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Judy Robinett

“Other people have the answers, deals, money, access, power, and influence you need to get what you want in this world. To achieve any goal, you need other people to help you do it.” — JUDY ROBINETT

As anyone in business knows, strategic planning is critical to achieving long-term success. In How to Be a Power Connector, Power Connector Judy Robinett argues that strategic relationship planning should be your top priority.

When you combine your specific skills and talents with a clear, workable path for creating and managing your relationships, nothing will stop you from meeting your goals. With high-value connections, you’ll tap into a dynamic “power grid” of influence guaranteed to accelerate your personal and professional success.

Robinett uses her decades of experience connecting the world’s highest achievers with one another to help you build high-value relationships. She reveals all the secrets of her trade, including proven ways to:

  • – Find and enter the best network “ecosystem” to meet your goals
  • – Reach even the most unreachable people quickly and effectively
  • – Get anyone’s contact information within 30 seconds
  • – Create a “3-D connection” that adds value to multiple people at the same time
  • – Access key influencers through industry and community events
  • – Subtly seed conversation with information about interests and needs
  • – Use social media to your best advantage

 

Robinett has based her methods on solid research proving that social groups begin to break up when they become larger than 150 people, and that 50 members is the optimal size for group communication. As such, she has developed what she calls the “5+50+100” method: contact your top 5 connections daily, your Key 50 weekly, and your Vital 100 monthly. this is your power grid, and it will work wonders for your career.

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey

About The Barefoot Spirit

It is hard to believe that such an iconic brand as Barefoot Wines began in a laundry room of a rented farmhouse in the Sonoma County hills. Even more surprising is that the people who started it were just an average business couple, Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, with no money and no real knowledge about the wine industry.

The part that isn’t a surprise is that, because of their lack of experience, and because the wine business is one massively complicated industry, they ran into difficulties and setbacks that regularly put the brand near death in the first two decades. What kept it going was an unshakable belief in Barefoot’s potential, Michael’s and Bonnie’s use of universal business principles, and their never-say-die outlook despite facing one seemingly insurmountable hurdle after another. Those hardships, that hustle, and their heart, are the essence of the Barefoot Spirit.

For years, Michael and Bonnie, the Barefoot Wine founders, have been asked to write a book about how this brand got started and became a best seller. “The Barefoot Spirit”, a NY Times Bestselling book, traces that history and tells the story of how an unknown novelty wine became an American icon. It chronicles the unlikely events that made it possible, and it lays out the cornerstone business and lifestyle philosophies that made it, ultimately, an enduring success.

If you like wine, the wine country, or a story about how a plucky little winery transformed an industry, if you want to know what it takes to really succeed in the face of adversity, if you want to know how to use your core beliefs to build a national brand, then “The Barefoot Spirit” is for you.

“An irreverent, eye-opening business memoir. Novice winemakers upend the industry’s pretensions while taking on the jungle of the retail beverage sector in this rollicking business saga.”

“Novice winemakers upend the industry’s pretensions while taking on the jungle of the retail beverage sector in this rollicking business saga.”

“An irreverent, eye-opening business memoir.”

-Kirkus Reviews [Read The Full Kirkus Review Here]

 

About The Entrepreneurial Culture

Does Your Company Culture Empower Your People to Think Like Owners? If any business is to thrive in the global marketplace, its employees must be engaged and empowered. In other words, they must think like owners. Problem is, few employees know how. Your job as a leader is to train them to think this way. Because entrepreneurial thinking is a natural extension of company culture, you may need to rebuild yours from the ground up.

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey—New York Times bestselling authors and founders of Barefoot, America’s #1 wine brand—know how to create the conditions that draw out and nourish people’s inner entrepreneurs. Here, they take the principles that empowered their own tribe of productive, creative and loyal employees to beat the odds and boil those principles down into quick, easy lessons you can put into practice right away. You’ll discover:

  • – How to remove roadblocks to the entrepreneurial spirit
  • – Why everyone at your company must ask questions (including you)
  • – Why your people should embrace mistakes
  • – How to find and hire people with entrepreneurial DNA
  • – How to foster innovation by getting out of your people’s way
  • – How to drive results with performance-based compensation

 

Houlihan and Harvey started the Barefoot Wine brand in their laundry room in 1986, made it a nationwide bestseller, and successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo in 2005. Starting with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles and create new markets. Today, they are sought-after entrepreneurial thought leaders, consultants, corporate trainers, keynote speakers, and workplace culture experts with hundreds of articles in national and professional publications.

In The Entrepreneurial Culture, 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your People they take everything they know about the spirit of entrepreneurship and teach C-Suite leaders how to infuse it into their company cultures to engage and empower their employees. The book perfectly complements the lessons from the authors’ New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. Together, these books will give your company the edge it needs to thrive and boost the bottom line.

Purchase your copy of The Barefoot Spirit and exclusively through this C-Suite portal, also obtain a BONUS copy of the companion book, The Entrepreneurial Culture (forward by Jeffrey Hayzlett).

 

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, founders of Barefoot Wine and authors of the New York Times Bestseller The Barefoot Spirit, share with Bizcast host Kevin Craine the creation of the famous Barefoot Wine, establishing an entrepreneurial culture in the business, and give a sneak peak into their new book on that subject: The Entrepreneurial Culture. Michael and Bonnie answer the hard c-suite question: How do you create an entrepreneurial culture within a business and empower employees to act with an entrepreneurial spirit.

D. Keith Pigues

Do your customers make more money doing business with you? 

Knowing the answer can help you build measurable and valuable customer relationships, outperform the competition, and unlock profitable growth.

Companies are blind to opportunities for profitable customer relationships without a deep understanding of how they create customer value relative to competitors. With a rigorous and measurable understanding of how customers make more money today and in the future with you, combined with supporting plans and tools to align the entire organization for success, a company can win and win big. Winning with Customers offers a step-by-step playbook to help companies develop this capability for themselves, act on it, build a culture around it and sustain it over time. The playbook includes case studies, interviews, and tools from leading B2B companies who have demonstrated success. Written by recognized business thought leaders and practitioners, this book will guide you to profitable growth. The book also serves as a launch point into a community of like-minded executives. Learn more about the book and the author at http://www.dkeithpigues.com and view Keith speaking about the topic. View the endorsements for the book here, and learn more about Keen Strategy: http://www.keenstrategy.com/

bizcast

 

Steven Haines

Every day, thousands of new products and innovations are brought to market.   Amid much fanfare, they struggle for shelf-space, mind-share, and market share.   Most studies on the subject suggest that products fail more often than they should.   CEOs, CMOs, and other C-Suite executives expect more from their product leaders and marketers!

Whatever your business sells, Product Management is one of the most important functions in the firm’s pursuit of profits.   With globalization and fierce competition, the stakes are higher than ever, and the room for error narrower than ever!   Therefore, leaders need a reliable resource for their product managers, brand managers, and category managers so these people know what to do, when, and with whom.  This resource is The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (2nd edition) — the most comprehensive book in the world on the subject of Product Management.   Designed for product managers and the leaders who support them, the book clearly explains how:

  • 1)     To conduct the research that lead to valuable market insights
  • 2)     To create the strategies required to drive innovation
  • 3)     To select and justify which products to build
  • 4)     To plan for their profitable creation and development
  • 5)     To launch them to the right markets at the right time
  • 6)     To manage them like businesses across their life cycles
  • 7)     To gracefully retire them
  • 8)     To align people across the organization so everyone’s moving in the same direction

The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (2nd edition) embodies everything “Product.”  Written by Steven Haines, one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, it’s a comprehensive, versatile, must-have resource for any business person who works in any company, in any industry, who seeks to successfully innovate, market, and manage products and services.

bizcast

Sylvie di Giusto

The Image of Leadership is the result of Sylvie di Giusto’s journey through two career paths: one in the field of human resources, the other one as a professional image consultant. The title reflects the reality that everyone can and should acknowledge, which is that true leadership manifests itself in ways that are both seen and unseen.

This book will take you step-by-step through the development of your professional imprint. The focus will be on all of those things that people perceive about you, with an emphasis on your appearance and your image.

By all means, it’s not a “How-to” book, because there simply is no “one-size-fits-all” formula for a look of leadership. Instead this book provides you with a deep understanding of the most important concepts to achieve your image of leadership. Because…

  • – YOU have to create your own professional imprint, which is true to your personality and which works for the duration of your long career.
  • – YOU have to appear confident, authentic, professional, and respectful to be perceived as a leader—no matter your height, weight, color, age or gender.
  • – YOU have to look like a leader long before you are one.
  • – YOU have only 7 seconds to create an imprint of leadership.
  • – YOU have to show people your leadership, every day, consistently.
  • – YOU —and only YOU— can choose to present yourself as a leader, or not.

 

This book is written to be entertaining for leaders at all levels. You’ll encounter hard data drawn from Sylvie’s research and she also shares countless stories from her 20 years of experience in corporations around the world, while she will prove her theories with people who are currently in the public eye. There is no other book that encourages you to learn about your image from famous politicians, CEO’s or pop stars at the same time.

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website 

Nathan Jamail

Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Business Teams

There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how and without creating a culture that supports coaching.

Nathan Jamail—a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses—trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies and learned that it takes not only different skills to achieve success, but a truly effective coach needs an organizational culture that creates and multiplies the success of every motivated team member. The Leadership Playbook shows leaders the skills necessary to be an effective coach and to build effective teams by:

  • Fostering employees’ belief in the culture of a company
  • Resolving issues proactively rather than reactively and creating an involvement that constantly pushes employees to be their best
  • Focusing on the more humane principles of leadership—gratitude, positivity, and recognition—that keep morale high
  • Holding teams and individuals accountable
  • Constantly recruiting talent (“building the bench”) rather than filling positions only when they are empty

Combining research, interviews, and inspiring stories with the lessons that have earned Jamail the respect of the world’s foremost corporations including CISCO, FedEx, Sprint, the U.S. Army, and State Farm; The Leadership Playbook will dominate the category for years to come.

Shep Hyken

You must deliver an amazing customer experience. Why? It is the competitive edge of new-era business–in any market and any economy.

Renowned customer experience expert Shep Hyken explains how consistently amazing customers through stellar service can elevate your company from good to great. All transformations require a role model, and Shep has found the perfect role model to inspire your team: Ace Hardware. Ace was named as one of the top ten customer service brands in America by Businessweek and ranked highest in its industry for customer satisfaction. Through revealing stories from Ace’s over-the-top work with customers, Shep explores the five tactical areas of customer amazement: leadership, culture, one-on-one, competitive edge, and community.

Delivering amazing service requires everyone in your organization to step up and be a leader. It doesn’t take a title. It takes the right set of tools and principles. To help you empower employees at all levels, Shep brings the content to a deeply practical level. His 52 Amazement Tools–like ”Ask the extra question” and ”Focus on the customer, not the money”–are simple, clear, useful for almost anybody, and supported with compelling research and stories.

Between these covers, you will find the tools and tactics you need to transform your company into a seriously customer-focused operation that will amaze every customer every time.

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website

Dina Simon

Make Unstoppable Simple

Being unstoppable doesn’t mean you are never blocked or stuck on your way through life. It means you need to figure out how to break through life’s obstacles and fully live your journey. That’s the essence of Make Unstoppable Simple.  It is a creative way to problem-solve, learn to see road blocks or people with a different lens, and figure out how to move your life forward.  Many people unnecessarily suffer in silence, letting fear or panic stop them in their tracks.  The fear of failure or of having to admit you need help doesn’t need to end your dreams.  People will line up to help you if you tell them what you need and how they can help you!

Make Unstoppable Simple walks you through my life journey and shares the difficulties I have encountered along the way. The story is unique to me – but not unlike what everyone else faces.  A roadblock doesn’t need to stop you! It can be a signal that a change is needed. Use it as an opportunity to reflect on your skills and capabilities and build on that platform.  There will be times you just need some self-talk and other more serious instances when you need to call in the troops to steer you into gear.  I love to help people grow and accomplish things they never thought they could do. My hope is that Make Unstoppable Simple will serve as a springboard for you to reflect and set some actionable goals to break-through to be unstoppable and achieve whatever you want out of life – both personally and professionally.

bizcast

Lee Frederiksen

What does it take to become a well-known expert in your field — someone other practitioners and the media seek out for leadership and insight? We call these stars Visible Experts℠. And becoming one is easier than it looks.

What You Will Learn

  • The 5 levels of Visible Experts
  • How these stars earn up to 13X more and help their firms grow faster and be more profitable
  • Why and how clients them seek out
  • A step-by-step program to turn you — and others in your firm — into Visible Experts
  • How you can do it up to 5X faster than most Visible Experts
  • Tips and advice from real-world industry stars

In this research-based book, you will learn how you or your colleagues can become Visible Experts and leverage this status to drive significant new growth and profits for your firm. You will discover which tools and techniques you need to build your reputation and ascend to prominence. And you will hear from real experts from across the professional services who have climbed from obscurity to the peak of their profession — successful experts like Warren Buffet, Seth Godin, Robert Lang, and Sarah Susanka.

The Visible Expert is the essential manual for any individual or firm that is ready to take their expertise to the highest level. Based on interviews with over 130 Visible Experts and 1,028 buyers of their services, this book will take you higher, faster.

Tom Hopkins

This is a complete and practical guide which highlights the authors’ new strategic approaches to selling when the buyer initially declines or is resistant on a sales opportunity. Hopkins and Katt explain that most sales reps take a traditional linear approach to selling, but that the trick in closing is in taking a more creative and circular approach. That’s the key.

It all starts with how the buyer initially says, “No.” Too many sales reps don’t pay close attention as to how that’s presented. Hopkins and Katt point out that “no” may suggest all sorts of other options — avenues that can eventually lead to the buyer actually saying yes.

The authors introduce a novel concept called the Circle of Persuasion which offers sales reps a new approach in this potentially tricky process. Along the way, WHEN BUYERS SAY NO details prescriptive steps and even sample dialogues that will instruct and guide sales professionals on how to best cultivate buyer-seller relationships.

There’s particular emphasis on how to establish the kind of rapport that ultimately leads to a successful close.