If you’ve read any of my E-Myth books, you know me well enough to anticipate what I’m about to share with you. If you haven’t read my E-Myth books, this book will come as a surprise.
The E-Myth Enterprise is a book about the business of invention. More importantly, it’s a book about rare people who I have come to think of as true E-Myth Entrepreneurs, people who were moved to re-create their world by inventing a business unlike any they had ever seen other than in their imagination.
Unlike any business you have ever seen.
Trust me when I say this: the E-Myth Enterprises you will come in touch with here are as uncommon a reality as winning the Olympics.
Companies like these don’t simply happen; they are the product of deep, delirious imagining. They are the outcome of passions intensely applied. Of perseverance impossible to fake. Of overcoming the relentless obstacles that are continually conspiring to make the impossible impossible. To make the unfathomable unfathomable. To make the difficult more than just difficult, but horrendously difficult. Of creating an original result in the world.
I think you get what I mean. Don’t try this at home, is what the warning reads at the bottom of the page. Unless you’re determined to exceed, that is.
To exceed what? is the question.
Well, of course: to exceed the everyday. The normal. The obvious.
And if that’s the case, this book tells you what it looks like when you’re done and how to think about it in the process.
How to invent an E-Myth Enterprise.
How to invent a company that acts like one in ten million.
Welcome to the club. The E-Myth Club. The Michael Gerber Club. The club of great entrepreneurs.
THE FOUR ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS
I was having a conversation with my friend and agent, Steve Hanselman, not that long ago, about my commitment to create a new master’s degree, one that would leave an MBA and all those who would pursue it smothered in the dust.
I called that new degree an MBD, or master’s of business design.
It would be the only business program an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial manager would ever need. It would teach the essential skills needed to invent a stunningly original company, what I in this book call an E-Myth Enterprise.
There are four essential ingredients to building such a company: they are the visual, emotional, functional, and financial. When you design a company, you design it visually, emotionally, functionally, and financially. These four essential components call for a systems thinker if they are to be designed to work as all great companies work: synergistically, in an integrated, intelligent, original, emotionally compelling way to deliver the original promise they were designed to deliver, a result that surprises the people it was intended to surprise, that glues them to it in ways they had never expected because it serves them in ways they had never expected. And it keeps on doing it because it was built in a very special way.
In this book I will discuss the beginnings of that MBD, at least to the point where you will clearly understand the logic underlying it and why it is so critical for you should you aspire to become such an inventor, such an E-Myth Entrepreneur, as the folks in this book have become.
The idea is not that difficult to grasp. A company is a product of an entrepreneur’s imagination. It is a visual product, an emotional product, a functional product, and a financial product.
Although the idea is not that difficult, it seems that most people I tell that to do find it difficult and, for many, impossible to get. I believe that to be caused by the gross, commercial, flat, unstimulating, unimaginative context most of us hold on to when relating to the subject of business.
Business, to most people, is what their parents did or do.
Business, to most people, is the job they’ve got to go to today.
Business, to most people, is where we work.
Business, to most people, is where we would least like to be if what we really wanted to be doing is having fun.
This book suggests something significantly different than that.
Business is the most creative and challenging pursuit in which one can engage. It is also downright fun—if done right.
Follow me. Let’s do it right! Let’s have fun!