Why most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Each month we will review a book that can have an impact on your business, your career, or your school. This month’s review is on the Emyth Revisited, a great book written by Michael Gerber. We chose this book because it is a great starting point for how to make your business run efficiently, and reduce the need for you to constantly be putting out fires. His basic premise is that many people run their business on a day to day basis without thinking about how to make it run systematically. Some businesses that work well, do so because of the people involved and if the people leave, the business falls apart. He maintains that a well-run business is one where your business is built on systems that reduces your stress, helps employees know your expectations, and provides a positive and consistent experience for your customers.

Highlights of the book include:

• Your main job as a business owner is to build the systems so that your business can maintain predictable results.
• Your employee’s job is to run the system that you have created.
• When systems are created correctly, even employees with lower skill levels can succeed in carrying out important tasks based on your needs.
• Think of the business as something you would franchise to help you determine the level of detail you would need to build into the system to make sure that the results are predictable.
• You first need to sit down and create a blueprint of what your ideal business looks like and then the job is to create the systems in place to make that ideal a reality.

When properly applied, the principles will allow you to more effectively grow your business and to put good, sound processes in place. Any business owner who is depending on himself or a key employee to get things done right needs to read this. The principles in this book can make you more money, give you more free time, and liberate you from feeling like you have to do everything.

The ideas in this book have guided us as an organization to constantly be looking for ways to systemize things and help the business run more efficiently. As in everything, this is a work in progress but any business that is not currently built on systems will get great value from the ideas in this book.

For more information about this book and where to purchase please click here.

To recommend a book for future reviews please post it in the comments section of this newsletter.

 

This review was written by Belynda Holt Pinto, Director of Operations for Mike Holt Enterprises. She has taught at Florida Atlantic University, has her MBA, and is passionate about books that can help a business grow to its full potential.