The E-Myth Revisited summary

Have you ever thought about the stages of a business like those of a person? Interestingly enough, businesses go through infant, adolescent and mature stages, just like we do. The difference is that most businesses won’t survive adolescence.

In the first stage, infancy, the owner and the business are one and the same.

Even if you’re prepared to get out of your comfort zone and relinquish some control to grow your business, where do you start? You have to start from the very beginning, back before you even opened your business.

That’s because businesses that make it past adolescence and into maturity are founded on a broader perspective than most, and have planned their structures accordingly.

Do you think of yourself as just one single, predictable personality? Then your business is probably going to struggle. The truth is that we’re made up of a number of battling personalities. Specifically, we’re each some part entrepreneur, manager and technician.

One moment we’re entrepreneurs creating a new product, and the next we're a technician, frustrated with the new idea we just came up with a moment ago!

Did you realize that we’re in the middle of a historic revolution that will change business forever?

It’s called the turn-key revolution, because more and more, businesses are being built so that an owner could in principle give the key to their business to anyone, and that person would be able to run the business successfully.

So how do you go about making a franchise? The first thing you have to do is build a franchise prototype, the original model of your business that will be replicated.

Your franchise prototype has to give people value and be so simple that it can operated by anyone.

Why did you want to start a business in the first place? Hopefully it’s at least partially because you wanted something more than a 9-to-5 job in your life. So as you set up your franchise prototype, your top priority is to ensure that your business will give you what you want!

The most important step in building your business is knowing your primary aim, or what kind of life you want to live.

If you’re like most people, you hate drafting organizational charts. Boring, right? But without a clear way for everyone to know their responsibilities, how will your business succeed?

You need an organizational strategy to lay out exactly who in your company will do what work.

Do you think the secret to a successful management strategy is finding as many incredibly talented people as possible? Then you’re wrong!

The secret to a great management strategy is implementing a management system that approaches your management of people as a marketing tool.

What about marketing? What’s the best way to approach your marketing strategy?

It’s simple. Focusing on the customer is so vital that you should forget about everything else and only think about the customer.

What will your business look like after plotting out your entire franchise prototype? It will be a complex, yet easy to run, interdependent series of all the systems and processes that make up the business, from marketing to management to organizational structure, all the way back to your primary aim.

That’s because you’ll have a systems strategy in which everything interacts with each other, and through those interactions, everything will develop and change. Generally, your systems strategy will be divided into a few categories:

If you want to ensure your business is successful, you can never rest on your laurels. You have to constantly be working on your prototype, tweaking its systems and confirming that it’s running as best as it can. That continual tweaking, testing and energy is called the business development process.

The first step in the business development process is innovation.