The e-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
The key to entrepreneurial success is to starting working less in your business and start working on your business. This is the central message of Michael Gerber’s seminal book on entrepreneurship. While he outlines why so few business startups make it past the five-year mark, he also provides a blueprint for ensuring that your business does succeed. With its running narrative of Sarah the baker opening her own business, the lessons are highly memorable and readable.
Key Messages of the Book:
- Fundamentally, the e-myth or entrepreneurial myth is that a good idea and skillful technical work are all you need to create a thriving startup. The truth is that you need a different mindset to make it.
- The technical work required to produce your product or service is quite different from the work required to run a business. i.e. Baking pies is not the same as running a bakery.
-
Successful businesses need three separate skills (and they can all be learned!): Technical skills, managerial skills and entrepreneurial skills.
- Technical skills are the how-to of creating your product or service
- Managerial skills are striking the correct balance of control as you transition away from the technical skills and bring on more technicians.
- Entrepreneurial skills allow you to plan for how you are going to grow your business and not just hiring people as you need them and figuring out as you go will lead to greater success.
- The technician is your doer. The manager is your fixer and creates order. The entrepreneur is the innovator and the visionary.
- The business development process involves innovation (constantly be tweaking), quantification (always be measuring what matters) and orchestration (putting innovation into practice)
- Create a scalable business. Business success comes not from what you sell, but how you sell it. Summarized in the ‘Business Format Franchise’. This means that a successful business is systems dependant and not people dependant. This can be achieved by building your business with a mind to how you would franchise it.
The problem isn’t your business; it never has been. The problem is you.