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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