Isaac Svensson, CEO of 7SUN Media, recently recommended The E Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber.
I just finished it and I’ll say it again… Holy crap!
Had I read this a long time ago, I would have saved YEARS in building my businesses.
E-Myth \ ‘e-,’mith\ n
- the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs
- the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work.
A few takeaways from The E-Myth Revisited…
1. This isn’t a new book (it was written in 2004), nor is it a new concept. But, the message is often one that is forgotten by those of us who built businesses out of doing what we love and believing that we’ll gain more freedom by striking out on our own.
Once we do that, though, owning our own business becomes a job.
And, that job starts running our lives and we lose that freedom we were hoping to gain entirely.
2. For me, bringing on a team was vital to building both District Bliss and Photos from the Harty.
At first, I went down the bootstrapping pathway: I brought on interns. But, the problem is that interns don’t stick around.
And, every time I had to train a new person, I was tempted to “get small” again and just scale back.
I even considered closing up shop at various points (we all go through that; if you’re there right now, you are not alone).
Investing in building the *right* team was critical to the growth of my businesses. I wish I’d realized how important that was before training a handful of interns who only stayed for a few months at a time.
3. Structuring your systems, products, and essentially packaging your business so that it could be sold (aka the “franchise method”) keeps things consistent and keeps customers coming back.
This also makes training easy as you expand or bring on new team members.
4. Customers like to know what to expect.
If you are a photographer, clients want to know that your artistic style is consistent.
If you make products, customers want to know that the quality of your products is the same from one product to the next.
Customers crave consistency. It’s what keeps them loyal to your business and why they continue to come back year after year.
There are many, many other takeaways in The E-Myth Revisited, but it’s an easy, fast read and I recommend you do yourself a favor and just grab a copy so that you can work smarter, not harder and continue to grow your entrepreneurial side so you can be wildly successful!
