An old friend, Marcia, owns a cookie business that in 20 years has grown from a tiny kiosk to a fine store employing 12 workers and a manager. She recently visited me to discuss a personnel accountability problem. Not uncommonly, however, she didn't see it as an "accountability" problem, but rather as a "people" problem. "The business is stagnating, and so am I," she complained. "Production is down, deliveries are late, quality is worsening...and so is my throat from yelling at my manager. I don't want to have to look over everyone's shoulders all the time. I just want to play bridge with my friends." "But Marcia," I said, "if after 20 years you still have to be there every day to oversee everything, apparently your people don ...

The E-Myth Revisited -- still going strong! "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" is currently number 10 on the New York Times Paperback Business Bestseller list. Originally published in 1986 (as "The E-Myth"), and fully revised in 1995, The E-Myth Revisited offers a radically fresh business perspective that has been fervently embraced by business owners and scholars both in the U.S. and abroad. Penned by E-Myth Worldwide founder and chairman, Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited has long been a staple in the business community. It has been voted the number one business book by Inc. 500 CEOs, and has consistently beaten its contemporaries in longevity on the BusinessWeek and other bus ...

How I learned - the hard way - what happens when you forget to apply the E-Myth principles to your online business [Paul Wenke has been an E-Myth Client since October 2005, and graduated from the Mastery Impact! Business Coaching program in December 2006.] My wife and I own an ACE hardware store in a small town located high in the remote Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado - a beautiful area with a population of only about 4,000 people in the whole county. Our business philosophy has been to stock a wide variety of products to meet as many of our customer's needs as possible. Like all retailers, we have some products that don't sell very well, or don't sell at all. But, because of our business philosophy and remote lo ...

Award Honoring Community College-educated Entrepreneurs will be presented at the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship's Annual Conference Lois and Dave Anderson, owners of the Bay and Bay Transfer Company of Rosemount, MN, have been named the winners of the 2007 E-Myth Worldwide Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The Award recognizes the achievements of entrepreneurs and the community colleges that they attended. E-Myth established the award through the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), which invited students, faculty, administrators and others to make nominations. To be eligible for the award, entrepreneurs must have attended a community college, been in business for three year ...

A business partnership is like a marriage. It comes with similar baggage - the ebb and flow of independence, dependence, insecurity, creativity, and crisis - and the challenge of trying to raise a child (your business) from infancy through adolescence to adulthood. Have you checked the divorce statistics lately? Well, the odds of a business partnership surviving are even worse! And for a family business? Train wreck ahead! But as with marriage, there seems to be a strong human pull to form business partnerships. And for those who've forged ahead despite the many perils, strategies do exist to increase your odds of success. A study in contrasts A partnership is an agreement to rule by shared decree. It's a declaratio ...

The Three Business Personalities: Entrepreneur, Manager, Technician "I am so discouraged with how my business is going," sighed Bob, a business owner. "I've got to get it straightened out in the next few months or I am going to give up and walk away from it!" This expression of frustration marked the beginning of our coaching / business owner relationship. Bob's dad was a plumber, and Bob grew up working in his dad's business. Then one day Bob reasoned that, since he's a plumber and has lived in and observed the plumbing business all of his life, that there was no reason not to establish a business of his own. And so he did. Bob is a terrific plumber, but he found that while he could clear clogged pipes and repair broken toilets ...

E-Myth Worldwide won a Stevie Award on June 12, 2006 for America's best source of public information delivered through interactive multimedia for the Embark Community Connection website(tm), and was a recognized as the national finalist in the category best interactive multimedia professional education program for the Embark E-Learning(tm) online courses. The awards were presented at The 2006 American Business AwardsSM Monday night in New York City. Hailed as "the business world's own Oscars" by the New York Post (April 27, 2005), The American Business Awards are the only national, all-encompassing business awards program honoring great performances in the workplace. Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word "crowned," the awards ceremoni ...

The Approach As an E-Myth Business Coach, I often talk to small business owners trying to solve key frustrations. My advice to them is to search for underlying causes of frustration, i.e., the business conditions that are causing the problems. This is a fundamental step that our clients sometimes ignore. Clients will often try to 'fix' a frustrating problem without understanding why the problem occurred. A result of this sort of 'fix' is often to blame others or blame themselves. A Blame-free Environment Given frustrations, and instead of blaming themselves thinking "it’s all my fault" or blaming others thinking "it’s all their fault" business owners must ask themselves, "What is causing these frustrations to occur? What standar ...

The Embark Community Connection team reads and reviews many online Entrepreneurial sites and will occasionally draw attention to articles and information of interest. This week we found a great slideshow from the, Fresh Inc. blog (a constantly updated blog from the Inc. magazine team), that lists 75 reasons why it is a great time to be an entrepreneur right now. Below we have selected a few of our favorite reasons from the list: Number 11: Because we're not rookies anymore. In 25 years of entrepreneurial expansion there have been experiments tried, experiences learned from, discoveries made, and notes taken. Launch a business today and you get shoulders to stand on--you don't have to make it all up from scratch. Number 13: Because m ...

Today, the Des Moines Higher Education Collaborative unveiled its newest program - the New Iowa Entrepreneurial Center. This new program will be headquartered in the John and Mary Pappajohn Education Center located at 1200 Grand Avenue in Des Moines. "By providing entrepreneurs with new business development and survival tools we will help encourage their success while elevating the role of entrepreneurship as a key driver of Iowa's economy. The New Iowa Entrepreneurial Center will help to improve Central Iowa's economic competitiveness which is core to the Collaborative mission", said David Maxwell, President of Drake University and the Collaborative Board’s Chair. An essential element of the program is the Embark E-Learning program, ...

The intangible, but highly influential, experiences of free expression, self-sufficiency, and creative control are what drive many people to embark upon the entrepreneurial journey, as it is these factors that provide personal satisfaction to business owners. Obviously, as the business owner and leader, you have a unique stake in the success or failure of the business because it is tied to you as an individual. As such, you are willing to struggle through the tough times while maintaining your excitement as you create a vision for the future. As mentioned in our earlier article, Your Entrepreneurial Vision in Action, creating what we refer to as the "Strategic Objective" is an entrepreneurial exerc ...

The concept of Strategic Work is critical to the success of your long-term business development. So what exactly is Strategic Work, and just why is it so important? At E-Myth, we make a very clear distinction between what we call "Tactical Work" and "Strategic Work." We say that for a business to grow and thrive, and to realize your vision and fuel your larger goals, you must always be focused on Strategic work - which is the work that will result in a transformation of your business, rather than just the maintenance of the status quo. The point of performing Strategic Work is to allow you to break free from what we call the cycle of just "doing it, doing it, doing it," because being stuck in that cycle will never lead to any busine ...

Your Starting Point: Developing a clear vision The starting point of designing, or redesigning, a business to be something exceptional, vital, and profitable in the marketplace is to develop a clear vision of what the business will look, feel, and act like. This includes developing brief descriptions of your unique business development components, such as the customer, people, and client fulfillment systems that will serve as the guiding force to realizing your business vision. Creating the vision, or what we at E-Myth refer to as the "Strategic Objective," is an entrepreneurial exercise that forces the leader to describe with clarity and conviction what their business is all about. No matter what stage of the business develo ...

At E-Myth Worldwide, we serve a diverse group of business owners, and potential business owners. As such, we receive a lot in inquiries from people seeking information about what they should know before starting their own business, as well as what skills they need to be successful once their business has been established. Michael Gerber, the founder and chairman of E-Myth uses the phrase "entrepreneurial seizure" to describe the belief that because an employee understands the technical work of the business, he or she is qualified to run a business that does that particular kind of work. The symptoms of an entrepreneurial seizure are the many pains that come along from doing business the hard way. Today I came across a wonderful ar ...

Well, ready or not, here it comes - the end of the year! The last weeks of December and first weeks of January seem to bring with them a heavier burden, and not a little confusion, to many business leaders. For some retail businesses, especially, this is "make-or-break" time - you're hiring extra help in sales, delivery, and customer service - and you hope they understand their jobs. Your challenge is to keep the vision alive, and to make certain that your staff feels secure and appreciated, and knows what you expect from them. Whether the season brings record sales, or record slumps, is on your shoulders. You find yourself working longer hours, while sleeping fewer. You’re skipping meals -- but if there’s a plate that needs j ...

Looking back while moving forward As usual when the end of the year draws closer, many of us begin to reflect on what we tried to accomplish over the course of this year, and what we would like to accomplish in the next. And, in the course of this reflection, we gain a more objective perspective of our goals that allows us to start to build our strategy for the New Year - a strategy that takes into account things we have learned that will help direct us where we want to go. Here at E-Myth, we not only advocate reflection, we see it as an indispensable part of the business development process of innovation, orchestration and quantification. The latter is particularly important, because without quantification you wo ...

Many business owners are not very skilled at thinking and acting like an entrepreneur. Your Primary Aim, the words you use to describe the essence of your life, and your Strategic Objective, your vision for your ideal business, may be your first experience setting priorities and identifying what is really important to you. Once you have them articulated, it's time to practice strategic thinking so that you can build your business and your life intentionally and in accordance with the goals and objectives you've set for yourself. (For more information about your Primary Aim and your Strategic Objective, read Chapters 12 and 13 of The E-Myth Revisited.) Most business owners spend far too much time working IN their b ...

It's important to understand that from my point of view, the entrepreneur is not a "person" but a part of everyone's personality. The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. We're born with that quality and it defines our lives as we respond to what we see, hear, feel, and experience. It is developed, nurtured, and given space to flourish or is squelched, thwarted, without air or stimulation, and dies. Look at anyone around you and you will recognize whether or not the entrepreneur is alive and well within them. The way they live their lives will demonstrate it. The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur ...

Yes, you and I have a great deal in common--we own our own business. Which means that you and I have the same demands put upon us. The people who we employ have a special need for us to put everything into perspective for them, in a way only you and I can be expected to do. After all, it's our business. What are those special needs; what do employees expect from a leader? From the owner? From the CEO? From the Boss? Well here are just a few things I've pulled out of my hat for you to chew on. Our people expect us to be: Consistent You and I are almost always inconsistent--okay, I am, and I don't know that you are, but having worked with thousands of business owners I can make a pretty educated guess. We've got to underst ...

As the old saying goes, "The only constant is change." Nothing drives this point home more clearly than the devastation in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The hurricanes' devastation affected thousands of businesses whose buildings were destroyed by the wind or ruined by the flood waters, or whose employees lost their lives, loved ones, or property in the storm and its aftermath. To the best of our abilities, we must prepare for change, or be swept away by it. The more proactive you can be in planning for change, the better your odds of surviving, and even thriving, when change occurs. Even if your business is located far away from the areas of destruction, it will nonetheless likely feel some of those impacts. ...

First and foremost, you must become a leader...an E-Myth leader. Leadership has different meanings for different people, but at E-Myth Worldwide, we are very specific about it. E-Myth Leadership has three components: Vision is your dream for the future of the business and the path you will take to make it a reality. You need a crystal clear vision that you communicate clearly, with energy and a strong sense of commitment. Everyone in your business must understand it and believe in it. It must become their vision as well as yours. If you don’t set the direction and guide the business, it will go nowhere. Unless you have a clear vision for the future of your business and an equally clear vision for the path you will take to get ...