The E-Myth Revisited

Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About I

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael E. Gerber is an American poet born on June 20, 1936, in
Indiana, United States. He is the founder of Michael E. Gerber
companies, a business skill training company Based in Carlsbad,
California.

REVIEW OF THE BOOk

PART I: THE E-MYTH AND AMERICAN

SMALL BUSINESS
 CHAPTER 1. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MYTH

The E-Myth is the myth of the entrepreneur. It runs

deep in this country and rings of heroic.
One thing which comes to my mind is a man or woman

standing alone, wind-blown against the elements,

climbing sheer faces of treacherous rock—all to realize
the dream of creating a business of one’s own.
A misunderstanding, costed us a lot in the country more
than anything, we lot resources, lost opportunities and
wasted lives.
That myth, I can call E-Myth, the myth of the
entrepreneur.

The Entrepreneurial Seizure

To understand and misunderstand the E-Myth from its
core, we need take a look at person who actually goes
into the business. not after he goes into the business,
but before.
Whichever business you are going in, it can be technical
work, a carpenter, a mechanic, or a machinist.
You were a bookkeeper or a poodle clipper; a drafts-
person or a hairdresser; a barber or a computer
programmer; a doctor or a technical writer; a graphic
artist or an accountant; an interior designer.
You are doing technical work.
And you maybe good at it. But you are not doing it for
yourself.
Then one day, something happened. It can be your
birthday, weather or something else. because of these
reasons your boss might feel you are not contributing to
the business
Apparently one day you might not fell the same for no
reason, you are stuck in entrepreneurial seizure, from
that day you might not fell the same.
You may feel like why I am doing this, for whom I am
doing this, if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have a
business. Any dummy can run a business. I’m working
for one.
 Once you are stuck with this then there is no relief. You
can now get back of it.
You had to start your own business.

CHAPTER 2. THE ENTREPRENEUR, THE

MANAGER, AND THE TECHNICAN

Today’s problem is that none of them want to have boss,

everyone wants to be boss. Let us take an example of fat and
skinny guy, a fat guy enjoying himself and suddenly some one
comes to you and tell you that you are not in shape, see
yourself. The skinny guy hates fat people. Can’t be around
them at all. Needs to be on the move. Lives for action.
The skinny guys are started taking over. Things are going to

change. You are planning new things in the physical life,

wake up at five, run three miles, cold shower at six, a
breakfast of wheat toast, black coffee, and half a grapefruit;
then, ride your bicycle to work, home by seven, run another
two miles by this everything seems to be different for you.

The fat guy is not interested in anything, he just loves eating

and sleeping. Food is major interest for him.

The skinny guy and fat guy are two different characters, with
different requirement, different passion, and different style.

Everyone has their own way of doing things, has own

interest. The fat guy and skinny guy, you can’t be both
somebody has to lose. That’s kind of things happen in small
business.

Let us discuss about three personalities.

THE ENTREPRENEUR
Entrepreneur is the one who is lives in future, less in present,
never in past. Every Entrepreneur have passion, value, skills,
hard work, creativity in them. Entrepreneurial has a
remarkable need for control. He needs control of people and
events in the present so that he can concentrate on his
dreams. He promises whatever happens in the life, keeps the
project moving.

To the entrepreneur most problems comes in the between of

our dream.

THE MANAGER

The manager is on of the most important personality.

Without manager there would be no proper planning, no one
to handle pressure in critical situation.

If the entrepreneur lives in future, then the manger lives in

past. Where entrepreneur controls and manager orders,
entrepreneur sees chances in events, managers see
problems. Manager gets settle in one thing but entrepreneur
doesn’t get settle in one thing, they start planning the next
one.

Without The Manager, there could be no business, no

society.

THE TECHNICAN

If The Entrepreneur lives in the future and The Manager lives

in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the
feel of things and the fact that things can get done.

Entrepreneur creates new and attractive work for the

technician.

The entrepreneur would be free to go ahead in new areas,

the manager would be indurate the operations, and the
technician would be doing technical work.
CHAPTER 3. INFANCY: THE TECHNICAN’S PHASE

…my Uncle Sol had a skunk farm but the skunks caught cold and died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the skunks in a subtle manner…

e.e. cummings

Collected Poems

Most businesses are not operating by the principle instead of

that they are operating by there owner, to want their
business want. Technician are free now at last because your
boss is dead you can do whatever you want, you are your
own boss now. In the beginning there no such work but
eventually their lot of work to be done. After all, work is
there in middle name. There is no other thing in your life
accept work, so you work twelve to fifteen hours of work in a
day. Seven day a week. Where ever you be at home or
outside you need to work.

We should name the company after our name so that it

would be easy for customers to remember and won’t forget
who is the boss. If the get impress by your work they keep
coming back, they send their friends, their friend have
friends. They all take about you and your work. Obviously
when work increases, we start having pressure, when
pressure increases, we start lacking behind. Then to if
customers want you, they will come back to you.
CHAPTER 4. ADOLESCENCE: GETTING SOME HELP
Adolescence comes in play when you decide to get some
help.

No one can tell you how it gone happen, but it always

happens, precepted by crises in the infancy stage. Everyone
needs help, who so ever survives needs help. There’s a one
critical moment in every business when you are hiring your
first ever employee to do work, he doesn’t know how to do
himself, or he is not interested to do. One man comes to into
your business, has good work experience, knows about
business well. At last, you are free now. Manager in you
wakes up and the technician temporarily goes to sleep. Your
worries are over. Someone else is going to do that now. You
are started taking little longer breaks, leaving everything on
him. Then you started neglecting things has your business
grow you need more people to hire, but leave everything one
him to do. The main thing happens everything goes out of
control, customer complains of shabby treatment by one of
person of our company, then banker calls tell you that you’re
overdrawn, the oldest supplier calls and tells you that order
you placed last week was placed wrong and it way take ten
weeks to deliver it. You promise to look in to it. The next day
you walk into production line, there you tell how you
suppose to do work, then you walk into salesperson and tells
them how to take care of things.
CHAPTER 5. BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE
Drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need
for a new birth of a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need
is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with
convulsions and explosions.

Eric Hoffer

The Temper of Our Time

Every business will reach a point where you need to come

out of your comfort zone, and control the environment.
Boundary of technician comes to know only when how much
he does by himself. The manager’s boundary can be
determined when, how many technicians he can control. The
entrepreneur’s boundary is a function of how many
managers he can engage with. When business increases, it
gets out of our ability to control, we give our job to
technician to control. We think technician can handle this so
we don’t need to worry about it.
Getting Small Again

One simple rule is if you can’t control the chaos, get rid of it.
Go back to your past leave everything when don’t have any
people to worry about, or to many customers. Go back to the
time when your business was simple. Many technicians do
that get rid of it.

Going for Broke

This is less painful but for dramatic then “getting small”. It

keeps growing faster and has own momentum. All the
excesses of Adolescence, frustrating and bewildering as they
might be in a normally expanding company, are disastrous in
a “going-for-broke” business. As quickly as it grows, chaos
grows even faster. For tied to the tail of a technological
breakthrough, The Technician and his people rarely break
free long enough to gain some perspective about their
condition. The demand for the commodity of which they are
so proud quickly exceeds their chronically Adolescent ability
to produce it.
Luck and speed and technology is not enough, there are
people who has more luck or speed or more technology. This
race is won by reflex.

Adolescent Survival

The most tragic possibility of all for an Adolescent business is

that it actually survives!

To survive you do whatever comes to your mind like kicking

and scratching, beating up people and your customers,
because after all you need your business going.
CHAPTER 6. MATURITY AND THE ENTREPRENEUR
PERSPECTIVE
They see the pattern, understand the order, experience the vision.

Peter Drucker

The New Society

The third most important thing in company’s growth is

Maturity. A Mature business knows where it is and how did
it got there and how will it go ahead. No companies end up
mature companies even companies like McDonald’s, Federal
Express, and Disney are not mature companies.

It's perspective which makes difference.

The Entrepreneurial Perspective

The Entrepreneurial Perspective is very important to have

great business but technician is opposite to it.

The Entrepreneurial Perspective is wider and expensive scale.

It helps to produce planned result in systematic way. Each
step in the development of such a business is measurable, if
not quantitatively, at least, qualitatively. The business
operated with some rules and principle.

The Entrepreneurial Model

It’s a model of a business that fulfils need of specific segment

of customer. When entrepreneurial creates model, he
surveys and then recheck it or corrects it the way the

customer wants. It understands that without a clear picture

of that customer, no business can succeed. To entrepreneur
customer is always opportunities because the entrepreneur
knows that within the customer is a continuing parade of
changing wants begging to be satisfied.
 PART II

THE TURN-KEY REVOLUTION: A NEW

VIEW OF BUSINESS
CHAPTER 7. THE TURN-KEY REVOLUTION

Systems theory looks at the world in terms of the interrelatedness of

all phenomena, and in this framework an integrated whole whose
properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system.

Fritjof Capra

The Turning Point

Yet no one knows about Turn-Key revolution. The impact

Turn-Key revolution add on American small business is more.
It is the Turn-Key Revolution that provides us with that
illusive key to the development of an extraordinary business.

“The Most Successful Small Business in the World”

That’s what McDonald’s calls itself today.

Think about it. In less than forty years, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s
has become a $40-billion-a-year business, with 28,707
restaurants worldwide—and growing in number every
minute—serving food to more than 43 million people every
day in 120 countries, representing more than 10 percent of
the gross restaurant receipts in America!

The average McDonald’s restaurant produces more than $2

million in annual sales, and is more profitable than almost
any other retail business in the world, with an average 17
percent pretax net profit.

Selling the Business Instead of the Product

Ray Kroc is the entrepreneur and like everyone he has huge

dream and very little money. Entered into franchisee.
Franchisee become main asset to him to realize dream.
CHAPTER 8. THE FRANCHISE PROTOTYPE

The Business Format Franchise is the most important news in

business.

Over one year, Business Format Franchise have reported

success rate of 95 percent in contrast to the 50-plus-percent
failure rate of new independently owned business. Where 80
percent of business fail in first 5 years, 75 percent succeed.

The Franchise Prototype is where all your ideas put into test
before implementing it in the business.
CHAPTER 9. WORKING ON YOUR BUSINESS,
NOT IN IT

Your business and your life are two different things don’t
make it one.

At its best, your business is something apart from you, rather

than a part of you, with its own rules and its own purposes.
An organism, you might say, that will live or die according to
how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep
customers.

Once you know your purpose of your life is not serve

business but serve your life.
YOUR MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

Management strategy does not focus only on finding

managers or people with degree from management schools.

In fact, they will be the bane of your existence.

You need management system; the system will become your

management strategy. Produces the result you want. This
system itself will become your solution for your problems. It
transfers people’s problems in to opportunities.
YOUR PEOPLE STRATEGY

How do I get my people to do what I want?” This is the one

question I hear most often from small business owners. And
the answer I invariably give them is, “You can’t! You can’t get
your people to do anything. “If you want it done,” I tell them,
“You’re going to have to create an environment in which
‘doing it’ is more important to your people than not doing it.
Where ‘doing it’ well becomes a way of life for them.”
YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

Marketing Strategy is all about customers, how you start,

ends, lives and dies with your customer.

When you enter in this thing you should forget about your
passion, dreams and interest. The only thing you should
remember is about your customer.

And what your customer wants is probably significantly

different from what you think he wants.
Epilogue

BRINGING THE DREAM BACK TO AMERICAN

SMALL BUSINESS
This book is not just simple prescription for success.

But this call to arms is not a call to do battle. It’s a call to

learning. How to feel, think, and act differently and more
productively, more humanly than our existing skills and
understanding allow. Today’s world is a difficult place.
Humankind has experienced more change in the past twenty
years than it has in the 2,000 that preceded them.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been taught to think that way. We

are an “out there” society, accustomed to thinking in terms
of them against us. We want to fix the world so that we can
remain the same. And for an “out there” society, coming
“inside” is a problem. But now is the time to learn how. Now
is the time to change. Because unless we do, the chaos will
remain. And we can’t afford this kind of chaos much longer.
We’re simply running out of time