| Monday, July 5, 2010

After reading The Goal by Eli Goldratt, I’ve moved on to Michael Gerber’s ‘E-Myth Revisited’.

Where Goldratt’s book is a didactic business novel which tells the story of Alex Rogo, his UniWare production plant and how he manages to lead his team to business victory after learning about and applying Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, E-Myth Revisited is split between Gerber’s personal hero’s journey, musings on small business structure and the story of Sarah and her small business—All About Pies.

My business—translation & language teaching—has been the same for the last seven years and many of my clients and students have stuck with me for most of that time.

My first company, however—Doctorlingua SL—wasn’t such a success and we closed it after a couple of years, and I went back to being a self-employed independent businessman.

The business is the same but the company structure has changed over time, sometimes growing and sometimes shrinking.

According to Gerber’s theory, with Doctorlingua we made it to small business Adolescence before it all went wrong. Adolescence comes after small business Infancy, in which the first and only employee does everything until: “it becomes too much for one person and the business must change. This is when most business failures occur. The rest go on to Adolescence.”

I think the key question when you reach the end of small business Infancy has to be: do you really want to build a company?

I remember being asked this question by my cousin before I went on to create Doctorlingua and if I’m honest my response at the time wasn’t a resounding, totally committed ‘yes’.

It got me thinking though and, when I reached the point where “it became too much for one person”, I decided it was a good idea and rolled the dice.

Unfortunately (c’est la vie, I guess) I hadn’t read Gerber’s book or thought about how or why a small business grows or needs to grow in order to survive and prosper.

If I had, as well as understanding his ideas on the transition from Infancy to Adolescence and small business Maturity, I would have been aware of the existence of an Entrepreneur, a Manager and a Technician within each aspiring business owner.

Confusion between these reflections of your business personality helps to explain Gerber’s fatal assumption: “if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does the technical work.”

In my case, I clearly have no problem with the entrepreneur part—the thinking, dreaming, exploring, planning side of creating business activity. I would say this is my dominant side, even.

I can also do the technical stuff—translation, classes, invoices, accounting and sales—otherwise I wouldn’t have survived the last seven years in one form or another.

No, my problem, my great missing business personality, would have to be my manager. And I can even see this reflected in some aspects of my personal life.

Order, quality and precision are definitely possible—and most certainly available on demand for clients, friends or important personal stuff—but they’re not a regular, habitual part of what I’ve been doing. They’re not systematic.

Drawing a parallel with a previous, discarded career option, and comparing Gerber’s Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician to an army’s Officer, Sergeant-Major and Soldier, you could say I needed to channel my inner Sergeant-Major a bit more.

Next week I’ll write more about that and about Gerber’s proposed solution to such chaos and confusion—the Turn-Key revolution and how to look at your business through the eyes of someone who wants to create a franchise.