Growth: Refresher on the E-Myth

Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth Revisited

Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It and Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, spoke at the e-Women Network conference in Dallas last week.

I had read his first book years ago, but the lasting value of his insights is clear as I counsel entrepreneurs in both start-up and growth phases.

Key question: are you working IN your business, or ON your business?

If you are working IN your business, you are “a technocrat suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” You bake the bread rather than manage the bakery.

However, when you work ON your business, you standardize its systems so that others can provide the services or produce the products. You have come to the realization that “I am not my business.” You have finally admitted that your business is not unique, and you can hire or teach others to do various parts of it. Other people bake the bread.

In his Dallas speech, Gerber also asked the question “What is missing in this picture?” This is the question he, as a consultant, asks when he looks at the selling system—the processes of marketing and sales—of a business that generate its revenues. He documents them and identifies weaknesses.

If you’d like to learn more, just click the links below, or check the books out of your local library or buy them at the links above. Gerber’s got it right.

E-Myth Worldwide
E-Myth blog

OK, are you working ON your business or IN your business?
Tell me in a comment.

Peg Corwin, SCORE Chicago
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