Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
"If your business depends on you, you don’t have a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world.”
The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.
He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise.
Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.
The E-Myth Revisited, will help you to be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.
Key Takeaways
“If your business depends on you, you don’t have a business- you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world.”
The top priority for a business owner is to create a business that produces a great product or service without them. In other words, an entrepreneur doesn’t produce a product or service. An entrepreneur creates a system that product a great product or service and removes themselves from the process.
- Build a system that allows ordinary people to produce extraordinary results.
What size do I my business in 5 years?
What roles do I need to fill inside that business? For each position on that board chart, you identified the result that position is responsible for and the standards to which they must deliver. Then you and your business partners decide which of your names will go into those positions. Could be 4 different positions at this point, but that’s normal. Your goal is to start from the lowest level position and build systems to replace yourself.
- Responsibilities
- Standards
- Procedures
You need to develop a reliable and repeatable system that anyone who fills the position can execute and successfully produce a result of the standards you’ve said. Only after you’ve built a reliable, repeatable system, do you move yourself into a higher position.
- You replace yourself with a system by documenting everything you do to achieve the results you want to the standards you’ve set.
- You document your process in an operations manual, which contains checklists, templates, and scripts.
- You test your system by following your operations manual exactly as you’ve written it.
- Once you’ve verified that your system produces the results that position is responsible for, to the standards you set, it’s time to hire someone to execute your system.
To hire someone, put the following ad on CraigsList or LinkedIn:
Looking for people who believe in our companies vision. Who have an open mind and wants to learn new skills. No experience necessary.
- If you hire someone with experience, they won’t fully buy into your system because they’ve had already developed the habits of someone else’s system and if your business success relies on hiring experienced people who have their own way of doing things, then the business not only relies on you, it also relies on each of them.
- If they show up, you succeed. If they don’t, you’re doomed.
- It’s better to have the success of your company rely on the quality of the systems that you’ve built for the company.
- When a company with high quality systems loses a person, they can quickly be replaced by a wide variety of people who are eager to learn.
When taking a systems approach to your business, think of yourself as a writer/director for a broadway musical.
- Write the script.
- Design the set.
- Hire the actors.
- Eventually the actors take on an entrepreneurial mindset: How can we innovate and improve the system?
