The E-Myth Revisited

Why most small businesses don’t work, and what to do about it.

The E-Myth Revisited is the 2001 update to Michael Gerber’s perennial classic on small business development: The E-Myth.

Review Summary: This is a valuable book. It often traverses between lucid and lame, but I’m suggesting that you need to read it anyhow.

The E-Myth is one of the books I've been urged to read by Dr. Terrence Sebora, perhaps the book. Terry loves E-Myth. He has assigned its reading in both of the MBA courses I have taken from him. As the former Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an influential mentor during Allied Strategy's business plan days, there was no way I was going to escape Terry's favorite book.

E-Myth refers to the American myth that most businesses are created and run by true entrepreneurs. Instead it conjects, that most businesses are started by workers taken hostage by a temporary entrepreneurial seizure. This book is designed to hit home with the newly minted, or already disillusioned technician or craftsperson turned business owner. It is designed to spur entrepreneurial and managerial thinking in that person and to convince them to take a systematic and higher level view of their business. It urges them to work ‘on’ their business rather than ‘in’ their business, and to create something that does not depend on them, and could one-day be sold. In accomplishing this purpose, the book is dead on.

Despite my serial entrepreneur's perspective conflict, there were still significant portions of the book I found rather enlightening. Whether I like to admit it or not, E-Myth did a good job of reminding me what I was here to do. In fact, I would go so far as Terry to say that every aspiring business owner should read this book. I suspect most that thumb through The E-Myth will not only take away something of value, but will be immediately struck as to which of their friends desperately need to read this book.

Attached is a 19-pg outline of information gleaned from the book, that is, if you're the executive summary type.