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

by Michael E. Gerber

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

“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 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.

if yours is a legal firm, you must have attorneys. If yours is a medical firm, you must have physicians. But you don’t need to hire brilliant attorneys or brilliant physicians. You need to create the very best system through which good attorneys and good physicians can be leveraged to produce exquisite results.

What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time.

The colors you show your customer must be scientifically determined and then used throughout your model—on the walls, the floors, the ceiling, the vehicles, the invoices, your people’s clothes, the displays, the signs. The model must be thought of as a package for your one and only product—your business.

Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything.

“The owner of the business must start out by asking marketing questions.

“every written or verbal communication with anyone who comes into contact with your business is a Soft System. What so few of us understand is the power of those words when they are totally integrated. That your recruitment script, and your shop’s name, and the training you conduct in your school, and the words in your customer brochures, and your ads, everything you say, must work together just as the visual components of your shop must work together, to make one powerfully effective message.