Work ON your business, not IN it
For 22 years, as an entrepreneur, i have been working hard IN my business as an ‘owner-manager’. The book titled “The E-Myth Busted” has transformed the way i look at my role in my business!
I really felt cheated when i read this chapter!
For 20+ years i had been working hard IN my business as an ‘owner-manager’. While my title may have been snooty-sounding ‘CEO’ or ‘Managing Director’, i have really been everything from an incharge of toilet maintenance to PHP programmer to a sales manager…sometimes all of those in a single day’s work.
In May-June this year, i signed up for a Business Management program run by Rahul Jain, where i got introduced to this book titled “E-Myth Busted : Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work And What to Do About Them” by Michael Gerber, a business coach in the US from the 1970s.
The story of his conversations with a small business owner (a bakery owner) builds up slowly and then comes the chapter titled “Work ON the Business, Not IN the Business”. The author explains that when most entrepreneurs go into their businesses, they take not one but three profiles with them:
- Technician (programmer, chef, engineer, etc.)
- Manager (the who manages the people and projects)
- Entrepreneur (the person who had taken the risk to start the business)
And between these three personalities, most often the entrepreneur, who had started the business actually gets lost somewhere while running the daily duties of the technician or the manager.
This, Michael Gerber reminds his entrepreneurial readers, is the most devastating thing they do to their businesses – suffocating and stifling the business. He reminds the entrepreneurs that their sole job is to work on building systems so that the business can be run by the doers in the business – all the leaders, managers and workers/technicians in the business who carry a line-function.
He mocks at the entrepreneur who gives up a function of the business to a leader or manager, without building a system around that function. He reads the pulse of the small-business entrepreneur really well and observes that they do so hoping that this manager would now relieve them of a specific function. This, Michael Gerber says, is called ‘business by abdication’ and writes that in doing so, the entrepreneur has inadvertently created a noose around her neck – by now having created a huge dependence upon the success (or in most cases, failure) of the function on an individual AND having no system of reviews on the performance and outcomes of that person’s work.
Further, he says, that if the function fails, the entrepreneur blames the individual. The blame, he says, must lie with the entrepreneur who did not build a system for the worker/manager to follow and not on the performer.
“Businesses must run on systems”, he reminds his readers. And “entrepreneurs and leaders must build the systems”.
I felt cheated when i read the book three months back!
I wish this book had come my way 20 years ago. Or atleast 10! 🤷🏽
But i guess, as the old adage goes — ‘when the student is ready, the Master arrives’. Perhaps, this was the right time for this book to arrive in my life. Possibly, i may not have valued the transformative message of this book any time earlier, or, perhaps would not have had the smarts to understand what building systems really meant.
