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

by Michael E. Gerber

when the technician falls prey to the Fatal Assumption, the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him.

Every strong entrepreneurial personality has an extraordinary need for control. Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that he can concentrate on his dreams.

This then becomes the entrepreneurial worldview: a world made up of both an overabundance of opportunities and dragging feet.

Put another way, while The Entrepreneur dreams, The Manager frets, and The Technician ruminates.

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

your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.

“The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

You don’t own a business—you own a job!

any plan is better than no plan.

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.

To The Entrepreneur, the present-day world is modeled after his vision. To The Technician, the future is modeled after the present-day world.

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 Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.

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

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