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

by Michael E. Gerber

‘I wonder’ is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality.”

“If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own.

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.

“The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life.”

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

“To educate yourself sufficiently so that, as your business grows, the business’s foundation and structure can carry the additional weight.

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 Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.

the Business Format Franchise is built on the belief that the true product of a business is not what it sells but how it sells it.

The true product of a business is the business itself.

But for ordinary people to do extraordinary things, a system—“a way of doing things”—is absolutely essential in order to compensate for the disparity between the skills your people have and the skills your business needs if it is to produce consistent results.

It’s your job—more accurately, the job of your business—to develop those tools and to teach your people how to use them.

Documentation is an affirmation of order.

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

Each and every component of the business system is a means through which the franchisor can differentiate his business from all other businesses in the mind of his consumer.

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.

the definition of a franchise is simply your unique way of doing business.

There needs to be a way we do something. There needs to be a set routine. Because without it, there would be nothing to improve upon. And without improvement, there would be no reason to be.

desultory

Your Strategic Objective is a very clear statement of what your business has to ultimately do for you to achieve your Primary Aim.

What’s your product? What feeling will your customer walk away with? Peace of mind? Order? Power? Love? What is he really buying when he buys from you?

I want the business to be an expression of ‘our caring deeply and often enough.’ I want the business, All About Pies, to be all about caring, not about pies.

Caring will be the true product of my business, not pies.

the Position Contract is the document that identifies who’s to stand up and what they’re being counted on to produce.

The System will become your solution to the problems that beset you because of the unpredictability of your people.

sacrosanct,

demographics is the science of marketplace reality. It tells you who buys.

Psychographics is the science of perceived marketplace reality. It tells you why certain demographic types buy for one reason while other demographic types buy for another.

‘What must our business be in the mind of our customers in order for them to choose us over everyone else?’

A system is a set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems.

frenetically.