What is the main message of The E-Myth Revisited?

The main message of The E-Myth Revisited is to work on your business, not just in it.

Who is the author of The E-Myth Revisited?

The author of The E-Myth Revisited is Michael E. Gerber.

Entrepreneurship

The E-Myth Revisited Book Summary - The E-Myth Revisited Book explained in key points

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The E-Myth Revisited summary

Name: The E-Myth Revisited
Rating: 4.5 (425 reviews)
Author: Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber

Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

4.5 (425 ratings)

26 mins

Brief summary

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber is a business book that dispels the myth of entrepreneurship and teaches how to build a successful business with systems and processes in place. It emphasizes working on the business, not just in it.

Topics

Small Businesses

Table of Contents

The E-Myth Revisited
Summary of 12 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? Learn the secrets for small-business success.

Did you ever realize that the vast majority of small businesses fail without ever becoming successful? Did you ever wonder what’s so special about businesses that survive past the five-year mark and then run smoothly ever after?

In these blinks, you’ll find an easy-to-follow guide to making sure your business is a success and not just a sad statistic.

You’ll also find out:

why 80 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years,
why founder Ray Kroc’s strategy for McDonald’s is one you should follow, and
why your business will be better off without you.

A heroic entrepreneur with a great idea and technical know-how succeeding in business quickly? That’s a myth.

Did you know that one million small businesses are founded in America each year, but 40 percent of them fail in the first year and 80 percent in the first five years? That’s 800,000 failed businesses, and most of these failures are due to the E-Myth.

The E-Myth, or entrepreneurial myth, is a fundamental misunderstanding in American business. It’s the notion that skillful technical work and a good idea form a sufficient basis for business success.

People often start their own business merely because they excel at work in a certain field, such as a machinist, barber or computer programmer.

Then one day the entrepreneurial seizure strikes. They realize they don’t want to do technical work for someone else. They want to work for themselves as per their own ideas for their own business.

Let’s say you work as a barista. You’ve mastered coffee roasting, brewing and latte art and you have lots of ideas of how to run a cafe. Suddenly, you realize you’d rather open your own cafe.

Such a realization is the reason behind the one million new businesses each year.

But if you start a business from the basis that you have technical expertise and new ideas, you’ve already started on the wrong foot. Your business will probably fail.

You’ve made the fatal assumption, the mistaken belief that knowing how to do technical work means you know how to run a business.

In fact, technical work and the work required to run a business are two completely different things.

Here’s an example. A barista opens her own cafe, and soon realizes that her coffee skills are not enough to make her business successful. She has to know how to hire more employees, organize tasks and grow her business.

This is why so many small businesses fail!

Usually an entrepreneur’s business won’t survive past adolescence.

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.

To nurture your business beyond the adolescent stage, you have to plan ahead from the start.

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.

Inside, everyone has many different business personalities.

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!

There’s an ongoing revolution in small business that provides a path to success.

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.

Imagine your small business will one day be a national chain; now, build the very first store.

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.

Start a business to satisfy your personal aim in life.

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.

Organizational charts are crucial for your business’s growth and establishing accountability.

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.

To manage your employees, don’t rely on great people – rely on a great people-management system.

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.

Next, forget everything and think only about the customer.

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.

In the end, you’ll have a business made up of fully functional systems.

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:

This process of planning and implementing never stops.

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.

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What is The E-Myth Revisited about?

In a revised and updated version of his famous book The E-Myth, author Michael Gerber cuts through various myths about what’s involved in starting a small business and how to make a business successful. Walking you through every stage of how to build a business, The E-Myth Revisited highlights the important difference between working in your business and working on your business.

The E-Myth Revisited Review

The E-Myth Revisited (1995) is an insightful book that delves into the world of entrepreneurship and dispels common myths surrounding it. Here's why this book is worth reading:

With its practical insights and actionable advice, it equips readers with the knowledge and tools to build successful businesses.
Blending real-life anecdotes and lessons, the book provides a relatable and engaging narrative that keeps readers hooked.
Through its exploration of the entrepreneurial mindset and the importance of systems, it offers a fresh perspective on running a business and achieving growth.

Best quote from The E-Myth Revisited

The problem isnt your business; it never has been. The problem is you!

—Michael E. Gerber

Who should read The E-Myth Revisited?

Anyone who owns or wants to own a small business
Business owners trying to turn their struggling business into a successful one
Anyone who thinks entrepreneurship is easy

About the Author

Michael E. Gerber is an entrepreneurial legend. He is the co-founder and chairman of Michael E. Gerber Companies, an organization that helps businesses and entrepreneurs succeed regardless of industry. He has written more than a dozen books on entrepreneurship.

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Entrepreneurship

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