Book Promo: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

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

 

by Michael E. Gerber

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

The Master Game
By Michael E. Gerber

There once was a man named DeRopp who wrote a book titled The Master Game.  No need to discuss his book or his philosophy here, other than to say it had to do with the shaping of one’s life and options through a lens few of us normal people have ever looked through before.

It brings to mind a question many people have asked me over the years about the entrepreneurial genius of Steve Jobs. What did he know that the rest of us did not?   My answer was simply that Jobs didn’t actually know more than the rest of us; he simply cared more.

I believe that’s the heart of choice; caring more. Not just doing more. And, certainly not just doing something different than what you’re doing today.

So, the subject then becomes, what does “caring more” mean? What does it look like and how does it reveal itself, especially at your age and mine? 

In my work with entrepreneurs and small business owners, caring more is a huge conversation, in that most of my clients and students over the years were confused about what it meant and how it related to what they were doing in their work.

They actually believed they cared, even when it was obvious as we pursued the conversation that they didn’t.

Yes, they cared about the money.  To live without it would certainly throw a monkey wrench into their lives.  So, in one sense they cared about making money, just as we all do.  But, Steve Jobs didn’t! 

Think about it. Here was a guy who dropped out of college in his first year, wandered off to India on a spiritual hippy quest that seriously disappointed him, took an engineering  job for which he was hopelessly unsuited, and then started his own company, Apple, in his father’s garage, without any hope of succeeding, if you measure success by a financially robust outcome.

In short, Jobs didn’t care about the money.  He cared about his dream.   And his dream was so outrageously incongruent with what was going on in the world of his time as to be, on the face of it, absurd.

So caring, as we’re beginning to look at it, has nothing to do with any of us personally – neither DeRopp nor Jobs cared about themselves personally – it has to do with the impersonal.  It has to do with something huge outside of ourselves.  It has to do with someone else.  And it also has to do with the ineffable.

What is the ineffable?

To DeRopp it was the product of the Master Game.

To Jobs it was the product of Apple.  Not the computer, but the product of the computer, the profound impact the Mac would have on the lives of his customers, and, then, through his customers, the unexpected outcome for the world.

Everything Jobs did had to do with the ineffable, which couldn’t be described perfectly (thus the ineffable). But he could experience it inside, as a picture that appeared to him, in his imagination, in his unconscious, in his visual, emotional, functional and financial mind. (Yes, Apple was a financial engine as well as an innovative engine – the innovative engine of our time.) That vision drove Jobs and his company, and all of the people he attracted, to be a force moving forward with unabated determination to completely transform the world.

All one can say about that is, “Wow!”

From our perspective, what Jobs did and what DeRopp wrote about and how he lived are far more ambitious than what any of us would do, so why even put it into our consciousness here? To feel guilty? To feel overwhelmed? To feel diminished or minimalized?

No, not at all.  The point is to feel what it means when I say, “Steve Jobs didn’t know any more than the rest of us do, he simply cared more.” 

Because each of us has the ability to feel more, to care more, to discover more, than we’ve ever felt, cared about or discovered before.

And if that’s true (and at age 79, working as I am on the creation of an enterprise  seemingly impossible for me to pursue,  I know that it is true)  then what in the world do we do about it?

That’s the question I wanted to pose to you: What DO you care about? And why? And what difference will it make to the world?

What is your ineffable?

How does it show up in your mind, in your imagination, in your heart, in your spirit?

What is your Apple?

What is your Master Game?

What is it that you’ve been placed on this earth to create?

About Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber (www.michaelegerbercompanies.com) is an entrepreneur, thought leader, speaker and best-selling author whose modern classic, “The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It,” has sold more than 3 million copies. He is the founder of The Dreaming Room™, where entrepreneurs and others are provided the tools and facilitation to see, experience, develop and design their Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission. A free subscription to his Dreaming Room Monologues, a series of taped inspirational talks, is available through his website. His next book, “Beyond The E-Myth” is a passionate response to America’s current inspiration deficit.

The American Dream

Has The American Dream Hit The Skids?
Best-Selling ‘E-Myth’ Author Michael E. Gerber
Is Determined To Shock People Out Of Their Stupor

Michael E. Gerber is miffed and he doesn’t care who knows it.

The best-selling author of the “E-Myth” book series says the American Dream has been waylaid – no different than if it had been besieged by robbers in a dark alley – and Gerber is intent on rescuing it.

The way Gerber sees it, the issue is our confusion about the American Dream and what every one of us believe to be true about it. And it’s time to get it back on track, says the fiery 78-year-old small-business guru who vaulted to fame in 1986 with his original “E-Myth” book and has been engaged in realizing a dream of his own over the past 40 years.

“Somehow we’ve forgotten our roots and why there was an American Dream to begin with,” Gerber says. “We’ve lost track of the reason why millions upon millions of people came here to try to make a better future for themselves. We’ve also forgotten that the dream never was a political one, but a personal one for each and every one of us.  It’s the politicizing of it that’s created all the trouble.”

Gerber (www.michaelegerbercompanies.com) has a great deal of experience in how to restore faith in the American dream. He has worked with tens of thousands of small business owners over the past 40 years.

The trick, Gerber says, is giving small business owners and aspiring small business owners a splash of cold water to wake them up to see that the American Dream isn’t dead, nor is their business. Instead, what they are missing is a lack of commitment to their own dream.

To bring his point home, Gerber began a nationwide campaign this year in Riverside, Calif., where the city’s mayor, Rusty Bailey, helped launch Gerber’s first city-sponsored Dreaming Room.

Gerber invented the Dreaming Room, which he describes as an “entrepreneurial incubator,” in 2005, and has been delivering it to individuals worldwide ever since. It’s a program where the unemployed, underemployed, self-employed or small business owners who find themselves stuck in their current unworkable circumstances join together, led by a facilitator.

In an intense, small-group setting they go through a step-by-step process where they create, collaborate and test ideas to develop or improve their current circumstances by inventing a new business. 

Once developed, the concept for that new business is then put to work, with Gerber’s team helping the new entrepreneur apply Gerber’s entrepreneurial principles to design, build, launch and grow their new company.

Riverside was just a first step in Gerber’s vision for city-sponsored economic development initiatives in cities and counties throughout the nation and the world. Having launched Riverside, it’s on to Fresno and the 14 counties surrounding that California city of 509,000 people. In May, Gerber plans a Dreaming Room for the 96 mayors of all the cities in those counties “to awaken the spirit of entrepreneurship in them.”

“We will be teaching people how to make it on their own in Fresno, San Mateo, and every U.S. city who invites us in, you name it,” Gerber says. “In the process of inspiring and leading them and mentoring them, something remarkable will happen. Each and every individual will understand, many for the very first time, that he or she and no one else is responsible for their circumstances.”

Even as he makes more Dreaming Room plans, the prolific Gerber is still pounding out books, with three he’s working on simultaneously. They are “Beyond the E-Myth,” “The 5 Essential Skills of Extraordinary People” and “Making It on Your Own in America.”

The latter title has become an overriding theme for him of late. For Gerber, economic development is all about the individual and how personal responsibility is the key to making it in America.

“It happens with the individual or it doesn’t happen at all,” he says. “Every single individual is accountable for their own economy – an ‘economy of one’”.

“Our economic problem has been created through the belief that big government can solve our problems. We then created a monster of a government that presumes to think for us. That’s why our economy is in tatters. It’s why the number of people on food stamps has grown exponentially. It’s why the number of people who are impoverished has grown, and the number of unemployed has grown exponentially. It’s also why our federal debts and deficits have grown beyond the pale.”

“The way forward is to go back”, Gerber says. “Back to those inspirational days when the nation took its first awkward steps, the Constitution was written and the Bill of Rights was tacked on like a brilliant afterthought”.

“If it becomes a political discussion, it misses the point,” Gerber says. “It was never political back then, it was existential. It was an existential reality to liberate each of us to follow our own path.”

About Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber (www.michaelegerbercompanies.com) is an entrepreneur, thought leader, speaker and best-selling author whose modern classic, “The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It,” has sold more than 3 million copies. He is the founder of The Dreaming Room™, where entrepreneurs and others are provided the tools and facilitation to see, experience, develop and design their Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission. His next book, “Beyond The E-Myth” is a passionate response to America’s current inspiration deficit.

Recharge Your Enterprise

How a Blank Piece of Paper Can be the Best
Tool for Your Small Business
Best-Selling ‘E-Myth’ Business Author Shares Strategies
to Recharge Your Enterprise

Statistically, new small businesses have the odds against them, with more than half failing within the first five years, according to the Small Business Administration.

They’ve hamstrung themselves even more recently with their reluctance to hire new employees. Almost 80 percent of small businesses did little to no hiring this summer, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.

“No new employees, no new ideas, no new projects – too many entrepreneurs have become paralyzed by fear and uncertainty,” says Michael E. Gerber, http://tinyurl.com/DreamingRoom, best-selling author of “The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” and creator of the world’s first incubator for entrepreneurs, The Dreaming Room.

Instead of operating out of a place of extreme caution, essentially treading water and just waiting for something good to happen, Gerber says small business owners should sit down with a blank piece of paper and a “beginner’s mind.”

“With that paper in front of you, open your mind to all you’ve never thought of and  create something that doesn’t exist: a product, a service, a system,” he says. “That will awaken your creativity and inspire innovation. Create something new!”

Gerber cites the general lack of consumer excitement over Apple’s newest iPhones, the 5S and 5C.

“They’re not new!” he says. “People have come to expect something truly new every time Apple comes out with something, so they’re disappointed.”

How else can small-business owners reframe their thinking and tap into that spark that initially set them on their course?

• Don’t be so mired in today that you don’t lay the groundwork for infinite possibilities tomorrow. Modesty is often seen as a virtue, but if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a tragic flaw. What if Steve Jobs’ ambition was to make electronics “a little bit better?” What would the world look like today without iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Jobs started out with only $5,000 – but also a grand vision that he believed in. Thousands of entrepreneurs see their business as a means of doing their work autonomously; they get by and see this as a win. But that modest success may be a tragic handicap.

• Self-employment is one thing; a thriving business is something altogether different. A small business starts with an idea, but too often the idea is: “I have a talent (or technical skill); I’ll build my business around my execution of that talent.” While this may create the means for self-employment, it closes off the avenues for growth. When a business owner trusts no one else to get the work done, he or she can’t pull away enough to develop new ideas, new products and new opportunities to grow. Find people who can replicate the technical aspects of what you do so that you’re free to explore, experiment and test.

• Make sure everyone is working toward the same goal. A small business is a system in which all parts contribute to the success or failure of the whole. A human body cannot move forward unless all parts cooperate. If your employees are working toward different goals, they’re not only not moving the business forward, they’re not playing as a team. Foster creativity, enthusiasm and energy by clearly communicating the dream and the importance and value of each person’s contribution toward it.

About Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber is an entrepreneur, thought leader, speaker and best-selling author whose modern classic, “The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It,” has sold more than 1 million copies. He is the founder of The Dreaming Room™, where entrepreneurs and others are provided the tools and facilitation to see, experience, develop and design their Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission.