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The Leaning Tower of Pisa, appropriately located in Italy’s Field of Miracles for it is a miracle that this monument is still standing, is one of the world’s most famous pieces of architecture. But what has this iconic building have to do with business success strategies? Bear with me, it will all become clear. The first lessons can be learnt from why this building is leaning in the first place.

The answer to this question, despite baffling engineers for centuries, is simple. It was built on a poor foundation. The soil upon which it was built was loose, sandy soil - inappropriate to support a monument of such stature.

The leaning actually started early in the construction phase and several attempts were made to rectify the problem. Special construction devices were used, columns and damaged parts were replaced but to no avail. The inclination continued because the underlying cause of the inclination had not been tackled.

In more recent times, concrete was poured into the foundation to help stabilise it but, alarmingly, the building sank further into the ground. It took an international committee of which a key player was a Professor of Soil Mechanics from the London Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, Professor John Burlap, to come up with a viable solution.

After anchoring the building, soil was carefully extracted from the North side causing it to sink on that side. It was a very delicate procedure because it was paramount that the building remained stable during this extraction process. The remedial action was set up so that the building could be carefully monitored and the position soil was extracted was altered where necessary so that the realignment of the building was controlled centimetre by centimetre.

Today, after an investment of $40M the tower still leans because to bring it to a completely vertical position would be out of character for the building. However, it has been shifted by 15 centimetres, restoring it to its 1838 position. This action is expected to prolong the life of this historic landmark for another 300-400 years.

So what business success strategies can we learn from this beautiful yet flawed building.

1. The first thing is, when building your business it is important to start on a firm foundation that is appropriate for your business.
2. Pouring cement into the tower’s foundation almost proved to be its undoing. Similarly, pouring too much ’stuff’ into your business without careful consideration can do more harm than good. It’s important to receive strategic, accurate and focused advice.
3. Sometimes a subtraction process is more valuable or relevant that an addition process. What can you subtract from your business that would significantly boost its performance and multiply its results?
4. Correcting mistakes can be costly. It may seem expensive at the time, but getting the right advice at the start of your project will pay for itself many times over. As Benjamin Franklin said “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
5. Learn to look below the surface for solutions to your challenges. The problem with the tower lay not in the structure but in its foundation. Your business problems may lie in the invisible realm such as your mindset and or that of your employees.
6. Think outside of the box when seeking solutions to challenges and learn to look to other industries for solutions that can be adapted to your business.
7. Don’t press on irregardless if you have evidence that what you are doing is not working. Construction work on the tower was stopped twice and it has now been determined that had workers not done this the tower would have toppled over before it was completed. Take time out to analyse and evaluate your progress and modify your business strategy where needed.

However, having said all this, if you have an idea that you believe in then action it. The adage that “you don’t have to get it perfect, you just need to get it started” still holds. For many the quest for perfection rather than progress is one of the biggest obstacles to getting a business off the ground.

Despite its flaws the Leaning Tower of Pisa is, nonetheless, a remarkable building. It has been around for centuries and has had millions of visitors - a success that many businesses would love to emulate. And, if you pay attention to the success strategies given here your business will soar vertically just as it was originally intended for the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

When I first got in the billboard business, I assumed that the taller the sign, the better the sign. When I was driving down the interstate and I saw a really tall billboard, I would think to myself “now there’s a valuable sign”.

I used to compare my signs to others by saying “my sign’s the tallest and, therefore, is the best”. Unfortunately, that’s a bad mindset and I messed up some great opportunities in my quest for being the “tallest”.

The whole point to a billboard, from the advertiser’s perspective (and they are the boss in reality), is for the billboard to have maximum visibility of their ad message. The easier and longer the traffic can read the ad message, the better.

Being real tall doesn’t often get this job done.

Tall signs actually reduce the ability to read the advertiser’s message for two key reasons:

A sign that is twice the height of the other signs creates a reduction of the apparent size of the ad message by a huge percentage. It’s just math - the farther away something is, the smaller it appears. In Houston, for example, where signs can easily be over 100′ to the bottom of the ad message, giant 14′ x 48′ bulletins look like 4′ x 8′ sheets of plywood. The average driver in Houston will have trouble believing that the ad on top of a 100′ monopole is the same size as that on a 30′ monopole - it looks like about 50%.

Tall signs go out of your field of vision quickly, and so you cannot read the message very long and certainly not from a distance where the copy is legible. Just as the traffic can begin to read the exit, the sign goes out the “top” of their windshield and so they move on to the next ad message. Now, you may argue that they can see the tall sign from farther back, as it stands majestically above the trees and other obstructions, and that is true, but you can’t read the copy except for the largest words, so you don’t really even know what they are selling. Unless the advertiser’s message is “Wendy’s Exit Now”, the value of the copy is great impaired.

I learned this lesson the hard way on my colossal 120′ high 20′ x 60′ monopole in Dallas. I was so proud of building one of the largest signs in the city that I never bother to think of what the appropriate height would be - only what the tallest I could afford was.

As a result, instead of a dominant giant 20′ x 60′ ad face dwarfing a sea of 14′ x 48′ ad faces, instead I had what looked like a 14′ x 48′ on steroids. The mega height made the ad face look no larger than the surrounding signs, and it also made the sign hard to read except from a large distance - the sign was already out of your field of vision, out of the top of your windshield, from about 1,000′ away.

Tallest may be important in basketball, but in sign world, it’s often a misunderstood negative!

Every bit of evidence indicates that for a business to thrive and grow, and to ensure it’s protected from uncertainty, it needs a plan; the plan shows that you have thought about the opportunities and threats, about the objectives and the targets, and that there is a system in place for measuring progress, so that in the event of deviation immediate corrective action can be taken.

Unfortunately, I hear all too often “we’re too small to need a plan” or “we don’t have the time to spend on that sort of thing.” These are the words uttered by companies that later find themselves in deep financial difficulties because they failed to anticipate. I have worked with a significant number of such companies, and unless you have a stockpile of cash, a very understanding bank, or an alternative source of funds (like re-mortgaging the house), the line between survival and failure can be very thin.

Consider this. Is it better to invest your time in stabilising the business and growing the profitability, confident that you have the contingency plans in place to deal with most eventualities, or in fire-fighting and dealing with the issues as they arise, uncomfortable in the knowledge that you’re just waiting for the next crisis to happen?

The Business plan has three primary functions:

1. To serve as an Action Plan
2. To serve as a Road Map
3. To serve as a Sales Tool

• Action Plan. A business plan will help you to pull apart the pieces of the business and examine each piece by itself. So instead of one large problem, you have a sequence of smaller problems. And by solving the small problems, the large problem is automatically solved. So writing a business plan can help to move you to action, by breaking down a seemingly insurmountable task, like growing the business, into many smaller, less intimidating tasks.

• Road Map. With an existing company the business plan is an invaluable tool to help keep you on track, and moving in the direction you want to go. In the hurley-burley of daily business, it is very easy to lose sight of your objectives and goals - a business plan can help to keep you focused. A business plan can also serve to help others to understand your vision, including suppliers, customers, employees, friends, and family.

• Sales Tool. Perhaps most importantly, a business plan can serve as a sales tool. The business plan indicates how much cash will be needed to fund future operations, it also provides the framework for the “what-if” analyses; what would happen if you were able to increase revenues by 25%, what would happen if you lost that major customer, what would happen if you were able to cut costs by 3%.

Included in the business plan are the Sales and Finance Plans. These document need not be exhaustive, but they do provide a valuable excuse to think about the future, and to spend time working ON the business rather than working IN the business. We all want our businesses to be working for us, and not as most commonly happens, for us to be working for the business.

For more useful information on writing business plans and growing your business, go to http://www.eunus.com

Creating Loyal Customers is essential to the long term sustainability of any business in any industry.

The statistics are incredible. Studies show Loyal Customers come back more often spend more money each visit and talk about and promote your business to four to five times more people than a satisfied customer does. Loyal Customers even complain less. And for every dollar you spend keeping a loyal customer, it costs the typical business 5 dollars for a new customer. Loyal Customers, gotta love ‘em!

So how do you create loyal customers?

There are 3 essential connections that need to be understood.

o Points of Connection

o Personnel Connection

o Emotional Connection

What are points of connection? Points of connection will be every point where you’re customer (or prospective customer) comes into contact with your business. Points of connection include (but certainly not limited to) your website, your phone system, your location and so on. Every point of connection should be an easy to use, positive experience for your customer. If you’re a restaurant, you can have the best food in the world, but if the hostess is rude, you have degraded the experience for your customer. If the client has to go through a complicated phone tree to get to a real person that could be a real turn off. If your website is difficult to go thru or has old information, that could cause a problem in people’s perception of your business. All of the above mentioned make it more difficult for your customer in becoming a Loyal Customer.

Each point of connection needs to be (at the bare minimum) a neutral event, best if a positive experience. As each positive experience builds on other positive experiences, you expose the possibility of creating a Loyal Customer.

I did not type incorrectly when I typed Personnel Connection. Yes, personal connection is important and I’ll talk about it in step 3. Traditionally, when we think of customer service, we usually are focused on the front line people, those in front of the customer. However when you are talking about raising the bar and creating Loyal Customers, the personnel that need to be involved is everyone. Yes, everyone. CEO, Executive team, maintenance staff, tech geeks, back office staff, everyone. Here’s why.

Let’s start with the tech geeks. If they are in charge of the website, would a strong focus on creating loyal customers change the way they may look at working their website? Right now, they are probably disconnected. What you often see in companies is a constant back and forth between the tech folks and the customer service folks on making a customer-centric website. What a waste of time, money and meetings. And while that’s going on, you’re turning off the people you need most - customers. A customer loyalty focused staff resolves the issues before they even become a problem. This is true of any department.

How about the executive management team? After all, about once or twice a year, “customer service” becomes the topic of the moment and then satisfied that people get it, they move on to something else. Yet a couple months later, out comes a new corporate policy that has the front line people shaking their heads knowing that they just made it more difficult to work with their clients. It happens all the time. The executive team is so focused on bottom line results that they aren’t looking at the fact that they may drive customers away. Folks, customers are the bottom line results.

All’s you need to do is look at the industry leaders. Those company’s that continually produce results in good times and bad. They may not be flashy, but they are consistent. Look closer and you’ll see an organization that strives for creating loyal customers from the board room to the break room.

The third Connection is the Emotional Connection. Think of the places or businesses YOU feel loyalty to, whether it’s a restaurant, clothing store or even a particular hardware store. Is it an emotional connection? You bet it is! The fact is the vast majority of consumers want to be loyal; we love (an emotional word there!) having a favorite place or business. If nothing else, it makes our life easier. Loyal to an airline? Makes travel arrangements easier. Loyal to a restaurant? Guess where I’m taking guests from out of town. Loyal to a supply company? It’s so much easier than having to hunt for a new one each time.

Once you create that emotional connection where people like (dare I say love?) doing business with you and feel valued in return, it becomes increasingly more difficult for your competitor’s to whisper sweet nothings and take their business away.

By creating positive experiences with your business at every point of connection, internally creating a totally customer-centric operation and creating a relationship of respect and value, an emotional connection, you create a relationship more profitable, less problems and ultimately more satisfying to all parties concerned.

What a great connection to make!