Business lessons that can be gleaned from Lamborghini success story

Celebride -B-club- Lamborghini. [File, Standard] The luxury sports car, Lamborghini, is among the expensive and perhaps the classical of its kind that was invented by a prisoner of war. When Enzo Ferrari, the maker of Ferrari cars, told Ferruccio Lamborghini that he was a mere farmer, for the latter was born of peasants who grew grapes and sold wine in the Italian countryside of Renazzo, little did he anticipate he would be competing with this ex-prisoner who would turn a tractor business into a sports car empire. What business lessons can we learn from Lamborghini story? Follow your passion Lamborghini would have been a wine maker and had been inducted into grape farming and wine making but his passion was elsewhere, in mechanics, as he was only interested in fixing their farm tractor. You can learn from the best about business concepts but cannot have satisfaction in doing what your passion is not in. Maybe your family is grooming you to take manage their business but you may end up disappointing everyone by charting a different business path. Don't despair After studying mechanics in a college and learning from the best blacksmith the tricks of the trade, Lamborghini sought employment at a factory where Italian military vehicles were being maintained. He could not impress with his learned skills, but kept on persisting, that the factory owner had to hire him. Usually, employers' looks for hires with work experience, a situation Lamborghini found himself in, and his story is no different with the current job market. You can get that experience by volunteering in organizations and building a good network. With today's employers not advertising job positions the old way, your network contacts can tell you when a chance presents it elsewhere matching your skills. Find a void to fill Upon return to Italy from Rhodes Island in Greece, where he had remained behind when the Nazi German took control of the island and subsequently took him prisoner of war before putting him to fix their war machines as a mechanic, Lamborghini was presented with an unusual request from his father. His parent needed a new tractor. Italy was at the time coming out of post-war crisis, and with food production low, an idea hit him. Why not make tractors? Buying destroyed allied and Nazi battle machines and vehicles, he converted them into tractors, with modifications of engines of course. Lamborghini Tractors company was born and sales boomed. When you study a given market and see a gap, don't hesitate to fill it. Don't fear risks With demand for tractors, more capital needed to be injected into production. Where was extra money to be sourced from? He approached his father and they put their family land as collateral for a loan. It turned to be a gamble that changed their fortunes for good, for they more than quadrupled on the principal amount, and Lamborghini tractors were roaring on nearly all of Italian farmlands, with the company being the largest manufacturers of tractors in the whole of Italy. Maybe that loan to expand your business can see its turnaround and becoming a franchise of sorts. Challenge a market dominant Lamborghini had love for fast cars, and had a collection of Jaguars, Mercedes, Maseratis and Ferraris, but none of them satisfied him. It was while repairing his Ferrari, which had a troublesome clutch, that he made a discovery. There was no difference between the clutches of his tractors and those of the Ferrari, except in prices, where for the latter cost almost a thousand times over the cost of the former. When he told Enzo Ferrari about this, the latter brushed him off as a tractor maker and a farmer who knew nothing about cars! Lamborghini stuck his chin out promising Ferrari he would show him how a fast car looks like! Established brands with market dominance can be a challenge to compete with, but what with an innovation that can give them a run for the money? Learn from your competitor Lamborghini started off in his quest for fast cars with three ex-employees of Ferrari. In nine months, his first car, a Lamborghini 350GT, was off the production line. It was a masterpiece that rivaled the fast cars of the time in terms of speed and design. Lesson: it is better to start off with an experienced team that has background knowledge and can take your business forward. Listen to your stuff and allow in their ideas He gave his engineers a degree of freedom and they secretly designed a race car that they kept away from him as he was against the idea of race cars. It was nicknamed Miura P400, and had a precedent as being the first race car with the engine in the rear middle. One of the engineers behind it entered into a street race but ended up crashing into a restaurant. Lamborghini, on learning about this secret project, was of the mind of scraping the crazy street car idea, but decided against it. The Miura P400 was the world's first supercar, and its rear engine design became the standard for others (like Formula One). What stood out with his supercars brand was they never incorporated any parts from other car makers, and were in a class of their own as in performance and designs. The market can be uncertain Lamborghini tractor company suffered a setback when Bolivia ordered over 5, 000 tractors but a coup in that southern American country saw the deal cancelled, giving a blow to his business. He had to sell his tractor company, and 51% of his automobile shares. The blow to business was hardly assuaged when global oil prices crashed, and an oil embargo ensued, with high oil prices making it hard for the automobile industry. With the deepening financial situation, he had to sell the remaining 49% of his automobile shares, and retire early. The company had to go through several buyers with each selling to another when they failed to make a profit. Currently, carmaker Audi is the owner of the company that was started by the ex-prisoner and had managed to turn it around.

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