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

E-Myth RevisitedI

I’m reading “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” which is about small businesses and those who create them.  Having caught the entrepreneurial “bug” at the last few start ups I’ve worked at, I’m always looking for more information about start ups, small businesses, and what it takes to turn a great idea into a successful business.   I highly recommend this book if you have similar interests.  Here are a few of the nuggets of wisdom that I’ve picked up from this great read:

• There are three types of business people:  technicians, managers, and entrepreneurs.  Most small businesses are actually started by the technicians who go into “business” for themselves.  These folks typically create a “job” rather than a “business”.  The difference is:  you can walk away from a business and let others continue to run it whereas you cannot walk away from the job where you are the thing that people want (ex: contractor, plumber, baker).
• Businesses can go through three phases:  infancy, adolescence, maturity.   Not all businesses make it beyond infancy.  Fewer make it past adolescence.  Infancy is the stage where the business owner does it all himself.  He gets things off the ground and manages every last nut and bolt.  Adolescence is when the business owner hires help because they realize they can’t do it all themselves.  Most startups wind up here.   The ones that progress to maturity were probably structured to do so from the beginning two phases.  The ones that don’t progress either regress into infancy or flame out like a supernova in an “all or nothing” bid.

More to come as I continue to read the book.  It came reccommended via the “Internet Marketing This Week” podcast which I also recommend you check out.