I’ll never forget sitting on the couch at my in-laws house about 12-13 years ago. I was a little bored and there was a book on the end table called The E-Myth. I started flipping through the book I was amazed at the amount of quality information in the book.

That day I found the book in my Audible account and binge-listened to this book. I am not exaggerating what I read totally changed my life! Prior to reading this book, I’d always listened to personal development books.This was the first business book I read and boy was it powerful. I’m going to give you an overview below, but I highly suggest you read The E-Myth. Quick note: the most recent version is called The E-Myth Revisited, but either version will be great.

An Overview of The E-Myth:

The basic idea behind the book is an idea that every business has a technician, an entrepreneur, and a manager. The reason why most small businesses fail is because they are run by a technician – the person who knows the technical work involved in the job. The entrepreneur and the manager are equally as important but serve very different roles. These are not necessarily separate people, but they have distinct elements and different personalities. We might be biased towards one, but to successfully run a business, they all must play a role.

• The technician is someone like a mechanic, computer programmer, chef, or cook.They’re an expert at their craft. This often leads to people to go into business for themselves, like a great chef decides to open his own restaurant business. The technician is happiest doing the work they’re good at and ignoring the rest, which is a recipe for failure. For example, when chefs open up restaurants, they tend spend a lot of time in the kitchen. When front of the house (FOH) people open up restaurants, they tend to spend a lot of time there up front. If you’re just a customer or someone who likes to serve customers, you probably spend a lot talking to them, right? The problem with these scenarios is that were ignoring other aspects of the business.
• The entrepreneur is the dreamer, someone who wants to do something new and reach for the stars. They live the future thinking about what could be rather than in the present. The entrepreneur is often frustrated by how slow the world seems to move. How many times have you felt like things aren’t happening fast enough and they should move faster?
• The manager is detail oriented, dots the i’s and crosses the t’s, the one who remembers to pay the bills. The manager wants a well-organized world with no surprises; a world where things happen in an orderly, predictable manner. This all sounds great, we all try to hire that manager, but maybe we’re not doing a very good job of that ourselves.

All of these components are necessary in the founder of a business. You have to be able to be a technician, manager and entrepreneur.

Because:

• Without the Entrepreneur, you might as well keep working for someone else as a Technician.
• Without the technical ability, the Entrepreneur must rely on others to get anything done.
• Without the organizational abilities of the Manager, the other two would probably find themselves with the electricity in the office turned off because they have other things to do rather than pay the bills.

The Big Idea:

In order run a successful business we need technicians, we need entrepreneurs, and we need managers. The challenge becomes who is filling those roles? Are you fulfilling each role and its responsibility, or are you spending too much time in just one of them?

I really want you to read this book. Mr. Gerber talks about how to transition from one to the other, where to spend your time, and how to do it successfully. It’s a phenomenal book and I really hope you enjoy it.