The Answer Changed the Wine Industry.
A few years ago when I was working as a Value Builder Advisor with John Warrillow’s Built to Sell programme I ended up on a Zoom call with the founder of Barefoot Winery.
If you’ve ever grabbed a bottle of wine at a supermarket you’ve probably seen Barefoot. Massive brand. Sold everywhere.
In the early 2000s Ernest and Julio Gallo came to buy the company. At the time it was one of the largest acquisitions in the wine industry.
But when Gallo looked under the hood they found something unusual. Barefoot didn’t own any wineries. No vineyards. No trucks. No bottling plants. None of the infrastructure you’d expect from a wine company doing that kind of volume.
Gallo looked at the owner and asked what the hell he was actually buying.
The owner pointed to one thing.
His book of customers.
That was it. The relationships. The distribution channels. The loyalty of retailers who kept putting Barefoot on their shelves because it sold and because they trusted the company behind it.
Gallo understood immediately. Because a customer base like that is harder to build than a winery. You can buy trucks and build bottling plants with capital. You can’t buy a book of loyal customers who trust you. That takes years and you either have it or you don’t.
That satisfied Gallo enough to write one of the biggest cheques the industry had ever seen for a company that technically owned almost nothing.
Your business has a version of this. The question is whether you know what it is and whether you’re actively building it or accidentally neglecting it.
This story is one of the ones I walk through in Module 2 of Fall in Love with Your Business Again.
Understanding where your real value sits and how to grow it deliberately so when someone asks what they’re buying the answer is obvious.
Cohort call is this Monday 27 April.
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George Sotiropoulos shares the story of Barefoot Wines’ acquisition by Ernest and Julio Gallo, where the company’s book of loyal customers was the primary asset despite owning no wineries or infrastructure. George heard this directly from the Barefoot founder while working as a Value Builder Advisor with John Warrillow. This story features in Module 2 of End Burnout — Fall in Love with Your Business Again, illustrating customer loyalty as a growth lever.