From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
Dear friend,
The E-Myth by Michael Gerber is the only book you must read before starting a new business. I have finished it today and it provided me not just with an essential framework and mindset for my own business, but also a framework for my own life.
In order to understand what this book is about, let’s consider you are a CPA. Your boss is making your life a living hell, you are not paid enough for how much you work and you consider that you could do far better. You feel that you are at the end of your road (and patience). Instead of going with an AK 47 and showing him who’s the boss, you start your own business.
You open a LLC, you rent an office and you place an ad in the newspaper for finding new clients. You get two clients right away and you are making more money than ever. Life’s sweet, isn’t it?
Here comes the true challenge. You opened your own business because you were after the liberty that came with such a feat. However, here’s what you haven’t realized yet. When you were an employee, you had only one responsibility – doing the books.
Now, it’s different. You like doing the books. But you must also do several things that you don’t like, you despise or you don’t know how to do. These are marketing, operations and financial.
In other words, getting leads, converting them, doing the books for your clients and for yourself, cleaning the office, taking care of the legal papers and more.
Instead of having a job, you have four. I bet this isn’t what you were after initially. At this point, you can either get frustrated and declare bankruptcy or you can start implementing the E-Myth.
The E-Myth acknowledges that in every business and in every person there are three distinct personalities.
These are:
1. The technician – the person that gets thing done.
2. The manager – the person that keeps things in order.
3. The entrepreneur – the person that expands the business.
Because you were a technician, chances are that this is what you want to do. Get things done. You don’t want to take care of everything else. However, you must.
And the easiest and cheapest way to do this is to create systems that will take care of that result for you. A system is a set of procedures and rules optimized for the best results. For example, if answering in a certain way at the phone gets you more orders than answering in a different way every time, that is a system.
If wearing a blue suit instead of a red one in a sales meeting increases your conversion rate, that is again, a system.
However, system thinking is not just about optimization. Yes, you can take this to the next step and create systems for your life. You can create a system to shower better, to run better, to reach work faster, etc.
But in the context of a business, systems are critical because they need to replace you. A system is like your best personality. You set how you want things to be done. Then you do them to test the system. You get some results. You either perfect the system or you finalize it.
Then the most important thing happens. You hire someone with no experience to follow the system to the letter and replace you. If you have created a system for lead generation, you hire a person that will follow that system and get leads for you. And because it’s not skill based but rather guideline based (sequential), the efficiency should be near perfect.
This is what the E-myth is all about.
You can buy the book from:
Audible: http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B002V1LGZE&qid=1314306922&sr=1-1
Next on the line is GTD by David Allen.
Thank you,
Razvan Rogoz