I have just finished reading Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It.  The book offers advice to future and present entrepreneurs, especially the ones who are highly skilled employees who have decided to start a business around their area of expertise.  The format of the book is a series of descriptions of interactions between the author and the owner of the struggling All About Pies, a hypothetical business.  I found the style of the book annoying at times, but Gerber provides a solid overview of the entire process of opening a successful business, from conceiving the initial product to hiring employees to marketing to franchising.

Some highlights:

Gerber says that within each business owner the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur are in constant struggle.  The Technician represents the person who does the physical work, the Manager is the one who plans, and the Entrepreneur is the one who has dreams and visions.  In short, most small businesses fail (70%, according to the book) because the founders are excellent Technicians who spend too much time and energy focusing on doing the work and not enough on planning and dreaming.

According to Gerber, you can overcome this problem by Working On Your Business, Not In Your Business.  Essentially, part of your job as a Manager is to break down all of the pieces of your business into clear roles with very clear instructions that can be kept in operations manuals.  The instructions should be plain and detailed enough that they can be carried out by the least skilled labor possible (Gerber cites McDonalds as the ideal business model).  As an Entrepreneur you should find a clear vision of what your business should mean to the world (“caring”, etc.) that you can communicate to your employees.

In short, if you can wade through some fluff (which, realistically, you will find in any self-help book), The E-Myth Revisited is a strong introduction to the principles of small business entrepreneurship.