Are you an entrepreneur, a manager, or a technician?

If you own your business, you may say “entrepreneur,” but is that really your dominant personality? Michael Gerber wrote The E-myth Revisited to discuss these three personality traits of business owners, and he seems to feel that most business owners start out as technicians.

In other words, most business owners think they can do something most people can’t – like write software. Provide medical care. Buy and sell cars. Whatever the task, they’re driven by a vision of providing something and maybe making money while doing it. But those jobs associated with building a business aren’t at the top of their agenda.

But those tasks become important when they cause problems.

Accounting, staffing, marketing, sales, and even things that business owners were going to take care of themselves because of their sheer awesomeness, like workplace culture and profitability, start taking up too much time. Or are left undone, causing bigger problems.

This is the point when a partner is brought in to handle the growth. Often it’s a family member, like a spouse. And people start making jokes about how many hats they’re wearing.

The answer, according to Gerber, is to create an org chart, even if you have to put your name in every box, and start building a system. A system including job descriptions for every job, and rules of the road for every task that needs to be done. Something that can be “operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill,” with the result that you’ve built a system for your business that would allow you to duplicate it – as if you were going to franchise it out to another owner.

Gerber believes that not only does this kind of consistency reduce stress for the business owner, it provides a reason for the customer to buy from the business. He sees disorder and chaos as a constant in life, and doing business with a well-run operation as at least a partial cure.

I think there’s something to this – we’ve all experienced a sense of satisfaction when a company we do business with does things that exceed our expectations with great quality and consistency.

We can help you have a business like this – get in touch with us for a free initial consultation.