by Mark E. Mason on March 22, 2010
The other day I mentioned that I was rereading the fantastic book by Michael Gerber called The eMyth and I told you that you should run your business like McDonalds. There’s another lesson that you can learn from Ray Kroc and that is you should work on your business, not in it.
One of the key ideas in The eMyth that Michael Gerber articulates particularly well is that the typical entrepreneur, and certainly this includes internet business people like us, is really three people when it’s all said and done.
It’s the technician, the person who knows all about the details that their website is about. It’s the entrepreneur, the person who wanted to start the internet business in the first place. It’s the manager, the person who coordinates getting all of the work done, particularly in the case where there are multiple workers or outsourced employees.
The problem with most entrepreneurs, Gerber writes, is that they have passion around the technician role. They know how to do something very well or they’re expert in some area and they just don’t want to let go of it. For example, they’re an expert gardener and that’s why they have a gardening website, or they’re an expert at some other technical aspect like putting up websites and so they don’t want to let go of the technical task of coding HTML.
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by Mark E. Mason on March 17, 2010
I was reviewing one of my favorite books the other day and it reminded me that we really should all be building out internet businesses just like Ray Crock did at McDonalds. Of course, the book I’m talking about is The eMyth by Michael Gerber. Actually, the latest version is called The eMyth Revisted.
A lot of people mistakenly believe that The eMyth is about the electronics age, or email, or ecommerce, but actually E is for entrepreneurial myth. In The eMyth Gerber goes through an example of how McDonalds was able to franchise its business all across the world and the systems they used to do that.
As a matter of fact, Gerber points out that a new McDonalds franchise opens somewhere in the world every eight minutes. This is truly remarkable and only possible because the McDonalds business is completely systemized.
Every tiny detail that is involved in running a McDonalds is documented in McDonalds’ procedure manuals. How big the hamburgers should be, what the buns should look like, how thick the patties should be, they even have a procedure for where the pickles go. Crock recognized that if you place the pickles in a particular configuration you could keep them from falling off of the hamburger into the customer’s lap, therefore increasing customer satisfaction.
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