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The E-Myth Revisited
What It’s About
The completely revised underground bestseller - The E-Myth - in its compact disc edition, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how everyday assumptions can hinder effective business management. He guides you through the stages of a business's life cycle - from the entrepreneurial childhood through the adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial mindset that serves as the guiding principle of every successful business - and demonstrates how the lessons of franchising can be applied to any business, whether it is a franchise or not.
Three Key Ideas
The Entrepreneurial Myth
Most small businesses fail because their owners confused being skilled at a trade with knowing how to build a business around that trade.
Franchise Prototype Thinking
Designing your business as if it were the model for thousands of franchises forces you to build systems that work without you in the room.
Entrepreneur, Manager, Technician
Every owner contains three competing personalities, and the Technician dominating the other two is the most common cause of small business collapse.
Read a Sample
Sarah hates pies. She opened "All About Pies" three years ago because her aunt taught her to bake, because friends told her she was crazy not to, because she saw a way out of her old life. Now she gets to the shop at three in the morning, leaves around ten at night, and does the bookkeeping after that. She is deep in debt. When Michael Gerber asks her how she feels about her business, she tells him she cannot stand the smell of pies, the thought of pies, the sight of pies.
Sarah is the protagonist of *The E-Myth Revisited*, and she is also almost every small business owner Gerber has met across twenty-five years of consulting. The book runs on a single argument: most small businesses fail not because their owners lack grit or talent, but because they have mistaken a job they were good at for a business they could build. Gerber calls that mistake the Entrepreneurial Myth. He spends the rest of the book showing what it costs and how to escape it.
The Myth That Kills Small Businesses
The Entrepreneurial Myth is the assumption that most small businesses are launched by entrepreneurs deliberately taking calculated risks with capital. The reality is almost the opposite. Most small businesses are launched by technicians having what Gerber calls an Entrepreneurial Seizure. A baker, a hairdresser, a software engineer, a chiropractor wakes up one morning, looks at the boss running the shop, and thinks: I know as much about this as he does. Any dummy can run a business. I am working for one. The seizure follows. The technician quits, signs a lease, and becomes a business owner.
Then the Fatal Assumption kicks in. The Fatal Assumption is the belief that if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work. These are two different things, and treating them as the same thing is the single most common cause of small business failure. Knowing how to bake a pie does not teach you how to run a bakery. Knowing how to write code does not teach you how to run a software company. The skill that made you a good employee turns out to be your worst enemy as an owner, because it convinces you that you already know what you are doing.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who started a business because they were good at the work and now feels trapped running it.
- Anyone who wants to build a company that can operate and eventually be sold without depending on them personally.
- Anyone who has tried to hire help, lost control, and ended up doing everything themselves again.
- Anyone who wants a practical framework for turning daily chaos into a documented, repeatable business system.
About the Author: Michael E. Gerber
Michael E. Gerber is a small business consultant and author who spent decades working with independent business owners across the United States. He founded E-Myth Worldwide, a business coaching and training company that has worked with millions of small businesses.
Gerber is best known for arguing that most small business failures are not caused by lack of effort or skill, but by a fundamental confusion about what running a business actually requires. The E-Myth Revisited, first published in 1995, remains one of the best-selling small business books of all time.
