Do you constantly suffer from frustrations that are driving you crazy, keeping you awake at night with the acid churning up in your stomach while you stare at the ceiling?
Are you often irritated by issues that you thought you solved yesterday that keep reappearing today?
Do you view your business frustrations as the unavoidable occupational hazards of owning your own business?
Are you living the E-Myth?
The E-Myth is short for the “entrepreneurial myth.” It assumes that most owner-operated businesses were generally started by entrepreneurs. You know it's not true. You're living it.
Is this how it started for you?
You were good at your job. But tired of working for someone else. You knew in your heart that you could create a business that was extraordinary. Customers would flock to you. You'd get to keep all the money the business generated and you could hire people to do the parts of the business you didn't like.
You'd get to have dinner with your family, play with your kids before they went to bed and buy that dream house. More freedom. More money. More of what matters to you.
But somewhere along the way, the dream turned into a nightmare. You are immersed in the business, doing it, doing it, doing it, busy, busy, busy, doing the one or two things you know incredibly well how to do, and PAINFULLY slugging through the 14 other things that you have little or no clue how to do.
Things like bookkeeping, sales, financial management, writing ad copy, and so on and so on. The days get longer, the nights get shorter, the frustrations get bigger and more frequent, family activities are playing second fiddle, married bliss gets a bit tense, and the grand, extraordinary vision begins to fade into the tyranny of routine. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
You haven't created a business at all, but a job! And it’s the worst job in the world, because you're working for a lunatic!
Here's what happened
Businesses are almost always started by what we call “technicians” suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. A carpenter becomes a contractor; an auto mechanic opens an auto repair shop; an accountant opens an accounting practice, and so on. And each one of them starts their business operating under the fatal assumption that knowing how to do the technical work of a business somehow qualifies you to run a business that does that technical work—and the assumption is totally and completely false.
As a result, the overwhelming majority of owner-operated businesses fail—if not in the first year, then in 5 or 10 years. In fact, the chances of failure are 80% in five years, 96% in ten.
And if Mr. or Ms. Owner is one of the lucky ones who make it past the 10-year mark, he or she shouldn’t break their arm trying to pat themselves on the back. Because in all likelihood they are working in a business that depends on them or certain key people for its existence, continues to require long hours of their attention, and are having anything but a freeing, rewarding, and frustration-free experience.
Why? Because, like most business owners, they are and have been doing the wrong work—the work of a technician, and not the work of the manager and the entrepreneur.
Expanding the Myth by playing Employee Russian Roulette
Suddenly, genius strikes like a bolt of lightening! Our Technician decides its time for the business to move to a new level of maturation, and hires or contracts with someone to do one or more of those things she or he either detests or has no idea how to do.
"All I have to do is delegate those things I don't know how to do to my new employee, and I'll have all the time I need to do the things I enjoy." No problem, right? Wrong!
When the owner abdicates the books or the sales or whatever to the new employee Fred, what do you suppose the books or the sales process is going to look like? Whatever Fred thinks they should look like, of course.
That may or may not have anything to do with the owner's vision for the company, but how would he know? As long as things are going well, money and sales are rolling in, Mary or Fred must be doing something right, whatever that is. If not, time to get rid of Mary or Fred. It's a game of employee Russian roulette.
Now the owner has additional frustrations:
"Why can't I get people to do what they're supposed to when they're supposed to do it?"
"Why doesn't anybody work as hard as I do-what's wrong with this generation?" Doesn't anyone have ambition anymore?"
The truth is, no one really manages people, much less motivate them. The enlightened business leader creates and manages systems, and trains people to become masters of the system. Motivation comes from within, and is awakened by an environment that is built as a game worth playing.
Is this really how it's going to be?
If this sounds frighteningly familiar, instead of giving you more life, the business is your life.
Each day it is slowly sucking the life out of you. Since the business now owns you, instead of you owning the business, you spend your time producing and selling what the business offers as a product, instead of creating a product called "The Business That Works". Your time is not your own. The visionary is asleep. The manager is out to lunch, and the technician is running the business - doin' it, doin' it, and doin' it.
What systems you have are largely habits or folklore living in your head and the heads of your managers and key employees. Your business is a simple accident or a fatal diagnosis away from obliteration at worse and atrophy at best. You have reached a plateau. You are struggling to keep your brand promise to existing customers, before they become exiting customers. Innovation died and you didn't even have time to attend the funeral!
That's just the way it is. That's just business. Isn't it?
