The E-myth Revisited Quotes

“The Entrepreneur’s boundary is a function of how many managers he can engage in pursuit of his vision.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The Entrepreneur is our creative personality—always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-myth Revisited

“Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go, but the systems remain constant.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-myth Revisited

“most people who go into business don’t have a model of a business that works, but of work itself, a Technician’s Perspective, which differs from the Entrepreneurial Perspective in the following ways: • The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: “How must the business work?” The Technician’s Perspective asks: “What work has to be done?” • The Entrepreneurial Perspective sees the business as a system for producing outside results—for the customer—resulting in profits. The Technician’s Perspective sees the business as a place in which people work to produce inside results—for The Technician—producing income. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective starts with a picture of a well-defined future, and then comes back to the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision. The Technician’s Perspective starts with the present, and then looks forward to an uncertain future with the hope of keeping it much like the present. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts. The Technician’s Perspective envisions the business in parts, from which is constructed the whole. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective is an integrated vision of the world. The Technician’s Perspective is a fragmented vision of the world. • To The Entrepreneur, the present-day world is modeled after his vision. To The Technician, the future is modeled after the present-day world.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Where the business is the product, how the business interacts with the consumer is more important than what it sells.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing. The difference between the two is living intentionally and living by accident.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“your”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“you’ll know that your business is destined to grow, and that once it does your job is going to be significantly different. For now, that’s all you need.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Life becomes easier. Life becomes a dream. You begin to take a little longer lunch: thirty minutes instead of fifteen. You leave a little earlier at the end of the day: eight o’clock instead of nine. Harry comes to you occasionally to tell you what he needs, and you, busy as usual, simply tell him to handle it. How doesn’t matter as long as he doesn’t bother you with the details. You’ve got other fish to fry.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“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? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“And that is the sign of a Mature company. A Mature company is started differently than all the rest. 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.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Remember, Sarah, any plan is better than no plan.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“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.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“a business that ‘gets small again’ is a business reduced to the level of its owner’s personal resistance to change, to its owner’s Comfort Zone, in which the owner waits and works, works and waits, hoping for something positive to happen.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“You can’t sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“He needs to know why he’s doing what he’s doing.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Don’t you see? If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Once you fully understand the relationship every owner must have with his or her business if it is to work, I can assure you that your business and your life will take on new vitality and new meaning.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“This book is about such an idea—an idea that says your business is nothing more than a distinct reflection of who you are. If your thinking is sloppy, your business will be sloppy. If you are disorganized, your business will be disorganized. If you are greedy, your employees will be greedy, giving you less and less of themselves and always asking for more. If your information about what needs to be done in your business is limited, your business will reflect that limitation. So if your business is to change—as it must continuously to thrive—you must change first. If you are unwilling to change, your business will never be capable of giving you what you want.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business.1”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“I believe that our business can provide us with a mirror to see ourselves as we are, to see what we truly know and what we don’t know, to see ourselves honestly, directly, and immediately.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Yes, the simple truth about the greatest businesspeople I have known is that they have a genuine fascination for the truly astonishing impact little things done exactly right can have on the world.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Go to work on your business rather than in it, and ask yourself the following questions: • How can I get my business to work, but without me? • How can I get my people to work, but without my constant interference? • How can I systematize my business in such a way that it could be replicated 5,000 times, so the 5,000th unit would run as smoothly as the first? • How can I own my business, and still be free of it? • How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“system is a set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

“Anthony Greenbank, who said in The Book of Survival, “To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.”
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It