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The owner’s Comfort Zone is a boundary beyond which they lose their ability to control their environment. Every Adolescent business reaches a point where its owner pushes outside that boundary.
When an owner loses the ability to control his business, he hires a “Harry”. But “Harry” is also a technician and needs more guidance than The Technician can provide him. He needs a Manager. The lack of one causes the business to either return to Infancy, go for broke, or hang on for dear life.
THE TECHNICIAN-TURNED-business-owner typically tends to get rid of uncontrollable chaos and returns to Infancy. He gets rid of employees and inventory, rents a smaller facility, and goes back to doing it all by himself again, thereby feeling in control again.
He thinks that by doing so, nothing can go wrong, forgetting that he’d been there before. One day he wakes up not feeling like he wants to go to his business anymore. Then, he realizes that if he doesn’t, no one else will. He is again faced with the reality that what he created is not a business but a job.
In the United States, more than 400,000 small businesses close their doors every year.
GOING FOR BROKE IS a less painful and more dramatic alternative to getting small. In fact, these businesses are a sign of our time.
New technology brings with it a new breed of technicians to the business arena. Most of their businesses grow so fast that their ability to produce their commodity is quickly surpassed by the demand for it.
When a business explodes, the people left behind justify the explosion as an inescapable aftermath of doing business on a fast track, where brilliant technology, luck, and speed are essential to make it big.
The reality is that these three have never been sufficient, because somebody is always better. Unfortunately, there’s not enough time to listen once a business goes fast track.
FOR AN ADOLESCENT BUSINESS, surviving is the most tragic possibility of all.
In order for your business to survive, you have to be fully committed to doing whatever’s needed. You do it the way you only know – being there all the time. The business and the possibility of losing it consume you. You dedicate everything you have into it and you manage to keep it going.
In the end, your business doesn’t explode. You do. You give everything you have until there’s nothing left.
Infancy and Adolescence dominate the American small business. Most of the small businesses visited by E-Myth Worldwide for 24 years were in this condition. Nevertheless, there is a way to escape it.
