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

by Michael E. Gerber

knowledge, new emotional depth, new wisdom. “You might say that

two outcomes for the small business owner who sudde...

truly passionate owner, Don Juan’...

transmute his personal ‘lead’ into ‘gold.’ Or the fires can become so fearsome that he shrinks back t...

the ‘lead’ I’ve got is better than the ‘gold’ I haven’t got. Bet...

‘gets small again’ is a business reduced to the level of its owner’s personal resistance to change,...

“This condition reminds me of a line from Samuel

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which Estragon, having waited around for days hoping the mythical Godot will arrive and relieve him of his misery, turns to his companion, Vladimir, and says, ‘I can’t go on like this.’ To which Vladimir replies, ‘That’s what you think.’

the natural disposition of every business is to either...

“In short, businesses that ‘get small again’ die. They literally implode upon themselves.

“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.

by understanding the key processes

that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.

a...

the right questions, such as: Where do I wish to be? When do I wish to be there? How much capital will that take? How many people, doing what work, and how? What technology will be required? How large a space will be need...

have contingency plans in place. Best

And sometimes you will simply fly by the seat of your pants; you will go with the flow, follow your intuition.

“But

while, even while you’re guessing, the key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you see in ...

mean, write it down,...

in the process of defining the future, the plan begins to shape itself to reality, both the reality of the world out there and the reality you are able to create in here.

those two realities merge, they form a new reality—call it your reality,

A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view.

building a business that works not because of you but without you.

Mature business knows how it got to be where it is, and what it must do to get where it wants to go.

is not the end product of a serial process, beginning with Infancy and moving through Adolescence.

Disney didn’t end up as Mature companies. They started out that

way!

The person who launches his business as a Mature company must also go through Infancy and Adolescence.

He simply goes through them in an entirely different way.

It’s his perspective that makes th...

model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place.

how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was

once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place

would have to act,

then

realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we...

it would have to act like a great company long before it ever

each and every day

we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be,

Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.

best businesses are fashioned after a model of a business that works.

What’s important is the business: how it looks, how it acts, how it does what it is intended to do.

The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: “How must the business work?” The Technician’s Perspective asks: “What

work has to be done?”

producing outside results—for the customer—resulting

people work to produce inside results—for The Technician—producing income.

The

Perspective starts with a picture of a well-defined future, and then comes b...