't seen that before. And you were anxious to get

573
00:35:17,969 --> 00:35:21,489
going, to get working. Look at this idea, what are we doing? And that's what

574
00:35:21,489 --> 00:35:24,960
this book's about, I think. That's the spirit. Yeah.

575
00:35:24,960 --> 00:35:28,800
Yeah. Yes. And so it's a business book. It is a

576
00:35:28,880 --> 00:35:32,000
business book, but it's kind of an exposé

577
00:35:32,640 --> 00:35:36,240
of the bowels of the wine industry. It's, you know, it's

578
00:35:36,240 --> 00:35:39,720
an outsider's inside view of the wine industry. So

579
00:35:39,720 --> 00:35:43,200
the average person can really pick up

580
00:35:43,440 --> 00:35:47,080
on what's involved. I mean, you see those 18-wheelers going down

581
00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:50,790
the freeway and you don't realize that inside of it could

582
00:35:51,590 --> 00:35:55,030
be 22 pallets, 5 layers

583
00:35:55,270 --> 00:35:58,990
high, each one of them with 56 cases of 750s, 12

584
00:35:58,990 --> 00:36:02,790
to a box, on its way to a Ralph's store

585
00:36:04,230 --> 00:36:07,870
or, you know, a Kroger's or a Publix store. And so you go, oh

586
00:36:07,870 --> 00:36:11,670
my God, you know, this is commerce, right? Yeah. And

587
00:36:11,670 --> 00:36:15,430
just to get to that scale. So what the book is

588
00:36:16,230 --> 00:36:18,710
about about, I guess, Bonnie, why don't you tell them how we got into writing

589
00:36:18,710 --> 00:36:22,310
the book and what promoted us to write the book? We wrote the

590
00:36:22,310 --> 00:36:26,070
book after we had sold the business, and our

591
00:36:26,070 --> 00:36:29,790
staff and people that we'd done business with, they were coming

592
00:36:29,790 --> 00:36:33,510
to us independently, many of them, and saying, your

593
00:36:33,590 --> 00:36:37,190
business philosophies, the way you ran the business and the

594
00:36:37,430 --> 00:36:40,230
way you promoted the product were so

595
00:36:41,190 --> 00:36:44,550
unique that you've really got to tell other people about

596
00:36:44,790 --> 00:36:48,210
it. We had no turnover for the last 5 years. Years of our

597
00:36:48,290 --> 00:36:51,970
business. Really? That sounds a lot. And building that kind of

598
00:36:51,970 --> 00:36:55,730
loyalty and team players, you know, that

599
00:36:55,970 --> 00:36:58,690
spirit, team spirit that these people

600
00:36:59,730 --> 00:37:03,250
had, we had to share it. We couldn't just keep it within

601
00:37:03,490 --> 00:37:07,250
ourselves. There's so many people out there starting businesses and

602
00:37:07,250 --> 00:37:10,050
we all start with popularly

603
00:37:10,130 --> 00:37:13,980
held misconceptions. Mm-hmm. And there's a

604
00:37:13,980 --> 00:37:17,260
lot of those in the book. The book is all story

605
00:37:17,900 --> 00:37:21,580
form. So we give people the lessons we learned as we learned them,

606
00:37:21,580 --> 00:37:25,220
not here's the lesson, but you pull out the lesson from the

607
00:37:25,220 --> 00:37:28,620
story that we tell you. Oh, that's an interesting approach. People learn better, they're

608
00:37:28,620 --> 00:37:32,220
more interested in learning because it's in story

609
00:37:32,540 --> 00:37:36,220
form. Now we've been telling stories since the caveman

610
00:37:36,220 --> 00:37:39,930
days, right? That's how people learn. Learn. It's

611
00:37:39,930 --> 00:37:43,330
about the story anyway, right? It is about the

612
00:37:43,410 --> 00:37:47,170
story. This, this industry, and I've said this

613
00:37:47,170 --> 00:37:49,570
a few times with, upon this

614
00:37:50,690 --> 00:37:54,330
podcast, it's changed considerably. And I'm

615
00:37:54,330 --> 00:37:58,050
up against, in the retail side of things, €1

616
00:37:58,050 --> 00:38:01,610
per liter wines coming in 20,000-gallon Tetra

617
00:38:01,610 --> 00:38:05,410
Tank containers, driving up New Jersey's coast into New York, getting bottled into a

618
00:38:05,410 --> 00:38:09,010
bunch of brands, getting shipped out for, on the Groupon for 3, you know,

619
00:38:09,250 --> 00:38:13,070
$3 a bottle and it's bad. It's just not good wine. And it's not

620
00:38:13,070 --> 00:38:16,830
an experience that I think wine drinkers would say like, oh, I

621
00:38:16,830 --> 00:38:19,550
got this for $3. Isn't it great? And they're like, no, it's bad.

622
00:38:20,350 --> 00:38:24,070
Right? Or the other day I tasted some wine and I just said this to

623
00:38:24,070 --> 00:38:27,470
the Trombetta family with a

624
00:38:27,630 --> 00:38:31,270
blogger called punchdrink.com. It's a very famous

625
00:38:31,270 --> 00:38:35,110
distilled and wine spirit site. And she did a story on us. She sat

626
00:38:35,110 --> 00:38:38,410
with me and tasted and I tasted said this Beaujolais. She goes, this is really

627
00:38:38,410 --> 00:38:41,290
bad. I said, yeah, and it came from one of my competitors. They sent me

628
00:38:41,290 --> 00:38:44,970
samples. Imagine that, a competitor sending another competitor

629
00:38:44,970 --> 00:38:48,410
samples to taste to sell. What's this world come to,

630
00:38:49,290 --> 00:38:51,770
right? So I tasted it with her. She goes, this is really bad. I said,

631
00:38:51,770 --> 00:38:55,290
yeah, and it's, guess what it is? It's Saturday Night Live

632
00:38:55,690 --> 00:38:59,050
Beaujolais, named after the TV show. Oh yeah. Is that, is that, now

633
00:38:59,290 --> 00:39:02,690
so what kind of experience is that for a buyer to say, oh, I got

634
00:39:02,690 --> 00:39:04,530
the Saturday Night Live, and they put it in front of their friends and they

635
00:39:04,530 --> 00:39:08,370
open it and it's had, right? This is a story to tell.

636
00:39:08,370 --> 00:39:12,050
The barefoot story is a story. The inspiration

637
00:39:12,050 --> 00:39:15,530
you guys must be putting out on the street with this book, having

638
00:39:15,530 --> 00:39:18,970
this conversation today, to get people

639
00:39:19,850 --> 00:39:23,570
to think outside the box a little bit. Yeah. To understand that

640
00:39:23,570 --> 00:39:27,330
it doesn't just get handed to you. Amen. You know, you have to— You

641
00:39:27,330 --> 00:39:31,090
know, it's hard work, but it's doable. And I think what scares

642
00:39:31,090 --> 00:39:34,330
a lot of people is they don't know what the process is. They don't

643
00:39:35,030 --> 00:39:38,750
know foot to put in front of the other one. This book really lays

644
00:39:38,750 --> 00:39:42,550
out a process. Yes, it's in the wine business, but it's

645
00:39:42,550 --> 00:39:45,430
a very fungible process. It can be applied to any

646
00:39:46,070 --> 00:39:49,710
business. And the thinking and the reasoning and

647
00:39:49,710 --> 00:39:53,550
the spirit is the same. You know,

648
00:39:53,550 --> 00:39:57,350
since we wrote the book, Bonnie and I have become speakers. We've spoke all

649
00:39:57,350 --> 00:40:00,790
over the world. We've been in Trondheim, Norway. We've had students

650
00:40:01,230 --> 00:40:04,750
from Nanyang University in Singapore, all over the United

651
00:40:04,830 --> 00:40:07,790
States, probably 60 schools in the United States. They all

652
00:40:07,790 --> 00:40:11,470
teach entrepreneurship. They all got Barefoot in their fridge. So the

653
00:40:11,630 --> 00:40:15,350
brand has, you know, opened the door for us. There's no question. Thanks to

654
00:40:16,190 --> 00:40:19,870
E&J. But here we are talking about entrepreneurship.

655
00:40:19,870 --> 00:40:23,670
And the questions they always ask is, you know, just tell

656
00:40:23,670 --> 00:40:26,940
me two things. Number one, how do you keep going when you run into that

657
00:40:27,810 --> 00:40:31,650
wall? Wall. And the other one is, what's the other

658
00:40:31,650 --> 00:40:34,970
one? How do you prepare for

659
00:40:34,970 --> 00:40:38,530
the unexpected? That's it. Oh, great. How do you prepare for the unexpected? What

660
00:40:38,530 --> 00:40:42,370
a question. So those are the two most popular questions, and the answer

661
00:40:42,370 --> 00:40:46,130
is the same. You prepare for the unexpected and

662
00:40:46,130 --> 00:40:49,490
you handle the walls by

663
00:40:50,130 --> 00:40:53,220
actually having a mental attitude about

664
00:40:53,850 --> 00:40:57,290
mistakes. By having a mental attitude about your

665
00:40:57,370 --> 00:41:01,130
customer, about your employees, about your vendors. You

666
00:41:01,130 --> 00:41:04,650
know, we have a talk we give called, you know,

667
00:41:04,650 --> 00:41:08,170
How Soft Skills Earn Hard Cash. And we've forgotten

668
00:41:08,170 --> 00:41:11,810
soft skills. We got so carried away with technology in the last

669
00:41:11,810 --> 00:41:15,610
25 years that we forgot that if you treat your

670
00:41:15,610 --> 00:41:19,330
vendor right, he's liable to give you $300,000

671
00:41:19,330 --> 00:41:23,080
upfront with no no interest for 4 months, and he's liable to warehouse it

672
00:41:23,080 --> 00:41:26,480
for you for free just because he likes you and wants to do business with

673
00:41:26,560 --> 00:41:30,280
you. So you think that the, I

674
00:41:30,280 --> 00:41:34,120
think this particularly with texting and I just, I had a little gym,

675
00:41:34,120 --> 00:41:37,600
I used to lease it to young men that wanted to get their little sort

676
00:41:39,120 --> 00:41:42,480
of personal training business going, okay? And I consulted many of

677
00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:46,600
them. What they couldn't understand was texting was not a methodology of

678
00:41:46,600 --> 00:41:49,980
doing business. I still don't believe it is because you can't, We can't have

679
00:41:49,980 --> 00:41:53,260
this conversation. You can't see my face. You can't see

680
00:41:53,260 --> 00:41:56,740
my sincerity in the business we're doing. You just get

681
00:41:56,740 --> 00:42:00,220
this raw text and it can be

682
00:42:00,220 --> 00:42:03,740
misinterpreted so many ways that the value of the

683
00:42:03,820 --> 00:42:07,540
content is gone. And they're millennials, they're

684
00:42:07,540 --> 00:42:11,140
like, "No, it's absolutely Mr. Callum Carey and a way to do

685
00:42:11,140 --> 00:42:14,700
business." I'm like, "I don't think so." No, the reason is because they

686
00:42:14,940 --> 00:42:18,600
wanna believe that it is because it does provide them with a

687
00:42:19,710 --> 00:42:22,270
screen They don't have to take personal

688
00:42:23,390 --> 00:42:26,950
rejection. They can just ghost out. And so the thing

689
00:42:26,950 --> 00:42:30,470
with texting is it sets up this layer of

690
00:42:30,470 --> 00:42:34,270
separation between you and the person that you're communicating with. So

691
00:42:34,270 --> 00:42:37,710
there's no, you don't have any real skin in the

692
00:42:38,030 --> 00:42:41,230
game. But now if you were to physically go talk to that

693
00:42:42,270 --> 00:42:45,870
person, you're showing up. You're not doing anything else. You're

694
00:42:45,870 --> 00:42:49,550
giving them your undivided attention. That's it. Boy, that's the

695
00:42:49,550 --> 00:42:52,710
number one thing that people want. You're

696
00:42:52,710 --> 00:42:56,350
demonstrating sincerity. And that's the key. Yeah.

697
00:42:56,350 --> 00:42:59,670
The sincerity and the humility. The demonstration of sincerity is the

698
00:43:00,230 --> 00:43:03,949
key to reducing your costs in business.

699
00:43:03,949 --> 00:43:07,270
But you see, Silicon Valley has an answer for that. Borrow

700
00:43:09,030 --> 00:43:12,550
more. Yeah. You know, just go into further debt or give up more equity in

701
00:43:12,550 --> 00:43:15,902
your company. So, oh, my business failed because I didn't borrow more money. I didn't

702
00:43:15,902 --> 00:43:19,500
get funded or my business failed 'cause my second round of

703
00:43:19,500 --> 00:43:23,100
financing didn't go through. Well, I'm sorry. That's true. When were

704
00:43:23,100 --> 00:43:26,860
you ever resourceful? When did you think about it? You know, it's funny you

705
00:43:26,860 --> 00:43:30,380
said that 'cause my side of it, the internet side of

706
00:43:30,780 --> 00:43:34,220
sales, Wink, Naked Wines,

707
00:43:34,220 --> 00:43:38,020
even Wine.com just went to the street for $50 million. They

708
00:43:38,020 --> 00:43:41,380
had already gotten $35 million from Goldman Sachs. I'm

709
00:43:42,350 --> 00:43:46,190
like, They do big numbers. And I'm sort

710
00:43:46,190 --> 00:43:49,910
of the funny irony of this conversation is, you know, there's

711
00:43:49,910 --> 00:43:53,710
that commercial on the radio about, well, two guys started business same time.

712
00:43:53,710 --> 00:43:56,710
One still has a, you know, his little business. The other one built a career

713
00:43:56,710 --> 00:44:00,191
and moved on. And the Wine and Month Club is still this small business. And

714
00:44:00,191 --> 00:44:03,510
that's what I did. And Mike called on me in '99 and he built this

715
00:44:03,510 --> 00:44:07,230
big business. But the point is I've never borrowed

716
00:44:07,230 --> 00:44:10,870
a penny. And we have been

717
00:44:10,870 --> 00:44:14,550
less profitable in some years than others, but we've never leaned on that. And

718
00:44:14,550 --> 00:44:18,270
there's companies like Wink that have borrowed, have gained $75, $85

719
00:44:19,110 --> 00:44:22,390
million and just turned a profit for the first time like in 15 years. And

720
00:44:22,790 --> 00:44:25,910
so I look at that saying, gee, we're doing pretty good, you know, in that

721
00:44:25,910 --> 00:44:29,630
regard because I think this lesson that you're talking about here, the sincerity,

722
00:44:29,630 --> 00:44:33,230
the humility, we take care of our vendors. We, if I

723
00:44:33,230 --> 00:44:36,980
shake somebody's hand on a deal, that's the deal. Except for the

724
00:44:36,980 --> 00:44:40,780
small claims court I have Thursday morning, but that was because

725
00:44:40,780 --> 00:44:44,620
they defrauded me. But besides that,

726
00:44:44,620 --> 00:44:48,220
those lessons can't be learned via email

727
00:44:48,220 --> 00:44:51,980
and text and a distant relationship. They have to be learned the way

728
00:44:51,980 --> 00:44:55,620
you did it, which is show up, front the

729
00:44:56,340 --> 00:44:59,980
merchandise, talk to the people you're trying to sell to and make those deals and

730
00:44:59,980 --> 00:45:02,540
live by the ones that you shook your hand. You probably made some bad deals

731
00:45:02,540 --> 00:45:06,320
over your career. Oh yeah. But you live through it and you live

732
00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:08,480
by the handshake. There's a scene in the

733
00:45:10,400 --> 00:45:14,240
book where the Michael Houlihan character

734
00:45:14,240 --> 00:45:17,760
walks into Don Brown's office, who's the buyer

735
00:45:18,080 --> 00:45:21,720
for Lucky Stores in California, you know, with like hundreds

736
00:45:21,720 --> 00:45:25,080
of stores. And he's got a check in his hand

737
00:45:25,080 --> 00:45:28,830
for $5,000 and he lays it down on Don's desk. Michael Houlihan has the

738
00:45:29,300 --> 00:45:33,060
check. Check and he gives it to Don. Yeah, lays it down on

739
00:45:33,060 --> 00:45:36,900
Don's desk and Don says, what the hell is that

740
00:45:37,620 --> 00:45:41,380
for? I said, we screwed up. We put the

741
00:45:41,380 --> 00:45:45,140
$7.50 labels on the $1.50. You've been scanning them at half

742
00:45:45,460 --> 00:45:48,820
price. We did the math. We figured out how much you've

743
00:45:48,980 --> 00:45:52,740
lost. Wow. We— $5,000 will cover not only your

744
00:45:52,820 --> 00:45:56,420
losses, but it will cover, you know, your wear and tear in

745
00:45:56,420 --> 00:46:00,020
handling. Our truck is going around to the stores right now and

746
00:46:00,240 --> 00:46:03,600
exchanging them all out. And he goes, you did the right

747
00:46:04,160 --> 00:46:07,280
thing. He said, who's in charge of labeling then? Then he says, he

748
00:46:08,080 --> 00:46:11,560
says, next week you're on ad with mandatory.

749
00:46:11,560 --> 00:46:15,360
Wow. Mandatory stacks. You know what a mandatory stack is?

750
00:46:15,440 --> 00:46:18,880
No. That's when the, the, the buyer of the chain

751
00:46:19,360 --> 00:46:23,120
says, listen, manager, I'm telling you that you must put a stack

752
00:46:23,120 --> 00:46:26,810
of 20 cases of this product on the floor. You don't get to decide

753
00:46:26,810 --> 00:46:30,610
It's mandatory. Oh, so the local store manager doesn't get a

754
00:46:30,690 --> 00:46:34,530
chance to decide that? No, he doesn't. But you know— That's amazing. Yeah,

755
00:46:34,530 --> 00:46:38,370
so then you get 200 stores times 20 cases. That's amazing. So tell me then

756
00:46:38,850 --> 00:46:42,570
this story, this is the written form of the story. There's

757
00:46:42,570 --> 00:46:45,570
a podcast of it, there's an audio of it. Audiobook,

758
00:46:46,370 --> 00:46:50,130
yes. Yeah, audiobook. Bonnie, tell them why we decided to do the audiobook.

759
00:46:50,130 --> 00:46:53,850
Well, we were going into universities speaking to the

760
00:46:53,850 --> 00:46:57,370
students about entrepreneurship and conventions and such. Everybody was wearing

761
00:46:57,370 --> 00:47:00,870
their earbuds. That's 4 years ago. And

762
00:47:01,110 --> 00:47:04,950
so we found out that they were listening to podcasts. They were listening

763
00:47:04,950 --> 00:47:08,630
to some kind of self-improvement tape.

764
00:47:09,270 --> 00:47:12,950
And they said they really liked it because they could walk around and

765
00:47:12,950 --> 00:47:15,350
do other things while they were getting this

766
00:47:16,790 --> 00:47:20,510
education. And we said, well, our book is extremely

767
00:47:20,510 --> 00:47:23,510
educational and we really want to get the word out to more

768
00:47:24,450 --> 00:47:28,130
people. So they don't have to suffer the way we did, really, if they're going

769
00:47:28,130 --> 00:47:31,770
to start a business. So that's when we decided to make it into

770
00:47:31,770 --> 00:47:34,930
an audiobook. And we have some connections

771
00:47:34,930 --> 00:47:38,770
in Hollywood and UC Irvine, and we went down there

772
00:47:39,170 --> 00:47:42,530
and met Sherwood Players, which is an

773
00:47:42,530 --> 00:47:45,570
actor's troupe. And we worked with

774
00:47:46,450 --> 00:47:50,200
them and they produced a fabulous audiobook.

775
00:47:50,980 --> 00:47:54,660
Audiobook version of "The Barefoot Spirit." Actually,

776
00:47:56,180 --> 00:47:59,940
the Audiobook Producers of America

777
00:48:00,980 --> 00:48:04,820
Association gave "Barefoot Spirit" audiobook one of the

778
00:48:04,820 --> 00:48:08,020
top 5 business books of 2020. Wow, that's

779
00:48:08,420 --> 00:48:12,020
fascinating. Yes, particularly because it was self-published

780
00:48:12,020 --> 00:48:15,300
and that is their business. They're audiobook

781
00:48:16,180 --> 00:48:19,880
publishers. Yes. I just wanna add to that, Monica, may I?

782
00:48:19,880 --> 00:48:23,560
So I wanna add to that and say this

783
00:48:23,560 --> 00:48:26,640
book is not read to you like most

784
00:48:26,720 --> 00:48:30,160
business audiobooks. This book is performed for

785
00:48:30,800 --> 00:48:34,640
you. So it's kind of like a 1945 radio show that

786
00:48:34,640 --> 00:48:38,160
you're listening to. It has sound effects, it has music, it

787
00:48:38,160 --> 00:48:41,720
has characters. What a brilliant idea. The scenes are like 2 minutes to

788
00:48:41,720 --> 00:48:45,550
4 minutes. And so then there's like 10 scenes scenes

789
00:48:45,550 --> 00:48:49,390
and a segment. Segment is 25 minutes. And

790
00:48:49,470 --> 00:48:53,230
so, you know, you can binge and listen to the whole book. It's over 7

791
00:48:53,870 --> 00:48:57,470
hours. If you're gonna drive to Seattle or Denver. That's a project.

792
00:48:57,630 --> 00:49:01,150
Yeah, it took us over a year. I mean, we got to work

793
00:49:01,150 --> 00:49:04,870
with actors and Hollywood. I mean, they say we got 3

794
00:49:04,870 --> 00:49:08,510
things in California, right? We got wine, we got software, and we got

795
00:49:08,910 --> 00:49:12,370
Hollywood. So we put 'em all together. So, you know, you hear that. So

796
00:49:12,370 --> 00:49:16,090
the entire book's there? Yes. Yes. And is

797
00:49:16,090 --> 00:49:19,490
it word for word? Is this a script basically, or is the script— It's

798
00:49:19,490 --> 00:49:23,300
been converted. So instead of sort of a screenplay on the bottom. It's very, very

799
00:49:23,450 --> 00:49:27,210
much the same. Very close. Where there were dialogues such as

800
00:49:27,210 --> 00:49:30,970
he said, she said, those things were dropped. But no,

801
00:49:30,970 --> 00:49:34,570
it is the full story of the Barefoot Spirit

802
00:49:34,810 --> 00:49:38,390
and how we grew the brand. And if we bring

803
00:49:39,590 --> 00:49:43,030
in, uh, this is my controller. If we bring in 50 copies, I ship them

804
00:49:43,030 --> 00:49:46,830
up here, sign them for me, for my clients. Absolutely. Because, uh,

805
00:49:46,830 --> 00:49:49,990
we just did that with Rex Pickett and the Sideways movie

806
00:49:50,550 --> 00:49:54,070
book, sold a bunch of those. And then we— George Tabor with the Judgment of

807
00:49:54,070 --> 00:49:57,910
Paris book. I'd love to do it with this. We'd be— I think it'd be

808
00:49:57,910 --> 00:50:01,630
interesting for the customers to, to catch that, because part of

809
00:50:01,630 --> 00:50:04,690
this podcast— and we're getting on an hour here, so I don't wanna take too

810
00:50:04,690 --> 00:50:08,410
much of your time, but part of this podcast is sort of

811
00:50:08,410 --> 00:50:12,130
to do what you're talking about. And that is not expose the wine business,

812
00:50:12,130 --> 00:50:15,890
but have people understand what it's about because— Make it doable. Yeah, there's

813
00:50:15,890 --> 00:50:19,650
so much movement about organic and bio and people are confused and I want

814
00:50:19,650 --> 00:50:22,930
them to understand what happens a little bit behind the scenes, how we

815
00:50:23,410 --> 00:50:27,010
negotiate. And yesterday, you'll find this fascinating, I had a conversation

816
00:50:27,810 --> 00:50:31,410
with Alexandre Remy, he's from Atlas Wine. And

817
00:50:31,410 --> 00:50:35,190
he actually publishes on his website, he takes a bottle of

818
00:50:35,820 --> 00:50:39,060
Chardonnay and he draws a line across it and he says, "This is what it

819
00:50:39,060 --> 00:50:42,740
costs me to bottle and ink it. This is what it costs for the juice

820
00:50:42,740 --> 00:50:45,540
inside. This is what the margin is for the distributor who's delivering it to the

821
00:50:45,540 --> 00:50:48,460
store you're going to. And here's the retailer's margin." And that's what the price comes

822
00:50:48,700 --> 00:50:51,020
up. And he's been very transparent about that. And I'm

823
00:50:53,340 --> 00:50:56,900
wondering what, I'm wondering if that's not something of the future, but with the way

824
00:50:56,900 --> 00:51:00,740
business is going and is so, the digital track is fast, everybody's online,

825
00:51:00,740 --> 00:51:03,580
they're moving stuff, is the transparency of the

826
00:51:04,550 --> 00:51:08,070
cost something you think might be interesting to the consumer? Or are we sort

827
00:51:08,710 --> 00:51:12,390
of dipping our toe into an area we probably shouldn't be doing? You know,

828
00:51:12,390 --> 00:51:16,070
I think— That's a good question. I think, yeah, it's a great question

829
00:51:16,390 --> 00:51:19,670
because I think that people are looking for sincerity these

830
00:51:20,310 --> 00:51:24,030
days, especially since the COVID crisis. They wanna

831
00:51:24,030 --> 00:51:26,790
buy real things from real people that stand for

832
00:51:27,750 --> 00:51:30,870
real, you know, what do you really stand for? You got a great bottle of

833
00:51:30,870 --> 00:51:34,510
wine, but where do you stand on pollution? You know, where do you

834
00:51:34,510 --> 00:51:38,050
stand on how you treat people? How do you treat your workers? Where do

835
00:51:38,050 --> 00:51:41,730
you stand on women? Where do you stand on all these

836
00:51:41,730 --> 00:51:44,370
different issues that are the issues of today? The

837
00:51:45,720 --> 00:51:47,810
environment, right? So I think

838
00:51:49,250 --> 00:51:53,090
that it's not just here's my cost of goods and here's how

839
00:51:53,090 --> 00:51:56,530
little I make. It's also— 'Cause it's the wine

840
00:51:56,770 --> 00:52:00,210
business. Here's what I stand for. If you buy a bottle of wine from

841
00:52:00,770 --> 00:52:04,450
me, your money is going to a cause that you can identify with. I think

842
00:52:04,450 --> 00:52:07,670
that's the future, not just of the wine business, But of

843
00:52:08,310 --> 00:52:12,150
all consumer products. I think that's

844
00:52:12,150 --> 00:52:15,990
a great answer because that's true. You're seeing it more and more. And when he

845
00:52:15,990 --> 00:52:19,830
showed me in the wine side, I'm like, wow, you know, you're really treading water

846
00:52:19,830 --> 00:52:23,590
in the wine business for doing that because no one does it.

847
00:52:23,830 --> 00:52:26,950
And he's like, yeah, I don't, you know, I don't mind being controversial about it

848
00:52:27,270 --> 00:52:31,070
either. I'll tell you, I mean, we know the margins suck, but our

849
00:52:31,070 --> 00:52:33,966
daughter came back from, was it high school? She did a McDonald's report. You know

850
00:52:33,966 --> 00:52:37,550
what they're paying for it? And she said, those people are making a

851
00:52:38,830 --> 00:52:41,430
profit. I'm like, it's like, well, wait a minute. You know, this house you live

852
00:52:41,430 --> 00:52:44,670
in is because, you know, we make a profit. So I don't think that's evil

853
00:52:44,670 --> 00:52:48,430
in itself, but I think you're right. I think it's about the humility of the

854
00:52:48,430 --> 00:52:52,270
product and what you're preparing, what you're standing for, like the

855
00:52:52,270 --> 00:52:55,790
sustainable movement, all that stuff. Yes. That's why we're so excited

856
00:52:55,790 --> 00:52:59,590
about producing an audiobook for other founders. We

857
00:52:59,590 --> 00:53:03,300
want to help them tell their stories. Everybody's got a story to

858
00:53:03,380 --> 00:53:06,660
tell. Well, we have a great story. We're running out of time.

859
00:53:07,540 --> 00:53:10,500
Yeah, we're offering the service that we

860
00:53:11,380 --> 00:53:14,860
used to produce the audiobook of "The Barefoot Spirit" to

861
00:53:14,860 --> 00:53:18,420
other founders so they can tell their stories, preserve

862
00:53:18,420 --> 00:53:22,060
their legacy, keep engagement of their employees.

863
00:53:22,060 --> 00:53:25,820
So production value, soup to nuts

864
00:53:25,820 --> 00:53:29,530
as far as what you're offering, just the know-how No, or

865
00:53:29,530 --> 00:53:32,970
the actors and the recording and the— Well, yes, we have

866
00:53:32,970 --> 00:53:36,610
the actors, we have the producer, and it can all be

867
00:53:36,770 --> 00:53:39,610
done at a distance with these conditions now with COVID The whole thing can be

868
00:53:39,610 --> 00:53:43,410
done remotely? Yes, it can all be done remotely. So

869
00:53:43,410 --> 00:53:47,210
here's what I did. My dad started 19—

870
00:53:47,210 --> 00:53:50,530
He was a pharmacist by trade. He had 7, he bought and sold 12

871
00:53:51,090 --> 00:53:54,860
pharmacies. The last pharmacy he bought in 1969, insisted that he buy the

872
00:53:54,860 --> 00:53:58,500
liquor store. And then he started the club outta the liquor store in 1972.

873
00:53:58,500 --> 00:54:00,940
Fast forward, I mean, Jim Barrett was our neighbor. We used to come to the

874
00:54:00,940 --> 00:54:04,780
store all the time. Patricia Gallagher, who was part of the, the Taste Judgment

875
00:54:04,780 --> 00:54:08,620
of Paris, came into the store. Bruce Nair was in the store. David

876
00:54:08,620 --> 00:54:10,460
Stair was in the store. All these famous

877
00:54:12,540 --> 00:54:16,380
guys. So I've been taking this story. How do I differentiate the

878
00:54:16,380 --> 00:54:19,960
Wine of the Month Club from all these other services? Right. It's our story.

879
00:54:20,040 --> 00:54:23,840
We started the industry, which may in itself not mean anything, but

880
00:54:23,840 --> 00:54:27,400
the premise of what Wine Month Club does, which is I still taste

881
00:54:27,480 --> 00:54:31,000
everything that's sold. So every Tuesday since

882
00:54:31,160 --> 00:54:34,800
1988, since she came to my office, I tasted wine, probably

883
00:54:34,800 --> 00:54:38,560
100,000 wines. So to me, that's a story in the history of

884
00:54:38,560 --> 00:54:42,120
my father and the judgment of the parish and all that.

885
00:54:42,120 --> 00:54:45,800
So I've been trying to write a book and she's been saying, look, why are

886
00:54:45,800 --> 00:54:49,530
we gonna spend money on a book? Book when you can tell the story other

887
00:54:49,690 --> 00:54:53,130
ways? And I'm like, but the book, it's an interesting book. It's a business

888
00:54:53,610 --> 00:54:57,410
book. It's a wine book. It's an immigration— my dad was

889
00:54:57,410 --> 00:55:00,970
an immigrant from Cairo, came here with nothing, you know, so to speak.

890
00:55:01,610 --> 00:55:05,450
So I think this is a good story. Well, I think stories

891
00:55:05,690 --> 00:55:09,090
about businesses are interesting to this

892
00:55:09,090 --> 00:55:12,650
new generation. You know, a lot of them are unemployed right

893
00:55:13,170 --> 00:55:16,850
now. And they're considering going into business. So there's a

894
00:55:16,850 --> 00:55:20,650
big uptick in entrepreneurial education and

895
00:55:20,650 --> 00:55:24,330
all kinds of books that have to do with business. And that's why

896
00:55:24,330 --> 00:55:27,410
we're excited about the Barefoot Spirit

897
00:55:27,810 --> 00:55:31,570
audiobook because it's an opportunity to basically

898
00:55:31,650 --> 00:55:35,170
teach some business principles. You know, if you talk

899
00:55:35,410 --> 00:55:39,250
to successful business people long enough, you begin to notice that

900
00:55:39,250 --> 00:55:42,900
there are these universal principles universal values. You know,

901
00:55:42,900 --> 00:55:46,700
there's universal truth. The same guy, you know, or a different guy is

902
00:55:46,700 --> 00:55:50,100
saying the same thing as the last guy, but in a different way, you know,

903
00:55:50,100 --> 00:55:53,740
maybe in a different vertical, a different industry, but it's the same message.

904
00:55:53,900 --> 00:55:57,660
And so that's why I think that

905
00:55:57,660 --> 00:56:01,340
anything you can do, like Bonnie says, you leave it, it's your

906
00:56:01,900 --> 00:56:05,020
legacy. See? It is. So you don't have to be here once it's

907
00:56:05,740 --> 00:56:09,350
written. And that actually helps you sleep better But getting the

908
00:56:09,430 --> 00:56:13,190
best author, we interviewed for some time to get Rick

909
00:56:13,830 --> 00:56:17,550
Kushman, and he worked for the Sacramento Bee for well over

910
00:56:17,550 --> 00:56:21,390
a decade being the food and wine writer.

911
00:56:21,390 --> 00:56:25,070
And so he knew about wine. He'd written a book, and I picked

912
00:56:25,070 --> 00:56:28,790
up his book on a flight that we had, and I started reading it,

913
00:56:28,790 --> 00:56:32,230
and I was just in the introduction, and I cracked up,

914
00:56:32,230 --> 00:56:35,670
and Michael's looking at me 'cause I'm laughing too loud in the airplane,

915
00:56:36,230 --> 00:56:40,060
right? And I said, this is our author. It. He's

916
00:56:40,060 --> 00:56:43,620
got humor. He's got love

917
00:56:43,860 --> 00:56:47,620
and caring for other people. He's got so many of

918
00:56:47,620 --> 00:56:51,260
the qualities just in the introduction I read that

919
00:56:51,260 --> 00:56:54,580
we had when we were starting Barefoot and that we hope that

920
00:56:54,820 --> 00:56:58,260
we continued to show in the product Barefoot

921
00:56:58,500 --> 00:57:02,180
Wines. And I said, this is our author. I've got it. But we'd written

922
00:57:02,180 --> 00:57:05,940
a book before that. Michael had worked with an author and I'd

923
00:57:05,940 --> 00:57:09,580
given up on Michael went ahead and finished it up, and then

924
00:57:09,580 --> 00:57:13,380
we threw the whole thing right in the garbage can. It was terrible. See,

925
00:57:13,380 --> 00:57:17,220
that happens, doesn't it? So the person that you use, the author,

926
00:57:17,220 --> 00:57:20,540
you've really gotta resonate with them. They've got to

927
00:57:20,940 --> 00:57:24,060
understand your subject matter, and they've got to understand

928
00:57:24,060 --> 00:57:27,700
your personality and what points you wanna

929
00:57:27,700 --> 00:57:31,180
get across and who your audience is. That's the

930
00:57:31,340 --> 00:57:34,870
key. We lucked out when we found Rick Cushing. 'cause he's

931
00:57:34,870 --> 00:57:38,630
excellent. That's why the book is a New York Times bestseller.

932
00:57:38,630 --> 00:57:42,310
Has a lot to do with it. We, there's a book out

933
00:57:42,310 --> 00:57:46,030
too, which just for your own sake is a very interesting book called Tangled

934
00:57:46,590 --> 00:57:50,030
Vines written by Frances Deakinspiel. It's also a New York Times bestseller, but it's the

935
00:57:50,030 --> 00:57:53,790
history of wine starting at Rancho Cucamonga in the 1700s. Oh, fantastic. But

936
00:57:53,790 --> 00:57:57,630
it's really about, the title is what? Arson, theft, and murder in

937
00:57:57,630 --> 00:58:00,990
the wine business. So it's sort of this sort of dark side of the wine

938
00:58:00,990 --> 00:58:04,750
business, but it's fascinating story. I talked to her about writing the book.

939
00:58:04,750 --> 00:58:08,270
She wasn't interested. A gentleman named Patrick Hughes, he was

940
00:58:09,150 --> 00:58:12,430
the LA Times Magazine food writer forever, and we know him

941
00:58:12,990 --> 00:58:15,710
well. Really good writer, and he's just like, I don't have time to write a

942
00:58:15,710 --> 00:58:19,430
book right now. He wrote the book called The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, which

943
00:58:19,430 --> 00:58:23,270
is about New York food, French food scene. So I'm

944
00:58:23,270 --> 00:58:26,470
fascinated by this story, and I have to wrap this up because I don't want

945
00:58:26,470 --> 00:58:30,270
you guys to stick around too long. We'll have to do it again because I

946
00:58:30,270 --> 00:58:34,090
think there's enough content here to keep talking, but I'm

947
00:58:34,090 --> 00:58:37,890
fascinated by the idea I get to sell this. We'll send you some copies to

948
00:58:37,970 --> 00:58:41,010
autograph. We can't wait to read it and listen to

949
00:58:41,570 --> 00:58:45,410
it since I have an hour's flight to come home and another hour's drive.

950
00:58:45,410 --> 00:58:48,650
And just thank you so much for the time and sharing your home with us

951
00:58:48,650 --> 00:58:52,410
to come out and have this chat. Well, thanks for being with us. This

952
00:58:52,410 --> 00:58:55,730
has been too much fun. Yeah, it's been great. It's really nice to see you

953
00:58:55,730 --> 00:58:57,940
after all these years. Yeah, it's good to see you again. It's great to see

954
00:58:58,090 --> 00:59:01,610
you again. You, Paul. You know, that would be what,

955
00:59:01,610 --> 00:59:05,370
30 years? No, 40 years. No, 30 years. Amazing.

956
00:59:05,370 --> 00:59:09,050
30 years. You look great. You look— thanks. Thanks. Cheers. So do you.

957
00:59:09,050 --> 00:59:09,780
Thank you. All right.