The E-Myth 25 Years Later

Copyright (c) 2010 Chuck Boyce

25 years ago, small business coach, author and visionary Michael Gerber began a revolution. With his groundbreaking book, "The E-Myth," he articulated the reason why the vast majority of small businesses fail.

Simply put, it's because people become a small business owner without first understanding what being an entrepreneur is really all about.

For example, let's say someone is the best tax return specialist in the world. Everyone tells them they are. This person, who works for a bigger company, says, "Wait a minute - I should go out on my own if I'm this good. Why should I share the profits of my talents with this company?"

The problem, according to Gerber, is that someone like this is generally a technician, not an entrepreneur. Yes, they know how to do what they do extremely well, whatever the skill may be - dentistry, home remodeling, car repair, graphic design, etc. - but they probably don't know how to translate that skill into business success.

As new business owners, these people immediately thrust themselves into a dozen different other roles and, in many cases, without any training or long-range thought about what those roles require. They have to be CEOs, CFOs, bookkeepers, marketers, human resources managers, and so forth - all the support services they took for granted when they worked for a bigger company.

This gets frustrating to most technicians; they want to concentrate on doing what they're good at. That's what made them money in the past in their minds, in their minds.

Unfortunately, if they don't work on all the different skill sets that running a small business require, they end up running a sloppy operation, they have difficulty recruiting new customers and often provide bad service to the ones they already have. They grow impatient with the actual demands creating by managing their own business and they make the fatal error of only working in their business, not on it.

This results in a lack of "big picture" perspective in not only how they run their business, but also how they market it to others. For example, our income tax return specialist may not realize that the best way to sell his services might be to expedite tax refunds to his clients. He also may not know who his best potential clients might be - and may target the exact wrong group with his marketing.

In order to be a successful entrepreneur you have to think like a successful entrepreneur. Michael Gerber understands that - that's why his "E-Myth" and "E-Myth Revisited" books have been business best-sellers for a quarter of a century.

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