Chapter The Business Development Process Chapter Your Business Development Program Chapter Your Primary Aim Chapter Your Strategic Objective Chapter Your Organizational Strategy Chapter Your Management Strategy Chapter Your People Strategy Chapter Your Marketing Strategy Chapter Your Systems Strategy Chapter To Ilene Gerber, my wife, partner, and editor, without whose intensity of purpose, dedication to the truth, and love for the work, both in our business and in the rest of the life we share together, neither this book, our business, nor our marriage would have been possible.
To Shana, Kim, Hillary, Sam, and Alex Olivia, my children, who have given to me more than they have received, in ways only a father can truly know. To all my associates at E-Myth Worldwide, present and past, whose commitment to the ideas in this book, as well as to each other and our clients, have given meaning to the words by living them, even when it was impossible and when there seemed to be no good reason for doing so.
To all our thousands of clients over the years who have put their trust in our integrity, and, in the process, caught us at least as much as we taught them about what it means to transcend scarcity with excellence.
To Nancy and Bob Dreyfus, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, whose wisdom, love, and generous spirits have touched me more than they can possibly know. To Virginia Smith at HarperBusiness, whose caring, intelligent friendship has seen me through the most dismal moments of writing with a gentle, open, and willing nature that enabled me to be myself in the moments I least wanted to be, without apology or explanation.
And, finally, to all my readers who continue to support my work so enthusiastically. Thank you all. In my case, fifteen full years. A lot has happened in the interim—with my family, my business, my life. Many wonderful things, many good things, many painful things.
In these fifteen years, I have experienced near financial and business disaster as well as incredible victories; have built a year marriage into an exquisite partnership with my wife, Ilene; have become the father of two extraordinary children, Sam and Alex Olivia the total is now five, ages nine years to thirty-eight years ; have entered the anointed state of grandfatherhood thanks to my daughter Kim and my son-in-law John, who have blessed us with Sarah, Elijah, Noah, Hannah, and Isaiah; have traveled throughout the world speaking to hundreds of thousands of small business owners in Australia, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, Japan, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Indonesia, and, of course, in almost every major city in the United States.
And, through it all, I have been the grateful recipient of unrestrained support and caring from many of those whose lives I have in some way managed to touch and whose paths I have crossed. In short, the years have been exhilarating, challenging, frustrating, exhausting, debilitating, boring, enlightening, rewarding, and, after all is said and done, a handful for anyone, especially for a guy my age with a penchant for going to the wall without concern for the damage I do to the leading parts of my body.
This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those of you who are about to read this book.
In the years since The E-Myth was published, many of my readers—as well as many of our small business clients—have asked me to clarify specific aspects of The E-Myth point of view so they could better apply it to their businesses. This book answers many questions that The E-Myth has raised over the years, offering both new and previous readers the opportunity to approach their businesses with renewed vigor and a sharpened mindset through an expanded experience of The E-Myth principles.
I hope that Sarah and her questions are as engaging to you as they have been to me. An ethical certainty, a moral principle, a universal truth. You can see it in their eyes, feel it radiating from their bodies, hear it in the timbre of their voices. And so the great ones I have known seem to possess an intuitive understanding that the only way to reach something higher is to focus their attention on the multitude of seemingly insignificant, unimportant, and boring things that make up every business.
And that make up every life, for that matter! Yes, the simple truth about the greatest businesspeople I have known is that they have a genuine fascination for the truly astonishing impact little things done exactly right can have on the world. It is to that fascination that this book is dedicated. This book is a guide for those who see the development of an extraordinary business as a never-ending inquiry, an ongoing investigation, an active engagement with a world of forces, within us and without, that continually amaze and confound the true seekers among us with awesome variety, unending surprises, and untold complexity.
While it may seem obvious, this fascination with the development of an extraordinary business is not the same as a fascination with success. Certainly not the success we normally think of. You simply need to know what to do. Michael E. Joseph Heller Something Happened If you own a small business, or if you want to own a small business, this book was written for you. It represents many thousands of hours of work we have done at E- Myth Worldwide over the past twenty-four years.
It is a belief that says small businesses in the United States simply do not work; the people who own them do. As a result, most of their businesses end up in chaos—unmanageable, unpredictable, and unrewarding. Just look at the numbers. Businesses start and fail in the United States at an increasingly staggering rate. Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business.
Because more than 80 percent of the small businesses that survive the first five years fail in the second five. Why is this? Why do so many people go into business, only to fail?
Why is it that with all the information available today on how to be successful in small business, so few people really are? This book answers those questions. Ignore them, and you will likely join the hundreds of thousands of people every year who pour their energy and capital—and life—into starting a small business and fail, or the many others who struggle along for years simply trying to survive. This is simply not so. The real reasons people start businesses have little to do with entrepreneurship.
In fact, this belief in the Entrepreneurial Myth is the most important factor in the devastating rate of small business failure today. I call it the Turn-Key Revolution. Not only is it changing the way we do business in this country and throughout the world but it is changing who goes into business, how they do it, and the likelihood of their survival. When it is systematized and applied purposely by a small business owner, the Business Development Process has the power to transform any small business into an incredibly effective organization.
Our experience has shown us that when a small business incorporates this process into its every activity and uses it to control its destiny, that company stays young and thrives. When a small business ignores this process—as most unfortunately do—it commits itself to Management by Luck, stagnation, and, ultimately, failure.
The consequences are inevitable. This process then becomes a predictable way to produce results and vitality in any small business whose owner is willing to give it the time and attention it requires to flourish. Since the founding of E-Myth Worldwide in , we have assisted over 25, small business owners with the implementation of our Business Development Process through their enrollment in our unique E- Myth Mastery ProgramTM, and I have seen it succeed thousands of times.
I would venture to guess that no organization has had more direct experience applying the lessons of the Turn-Key Revolution and the Business Development Process to the development of a small business than we have had at E-Myth Worldwide.
Indeed, it will change your business and it will change your life. People do. And what makes people work is an idea worth working for, along with a clear understanding of what needs to be done. This book is about such an idea—an idea that says your business is nothing more than a distinct reflection of who you are. If your thinking is sloppy, your business will be sloppy. If you are disorganized, your business will be disorganized. If you are greedy, your employees will be greedy, giving you less and less of themselves and always asking for more.
If your information about what needs to be done in your business is limited, your business will reflect that limitation. So if your business is to change—as it must continuously to thrive— you must change first. If you are unwilling to change, your business will never be capable of giving you what you want.
The first change that needs to take place has to do with your idea of what a business really is and what it takes to make one work. Once you fully understand the relationship every owner must have with his or her business if it is to work, I can assure you that your business and your life will take on new vitality and new meaning. Aldous Huxley The E-Myth is the myth of the entrepreneur. It runs deep in this country and rings of the heroic.
The legend reeks of nobility, of lofty, extra-human efforts, of a prodigious commitment to larger-than-life ideals. Well, while there are such people, my experience tells me they are rare. Of the thousands of businesspeople I have had the opportunity to know and work with over the past two decades, few were real entrepreneurs when I met them. The vision was all but gone in most. The zest for the climb had turned into a terror of heights.
The face of the rock had become something to cling to rather than to scale. Exhaustion was common, exhilaration rare. After all, they had started their own business. There must have been some dream that drove them to take such a risk. But, if so, where was the dream now? Why had it faded? Where was the entrepreneur who had started the business? The answer is simple: the entrepreneur had only existed for a moment. A fleeting second in time. And then it was gone. In most cases, forever. If the entrepreneur survived at all, it was only as a myth that grew out of a misunderstanding about who goes into business and why.
A misunderstanding that has cost us dearly in this country—more than we can possibly imagine—in lost resources, lost opportunities, and wasted lives. That myth, that misunderstanding, I call the E-Myth, the myth of the entrepreneur. And it finds its roots in this country in a romantic belief that small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, when, in fact, most are not. Then who does start small businesses in America? And why?
Not after he goes into business, but before. For that matter, where were you before you started your business? What were you doing? Probably technical work, like almost everybody who goes into business.
You were a carpenter, a mechanic, or a machinist. You were a bookkeeper or a poodle clipper; a drafts-person or a hairdresser; a barber or a computer programmer; a doctor or a technical writer; a graphic artist or an accountant; an interior designer or a plumber or a salesperson. But whatever you were, you were doing technical work. And you were probably damn good at it.
But you were doing it for somebody else. Then, one day, for no apparent reason, something happened. But one day, for apparently no reason, you were suddenly stricken with an Entrepreneurial Seizure. And from that day on your life was never to be the same. Why am I working for this guy? Hell, I know as much about this business as he does.
Any dummy can run a business. The excitement of cutting the cord became your constant companion. The thought of independence followed you everywhere. The idea of being your own boss, doing your own thing, singing your own song, became obsessively irresistible. Once you were stricken with an Entrepreneurial Seizure, there was no relief. You had to start your own business. The Fatal Assumption In the throes of your Entrepreneurial Seizure, you fell victim to the most disastrous assumption anyone can make about going into business.
It is an assumption made by all technicians who go into business for themselves, one that charts the course of a business—from Grand Opening to Liquidation—the moment it is made. That Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work. The technical work of a business and a business that does that technical work are two totally different things!
But the technician who starts a business fails to see this. To the technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure, a business is not a business but a place to go to work. So the carpenter, or the electrician, or the plumber becomes a contractor. The barber opens up a barber shop. The technical writer starts a technical writing business.
The hairdresser starts a beauty salon. The engineer goes into the semiconductor business. The musician opens up a music store. All of them believing that by understanding the technical work of the business they are immediately and eminently qualified to run a business that does that kind of work. In fact, rather than being their greatest single asset, knowing the technical work of their business becomes their greatest single liability.
He would be forced to learn how to make the business work, rather than to do the work himself. The real tragedy is that when the technician falls prey to the Fatal Assumption, the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him. See the young Woman Banking Pies. I met Sarah after she had been in business for three years.
The work Sarah did. The work Sarah used to love to do more than anything else. Plus the work Sarah had never done in her life.
The sweet fresh aroma of pies filled the air. It was 7 A. And that I was up at two to get ready? I saw a way out of the horrible job I used to have. I waited quietly to hear what she would say next. Instead, she kicked the huge black oven in front of her with her right foot.
And then slumped, sighed deeply, and hugged herself, almost desperately. Not really asking me, I knew, but asking herself. Sarah leaned against the wall and remained there quietly for a long moment, staring at her feet. The large clock on the wall ticked loudly in the empty shop. I could hear the cars driving by on the busy street in front of the shop as the city came awake. The sun shone harshly through the spotless windows, sweeping the gleaming oak floor in front of the counter. I could see the dust in the stream of light, hanging suspended as though waiting for Sarah to speak.
She was deep in debt. She had spent everything she had, and more, to create this lovely little shop. The floors were the best oak. The ovens were the best ovens. The displays were charming, the very best money could buy.
She had put her heart into this place, just as she had put her heart into her pies, falling in love with baking as a young girl, mentored by her aunt who had lived with her family while Sarah was growing up. Her aunt had introduced her to the magic of the process: the kneading of the dough, the cleaning of the oven, the sprinkling of the flour, the preparation of the trays, the careful cutting of the apples, the cherries, the rhubarb, the peaches.
It was a labor of love. Her aunt had corrected her when, in her haste, Sarah had hurried the process. Baking pies is not about getting done. At least she thought it was. The clock continued its emphatic ticking. I watched as Sarah seemed to shrink even closer to herself. I knew how oppressive it must be for her to find herself so deeply in debt, to feel so helpless in the face of it.
Where was her aunt now? The work that was born out of love becomes a chore, among a welter of other less familiar and less pleasant chores. Rather than maintaining its specialness, representing the unique skill the technician possesses and upon which he started the business, the work becomes trivialized, something to get through in order to make room for everything else that must be done.
I told Sarah that every technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure experiences exactly the same thing. First, exhilaration; second, terror; third, exhaustion; and, finally, despair. A terrible sense of loss—not only the loss of what was closest to them, their special relationship with their work, but the loss of purpose, the loss of self. Sarah looked at me with a sense of relief, as though she felt seen but not judged. The problem is more complicated than that. The problem is that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.
And the problem is compounded by the fact that while each of these personalities wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss. So they start a business together in order to get rid of the boss.
And the conflict begins. Have you ever decided to go on a diet? Do something about it! Somebody wakes up inside us with a totally different picture of who we should be and what we should be doing. The Skinny Guy is intolerant, self-righteous, a stickler for detail, a compulsive tyrant.
The Skinny Guy abhors fat people. Needs to be on the move. Lives for action. The Skinny Guy has just taken over. Watch out—things are about to change. Things are going to be different around here. You have a new lease on life.
And you actually pull it off! You go to sleep dreaming of winning the Boston Marathon. Why not? Tuesday night you get on the scale. Another pound gone! A lean machine. On Wednesday, you really pour it on.
You work out an extra hour in the morning, an extra half-hour at night. You strip down to your bare skin, shivering in the bathroom, filled with expectation of what your scale is going to tell you.
You step lightly onto it and look down. What you see is…nothing. Dejection creeps in. You begin to feel a slight twinge of resentment. After all that sweat and effort? And then—nothing? You go to bed, vowing to work harder on Thursday. But somehow something has changed. The room is cold. Something feels different. What is it? And then you get it: somebody else is in your body. Are you kidding me?
The only exercise he might be interested in is eating! And all of a sudden you find yourself in front of the refrigerator —inside the refrigerator—all over the kitchen! Food is now your major interest. The Marathon is gone; the lean machine is gone; the sweats and barbells and running shoes are gone. The Fat Guy is back. It happens to all of us, time and time again. They each want totally different things. And then something happens—the scale disappoints you, the weather turns cold, somebody offers you a ham sandwich.
Grabs control. Is it any wonder we have such a tough time keeping our commitments to ourselves? Asking any one of them to defer to any of the others is inviting a battle or even a full-scale war. And they both know it. Understanding the differences between them will quickly explain why.
The Entrepreneur The entrepreneurial personality turns the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us.
The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for change. The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present.
In art, it thrives in the rarefied arena of the avant- garde. The Entrepreneur is our creative personality—always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony. Every strong entrepreneurial personality has an extraordinary need for control. Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that he can concentrate on his dreams.
Given his need for change, The Entrepreneur creates a great deal of havoc around him, which is predictably unsettling for those he enlists in his projects. As a result, he often finds himself rapidly outdistancing the others. The farther ahead he is, the greater the effort required to pull his cohorts along. This then becomes the entrepreneurial worldview: a world made up of both an overabundance of opportunities and dragging feet.
The problem is, how can he pursue the opportunities without getting mired down by the feet? The way he usually chooses is to bully, harass, excoriate, flatter, cajole, scream, and finally, when all else fails, promise whatever he must to keep the project moving. To The Entrepreneur, most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.
The Manager The managerial personality is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability. He then hangs all of the tools in impeccable order on the walls— lawn tools on one wall, carpentry tools on another—and, to be absolutely certain that order is not disturbed, paints a picture of each tool on the wall where it hangs!
If The Entrepreneur lives in the future, The Manager lives in the past. Where The Entrepreneur craves control, The Manager craves order. Where The Entrepreneur thrives on change, The Manager compulsively clings to the status quo. Where The Entrepreneur invariably sees the opportunity in events, The Manager invariably sees the problems. The Manager builds a house and then lives in it, forever.
The Manager creates neat, orderly rows of things. The Entrepreneur creates the things The Manager puts in rows. The Manager is the one who runs after The Entrepreneur to clean up the mess. Without The Entrepreneur there would be no mess to clean up. Without The Manager, there could be no business, no society. Without The Entrepreneur, there would be no innovation. The Technician The Technician is the doer. The Technician loves to tinker. Things are to be taken apart and put back together again.
He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done. As long as The Technician is working, he is happy, but only on one thing at a time.
So he works steadily and is happiest when he is in control of the work flow. As a result, The Technician mistrusts those he works for, because they are always trying to get more work done than is either possible or necessary. As a result, he is suspicious of lofty ideas or abstractions.
And with good reason. Nothing would get done, but lots of people would be thinking about it. He is the backbone of every cultural tradition, but most importantly, of ours.
Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way. It violates his individuality. Work is what a person does. To The Manager, however, work is a system of results in which The Technician is but a component part.
To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place! The fact of the matter is that we all have an Entrepreneur, Manager, and Technician inside us.
The Entrepreneur would be free to forge ahead into new areas of interest; The Manager would be solidifying the base of operations; and The Technician would be doing the technical work. Each would derive satisfaction from the work he does best, serving the whole in the most productive way. Unfortunately, our experience shows us that few people who go into business are blessed with such a balance.
Instead, the typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician. The Entrepreneur wakes up with a vision. Not to pursue the entrepreneurial dream, however, but to finally wrest control of his work from the other two. The Boss is dead. The Technician is in charge! Sarah looked a little overwhelmed. The only reason I went into this business was because I loved baking pies. If one of you wants this, and another of you wants that, and a third wants something entirely different, can you imagine the confusion that causes in our lives?
If this is true, and all you need to do to discover whether it is or not is to take a look at yourself from day to day, as though from above, as though from outside of your skin, as though you were watching someone else—that is, to observe yourself as you go through the day—you would see the different parts come out.
You would see them playing their respective games. You would see how they fight for their own space—and the space of all the others—and sabotage each other as best they can. You would see that it not only matters that your personalities are not in a balanced relationship with each other but that your life depends on gaining that balance.
Such a business will die very neatly. All I ever wanted to do was to bake pies, just like The Technician you described. When entrepreneurial personalities were passed out, I think I got passed over. What do I do if there is no Entrepreneur in me?
This was going to be fun. The work of asking all the right questions about why this business, as opposed to that business? Why a pie baking business rather than a body shop? If you are a baker of pies and are determined to do entrepreneurial work, you would leave your pie-baking experience behind you and engage in the internal dialogue with which every truly entrepreneurial personality is wonderfully familiar. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity-filled world is to create an exciting new business.
I wonder what that business would be? The dreaming question, I call it. I wonder. To see with as much of herself as she can muster the possibilities that waft about in midair someplace there above her head and within her heart. Not in the past but in the future. Just as every inventor must. Just as every composer must. Just as every artist, or every craftsperson, or every physicist must.
Just as every baker of pies must. I call it Future Work. Unfortunately, most businesses are not run according to this principle. Instead most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs. And what The Technician who runs the company wants is not growth or change but exactly the opposite. He wants a place to go to work, free to do what he wants, when he wants, free from the constraints of working for The Boss. Unfortunately, what The Technician wants dooms his business before it even begins.
The Boss is dead, and you, The Technician, are free at last. Finally, you can do your own thing in your own business. Hope runs high. The air is electric with possibility. Your newfound freedom is intoxicating. In the beginning nothing is too much for your business to ask. After all, your middle name is Work. Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Seven days a week.
All your thoughts, all your feelings, revolve around your new business. If you removed the owner from an Infancy business, there would be no business left. It would disappear! In Infancy, you are the business. You work hard. Their friends have friends. Joe, Tommy, and Mary are just like old friends. They work hard for their money. And they do good work. Joe is the best barber I ever went to. Tommy is the best printer I ever used. Mary makes the best corned beef sandwich I ever ate.
Your customers are crazy about you. They keep coming, in droves. And you love it! But then it changes. Subtly at first, but gradually it becomes obvious. The customers are relentless.
They want you; they need you. And then the inevitable happens. You, the Master Juggler, begin to drop some of the balls! Your enthusiasm for working with the customers wanes. Deliveries, once early, are now late. The product begins to show the wear and tear. Nothing seems to work the way it did at first. I said brown! It is pastrami. This is corned beef! You stretch. You work harder. You put in more time, more energy. If you put in twelve hours before, you now put in fourteen. If you put in fourteen hours before, you now put in sixteen.
If you put in sixteen hours before, you now put in twenty. But the balls keep dropping! All of a sudden, they want to hide. In a flash, you realize that your business has become The Boss you thought you left behind. Infancy ends when the owner realizes that the business cannot continue to run the way it has been; that, in order for it to survive, it will have to change. When that happens—when the reality sinks in—most business failures occur. When that happens, most of The Technicians lock their doors behind them and walk away.
The rest go on to Adolescence. Sarah was beginning to look defeated again. I had seen that look before on the faces of countless clients. When a Technician-turned-business- owner is suddenly confronted with the reality of her situation, a sense of hopelessness can set in.
The challenge can seem overwhelming. But, I sensed that Sarah would struggle with the idea—and herself—until she got it. I used to love the work I do. Because as a Technician-turned-business-owner, your focus is upside down. You see the world from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
You have a tactical view rather than a strategic view. You believe that a business is nothing more than an aggregate of the various types of work done in it, when in fact it is much more than that. When The Technician fills your day with work. When The Technician avoids the challenge of learning how to grow a business.
When The Technician shrinks from the entrepreneurial role so necessary to the lifeblood, the momentum, of a truly extraordinary small business, and from the managerial role so critical to the operational balance or grounding of a small business on a day-to-day basis. I saw that Sarah was still struggling with the idea of doing what she does differently. On a vacation? Or at home? Reading a book? Working in the garden? So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before.
So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life. And get rid of it as quickly as you can. Because a small business simply demands that we do it or the business will shrivel on the vine. Alvin Toffler The Third Wave Adolescence begins at the point in the life of your business when you decide to get some help. But it always happens, precipitated by a crisis in the Infancy stage. Every business that lasts must grow into the Adolescent phase.
Every small business owner who survives seeks help. What kind of help do you, the overloaded Technician, go out to get? The answer is as easy as it is inevitable: technical help. Someone with experience. Someone with experience in your kind of business. The sales-oriented owner goes out to find a production person.
The production-oriented owner looks for a salesperson. And just about everybody tries to find someone to do the books! Harry knows the books. He knows how to do the books in eight different languages. But most important, Harry has twenty-two years of experience doing the books in a company just like yours. The world suddenly looks brighter again. A major ball is about to be caught—and by somebody else for a change!
Harry arrives. You cleared out a generous space for him. You arranged the books and the stack of unopened letters on his desk. In your business, Harry is that person. And this Monday morning is that critical time.
Think about it. Harry is going to take one look at the books and know the truth. Will he laugh? Will he cry? Will he leave? Or will he go to work? And in a single stroke, you suddenly understand what it means to be in business in a way you never understood before. The Manager in you wakes up and The Technician temporarily goes to sleep. Your worries are over. Someone else is going to do that now. But at the same time—unaccustomed as you are to being The Manager—your newfound freedom takes on an all too common form.
In short, like every small business owner has done before you, you hand the books over to Harry…and run. And for a while you are free. At least relatively so. After all, you still have all the other work to do. But now that you have Harry, things are beginning to change. Life becomes easier.
Life becomes a dream. You begin to take a little longer lunch: thirty minutes instead of fifteen. Harry comes to you occasionally to tell you what he needs, and you, busy as usual, simply tell him to handle it. Harry needs more people. The business is beginning to grow. Busy as usual, you tell him to hire them. He does. He never complains. He just works. You get to be The Boss, doing the work you love to do, and Harry takes care of everything else.
Ah, the life of an Entrepreneur! And then it unexpectedly happens. A customer calls to complain about the shabby treatment she received from one of your people. You promise to look into it. Your oldest supplier calls to tell you that the order you placed the week before was placed wrong, so the shipment will be ten weeks late. Out on the shipping dock, you walk up to a kid Harry hired. You look at the package and explode.
Here, give it to me. That very afternoon, you happen to be walking by the production line. You almost drop in your tracks. And as the thud of the landing balls becomes deafening, you begin to realize that you never should have trusted Harry.
You never should have trusted anyone. You should have known better. As the balls continue to fall at an overwhelming rate, you begin to realize that no one cares about your business the way you do. That no one is willing to work as hard as you work. That no one has your judgment, or your ability, or your desire, or your interest.
So you run back into your business to become the Master Juggler again. So he interferes with what they have to do even more. But Harry knew this when he started. He could have told you—his new Boss—that ultimately The Boss always interferes. And the reason is that The Boss always changes his mind about what needs to be done, and how. For you to behave differently you would need to awaken the personalities who have been asleep within you for a long time—The Entrepreneur and The Manager—and then help them to develop the skills only they can add to your business.
The Technician in you has got to go to work! The Technician in you has got to catch the balls! The Technician in you has got to keep busy.
The Technician in you has just reached the limits of his Comfort Zone. I looked over at Sarah and could tell I had hit a nerve. Sarah had discovered something in the course of our conversation— something about her Comfort Zone that was very meaningful for her.
And, intuitively, I knew we had just taken a snapshot of it. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions.
But Harry has needs of his own. He needs more direction than The Technician can give him. He also needs to know where the business is going and where his accountabilities fit into its overall strategy. And the lack of one causes the business to go into a tailspin. It can return to Infancy. It can go for broke.
Or it can hang on for dear life. In short, go back to the time when business was simple, back to Infancy. And thousands upon thousands of technicians do just that. They get rid of their people, get rid of their inventory, wrap up their payables in a large bag, rent a smaller facility, put the machine in the middle, put the telephone by the machine, and go back to doing it all by themselves again.
They go back to being the owner, sole proprietor, chief cook and bottle washer—doing everything that needs to be done, all alone, but comfortable with the feeling of regained control. Predictably, this too takes its toll. At that point you feel the despair and the cynicism almost every small business owner gets to feel. And with it, any desire to keep busy, busy, busy.
The customers become a problem rather than an opportunity. Your standards of dress begin to deteriorate. The sign on the front door fades and peels. For when the dream is gone, the only thing left is work. The tyranny of routine. The day-to-day grind of purposeless activity.
Finally, you close the doors. According to the Small Business Administration, more than , such businesses close their doors in the United States every year. Your business, once the shining promise of your life, and now no promise at all, has gradually become a mortuary for dead dreams.
The roll call is endless: Itel, Osbourne Computer, Coleco, and countless more. They are a high-tech phenomenon. With the explosion of new technology and the numbers of those who create it, a whole new breed of technicians has flocked to the business arena.
Along with these wizards and their seemingly unlimited technical virtuosity, an avalanche of new products has thundered through the wide-open doors of an enthralled and receptive marketplace. Unfortunately, most of these companies barely get through the doors before the uncontrollable momentum that got them there forces them to stumble and then fall. As quickly as it grows, chaos grows even faster. For tied to the tail of a technological breakthrough, The Technician and his people rarely break free long enough to gain some perspective about their condition.
The demand for the commodity of which they are so proud quickly exceeds their chronically Adolescent ability to produce it. The result is almost always catastrophic. Game Boy Nintendo Player's Guide - Gateway to the Savage Frontier Adventurer's Journal - Guide to the Video Arcade Games Half-Life Official Perfect Guide - Halo 2 The Official Guide - Homeworld Prima's Official Strategy Guide - Homeworld 2 Prima's Official Strategy Guide - Hot Tips for the Coolest Nintendo Games How to Beat the Video Games How to Master Home Video Games How to Master the Video Games How to Win at Donkey Kong How to Win at E.
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