The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It - Michale E. Gerber

My recommendation: 8/10

My key takeaway from this book is creating a business that doesn't depend on us. We should create a system that provides great products and services, and scales well without any input from us. So we can choose to focus on things we enjoy instead of finding ourselves prisoned by long to-do lists to keep the business alive.

Notes:

The Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.

The Entrepreneur wakes up with a vision.
The Manager screams "Oh, no!"
While the two of them are battling it out, The Technician seizes the opportunity to go into business for himself.

"In a business that depends on you, on your style, on your personality, on your presence, on your talent and willingness to do the work, if you're not there why of course your customers would go someplace else. Wouldn't you?

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.

A mature company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.

The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: "How must the business work?" The Techni- can's Perspective asks: "What work has to be done?
The Entrepreneurial Perspective sees the business as a system for producing outside results.
The Entrepreneurial Perspective starts with a picture of a well-defined future.
To The Entrepreneur, the present-day world is modelled after his vision.

Go to work on your business rather than in it.
Go to work on your business as if it were the pre-production prototype of a mass-producible product.

When it comes to marketing, what you want is unimportant.
It's what your customer wants that matters.

Marketing process.
It starts with the promise you make to attract them to your door.
It continues with the sale you make once they get there.
It ends with the delivery of the promise before they leave your door.

"So it is that an entrepreneurial business, without a Manager to give it order and without a Technician to put it to work, is doomed to suffer an early, and probably very dramatic, death. And that a Manager-driven business, without an Entrepreneur or a Technician to play their absolutely critical roles, will put things into little grey boxes over and over again, only to realize too late that there's no reason for the things or the boxes she put them into! Such a business will die very neatly.
"And that in a Technician-driven business, without The Entrepreneur to lead her and The Manager to supervise her, The Technician will work until she drops, only to wake up the next morning to go to work even harder, and the next, and the next. Only to discover, long after it's too late, that while she was working someone moved a freeway through the store!"

If you have any comments or questions about this book notes, you can write me at Twitter @oykun or email me at hello[at]oykun.com.

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