Book Review: The E-Myth Revisted

The E-myth has been on my reading list for a long time. With the author being a guest on the BiggerPockets podcast, I moved it up on the list. He suggested in the podcast to read the E-myth Revisted.

I had it in my head that it was a book about delegating and being more productive, but really it’s about why small businesses fail and how to do it differently. Because most businesses aren’t started by true entrepreneurs, they are started by people with a technical skill of some sort. They set up a business where they can go to do their work, but spend all their time working rather than wondering what else the business should be doing, and how.

Some gems in the book:

• Think of marketing as delivering on promises that the competition won’t dare to make. Find and keep customers better than anyone else.
• Focus the business on what the customer needs, not what the owner wants.
• Businesses have stages, and are always adapting. Technicians need help, need to embrace change, and they need to strategically drive and prepare for growth.
• Any plan is better than no plan.
• How the business looks, acts, and does what it intended to do is more important that the commodity or work the business sells.
• To get control of the business instead of it controlling you, develop franchisable operating systems and manuals that allow the business to keep working without the owner. Keep asking “how can I give my customers the results they wan systematically rather than personally?”
• What you do is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time. This is what differentiates your business.
• Great people actively create their lives, while everyone else is created by their lives, waiting to see where life takes them.

I picked up some things to ponder for both our real estate business, and for my job in finance. At work we are currently looking at how the accounting and finance services are currently delivered, how we ideally would like them to be structured, and working on a multi-year plan to cover the gaps. In real estate, maybe it is time to determine a more concrete future plan and start working the gaps, rather than wait for some unknowns to settle out and time to go by. And, in the short term we can do more to get more consistent with our tenants and processes – using and keep refining our procedure manual more.