The E Myth Revisited

Right about one distinction, the technician manager entrepreneur split, and padded around it for two hundred pages.

The E Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber, 1995.

Right about one distinction and padded around it for two hundred pages. The technician, manager, and entrepreneur split explains more about why small businesses fail than anything else I have read on the subject. Everything after it is a consulting pitch wearing a parable’s clothes.

Gerber argues that most small businesses are started by a technician who understood the trade rather than the business, and that the resulting company works only as long as the founder personally works it. His fix is the franchise prototype: document every process so thoroughly that the business could be replicated exactly by people of ordinary skill, whether or not it ever becomes an actual franchise. The claim runs further than the evidence in the book supports, that any business, including ones built on genuine expertise or judgment rather than repeatable process, can be reduced to documentation without losing the thing that made it worth building.

One line, and I am counting it as one line on purpose: a business that depends entirely on its owner is not a business, it is a job that owner invented and then never fired themselves from.

What it changed is not a workflow, since I do not run a business the franchise model would apply to. It changed how I read the rest of this genre. I now check, on page one, whether a management book is selling a documented insight or a consulting practice built around one insight repeated at parable length. Gerber’s is the second kind, recognizable by the barber story returning every forty pages wearing a slightly different hat. Knowing the tell has saved me from finishing at least three other books this year that made the same trade, stretching a single true idea well past the point where it was still teaching me anything. That is a real result. It is just not the one the book was trying to produce.