EA203: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Every Small Firm Architect Should Read This Book [Podcast]

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Every Small Firm Architect Should Read This Book

Fivecat Studio Architecture launched in 1999, and Mark discovered a book that changed the way he viewed business. It helped him realize that running a successful architecture firm required so much more than designing great architecture. Inside the owner of every small firm exists a battle among the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician. If we don’t attend to the needs of each one, our firms are destined for failure.

This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Every Small Firm Architect Should Read This Book.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber inspired Mark to build Fivecat Studio Architecture as a franchise prototype. Even though they knew selling their business systems as a franchise was never a goal, it was still important. Those systems have allowed them to thrive and have given them the tools needed to balance the requirements of the firm with the responsibilities of their family.

This book inspired Mark to work on his business rather than in his business. Since 1999, Mark and Annmarie have experienced the startup pains of infancy, the hard-earned successes of adolescence, and the launch of a new virtual business model.

Part 1

Michael E. Gerber defines the E-Myth as the entrepreneurial myth and discusses how small businesses are often the result of entrepreneurial seizures. What does that mean? “The technician suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure takes the work he loves to do and turns it into a job.”

Have YOU done that? How many architects do you know who have launched their own firms with the goal to do it better than the firms they worked for?

The three phases of business are infancy, adolescence and maturity. It’s important to build a mature company right from the beginning. “A mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view about building a business that works not because of you, but without you. Because it starts that way, it’s more likely to continue that way. Therein the true difference between an adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped.”

Part 2

Gerber introduces the concept of the franchise prototype and working on your business and not in it. He encourages the creation of systems, and the predictable results and happy clients that come from them. “The systems run the business, the people run the systems. The system integrates all the elements required to make a business work. It transforms a business into an organism, driven by integrity of all its parts, all working in concert toward a realized objective. With its prototype as its progenitor, it works like nothing else before it.”

As architects, our first thought of having a system is negative. What if it takes away or limits creativity? In fact, systems do just the opposite. First, build the business, then you’ll have more time and more flexility to be the architect you want to be.

“Great businesses are not built by extraordinary people, but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. For ordinary people to do extraordinary things, a system is absolutely essential in order to compensate for the disparity between the skills of your people and the skills your business needs in order to produce consistent results.”

At McDonald’s, the systems in place allow their tens of thousands of stores to deliver exactly what customers expect every time they walk into one of their locations. “It delivers exactly what we’ve come to expect of it every single time. That’s why I look to McDonald’s for a model for every small business, because it can do in it’s more than fourteen thousand stores what most can’t do in one.”

Who among us can say that we do things as well as McDonald’s does?

Part 3

Do you want to build a successful small business? Gerber leads readers through a fully-developed business development program, a how-to guide for success.

The E-Myth Revisited is not only your guide to success, but it’s entertaining as well. 

Why is this Mark’s favorite business book?

If you take action to implement the lessons that Gerber teaches, The E-Myth Revisited will take your firm to places you’ve never imagined.

Read through the book and go through the process of creating a master plan for your life.

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The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber