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

by Michael E. Gerber

“There is no such thing as undesirable work,” he continued. “There are only people who see certain kinds of work as undesirable. People who use every excuse in the world to justify why they have to do work they hate to do. People who look upon their work as a punishment for who they are and where they stand in the world, rather than as an opportunity to see themselves as they really are.

“And the reason it’s different here is because we give everyone who comes to work at the hotel an opportunity to make a choice. Not after they’ve done the work, but before. “And we do that by making sure they understand the idea behind the work they’re being asked to do. “I guess that’s what excited me most about taking this job,” said the Manager. “It’s the very first place I’ve ever gone to work where there was an idea behind the work that was more important than the work itself.

What the Manager was telling me, and what the Boss had told him, was that people—your people—do not simply want to work for exciting people. They want to work for people who have created a clearly defined structure for acting in the world. A structure through which they can test themselves and be tested. Such a structure is called a game.

Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves. Something is missing in most of our lives. Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing. What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves?

That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing. It can become that place of community. It can become that place where words such as integrity, intention, commitment, vision, and excellence can be used as action steps in the process of producing a worthwhile result.

And the hiring process is just the beginning! Just think. All of this simply to start a relationship! Are you beginning to understand that systematizing your business need not be a dehumanizing experience, but quite the opposite? That in order to get your people to do what you want, you’ll first have to create an environment that will make it possible? That hiring people, developing people, and keeping people requires a strategy built on an understanding of people completely foreign to most businesses? That the system is indeed the solution? That without an idea worth pursuing, there can be no People Strategy at all?

“Talk to me more about management,” Sarah said. “I heard you say earlier that I don’t need professional managers to be successful in my business; that, in fact, I’m better off without them. What’s wrong with hiring experienced managers?” “Everything’s wrong with it, Sarah! “Because, if you don’t know how to manage, how are you going to choose them, and how are you going to manage them? “You can’t! “Because they will manage by the standards they have been taught to manage by in somebody else’s business. Not by your standards. “Remember Delegation rather than Abdication? “You can’t delegate your accountabilities, Sarah.

“You don’t need professional managers to manage to those standards. All you need are people who wish to learn how to manage to them. People who are as personally committed to those standards as you are! “In short, you need people who want to play your game, Sarah. Not people who believe they have a better one. “So, you need to invent the rules of the game, which become the foundation of your Management System.

So the famous dictum that says, “Find a need and fill it,” is inaccurate. It should say, “Find a perceived need and fill it.” Because if your customer doesn’t perceive he needs something, he doesn’t, even if he actually does. Get it? Those perceptions are at the heart of your customer’s decision-making process. And if you know his demographics, you can understand what those perceptions are, and then figure out what you must do to satisfy them and the expectations they produce. You can know your customer’s psychographic reality. Each demographic model has a specific set of perceptions that are identifiable in advance. Women of a certain age, with a certain amount of education, with a certain size family, living in a certain geography, buy for very specific psychographic reasons. Those unconsciously held reasons will be different from another group of women, of a different age and marital status, with a different educational background, living in a different part of the country. And these differences predetermine what each group buys.

Because until you do, until you begin to take it seriously, until you give it the earnest attention it demands, your Prototype will continue to be the only thing it could hope to be under the circumstances—a crap shoot! At GERBER Business Development Corporation, we have created tools for our small business clients to begin the often arduous task of making demographic and psychographic determinations, and how to position their Prototype in the mind of their consumer. The impact has been astonishing.

“To do what? “To deliver the promise no one else in your industry dares to make! “That’s what marketing is,