What Emyth Doesn't Teach You

28/11/2017

The Emyth is a top business book. But it has some glaring omissions. It talks a lot about WHY you need to systemise your business. But offers very little structure or explanation as to HOW to do this. Let us show you how that can be done.

Watch this video to find out how an App would help you implement the teachings of Emyth.

What we’re talking about today is one of my favourite business books I’ve ever read. Which most of you have heard of, which is the e-myth by Michael Gerber. So this is definitely in my top 3 all-time business books that I’ve ever read. The key thing that I’ve drawn from the book is the concept of working on your business not in it. For those of you that are not aware, that means if you’re doing the actual work of what your business does, then you’re working in your business. You’re making the widgets or selling the services. Whereas what you should be doing as a business owner is working on it. That is basically expanding the business, making it bigger, better, sleeker, more efficient, more systemized, more structured, and more organized. That’s the key thing that you need to draw from this book.

Michael Gerber uses McDonald’s as an example and Ray Kroc in particular. But I do have one big gripe with the book. It does go through all the requirements for having systems and why you need them. But it seems to fall short for me on how to actually create systems that work. I know this because I’ve done this myself. You read the book and you think right, obviously all I need to really do is document what systems I have already, write them down, and then somebody else can do them. So I did that. I wrote thousands if not tens of thousands of words out in something like an operations manual. Did it work? No, not really. What usually happens is the people who need to really read it don’t. If they do, they just glance through it. Because they’ve done nothing more than glance through it, they don’t follow any of the systems, and eventually you end up doing it the old-fashioned way anyway. So it doesn’t really work.

One thing that I’d like to draw from this though as a bit of a positive is this book was actually written originally in 1995. Imagine what the situation was in 1995. We had no internet. We had no email. A handful of people would have had computers at work. Mobile phones didn’t exist really, not in the current state they are now. So flash forward to where we are now, midway through 2017. We’ve now all got a computer in our pocket that can do anything that we tell it to do. This is why we got into the app business.

So what an app does, if you do it properly, is basically you put an app on all your employees' and staff’s phones and that then tells them what to do. But more importantly, it controls how they do things. For example, if your system requires that you do task A, then task B, then task C. In an operations manual, there was scope for somebody just ignoring A and jumping straight to B. Because maybe A was a bit of a pain to implement, whilst B was a nice easy job to do.

When you’ve got something like an app, you can make it so that B or C only appears or can only be filled in once A is complete, which we do quite a lot.

So if you’re building systems and procedures and you’re trying to get your business to the point where you don’t have to work in every day, and you’ve read the e-myth and want help in creating and building systems of procedures, then speak to us about an App to help you do that.