A Story of the Entrepreneur, Manager, and the Technician
This book was a serious wakeup call for me and I wish I had discovered it 15 years ago. It is an incredibly easy read and packed with very tangible concepts. It’s not usually in the standard list of books people have read and posted on Facebook. It’s not like a Good to Great or 4-Hour Work Week that every entrepreneur grins at the mention of, however, as I spoke to some seasoned entrepreneurs (read older) they gave the grin.
It’s funny how I happened to come across this book. I was listening to a podcast and they were ripping on the 4-Hour Work Week. I had decided not to read the book a while ago, as I had heard so many negative things about it, but the podcast ultimately inspired me to give it a shot.
So, I asked around to borrow a copy, and one of my friends obliged. It took a few months before I scheduled lunch with my friend and he showed up with a stack of books. He started out saying something like, “Here is the book you asked for, but this is the book you need to read [The E Myth Revisited].” He gave me an overview and I was hooked. I started reading it immediately.
The Problem
So, have you ever been sitting there at your desk, knowing you are more capable, skilled, and talented than those around you, and you just know that you could do this job better than your incompetent boss? If so, this book is for you. It details the struggle between the Technician, the Entrepreneur, and the Manager.
You are a skilled technician. You live in the present. You have work, you do work, you deliver work, you move on. This is a valuable skill, but you want something bigger; now you’ve added the entrepreneur. This person lives in the future. He is what got you to leave the comfort of your old company and start out on your own. He is the one that sees the vision of what your business could be. You need him to go out and get the work, because without him the technician has nothing to do. Now you balance your time between two jobs. You spend some of your time selling/growing and some of your time performing the work you sold. For you this led to an undesirable boom bust cycle.
As it turns out, the technician has a lack of appreciation for the other aspects that make your former company run, and if you continue to overlook these details, you will perfectly craft yourself a career dungeon. As the book outlines, you start your company for the independence and flexibility, but those overlooked details will start to be required, and you’ll need to react. So you hire another technician. They may be as skilled as you, but they won’t quite do things the same way. When you have just one or two, you can handle that and things get done. You get a few more and the cracks in the system get bigger. Then, thinking to yourself, I need a manager to keep these guys in line! The manager lives in the past trying to clean up messes.
So, now you have all of these people working for you, and you are working harder and you still aren’t making any more money than you made working for your former company. Additionally, the quality of your product or service drops due to a lack of systems and defined expectations. Furthermore, you didn’t start a company, you just made yourself a job! This place would fall apart without you.
Franchise Model
No one is suggesting that your shop should be the next McDonalds, however what Gerber and I are suggesting is that you run it like a franchise. I can envision a company that is represented by a large stack of documents: How you do everything in XYZ Co. If you can document how your entire company operates, then you don’t have a job, you have a business, and a business should be an asset. It should work for you. You may have a job, but it shouldn’t be any more critical than other jobs there. When you want to open a McDonalds franchise, you get a large stack of documents and go through a lot of training that effectively says, “this is how we do it here.” How do you do it at XYZ Co.? If it’s not written down and repeatable, only you know. Then only you can run the company, then you have a career dungeon. Did you want to build a dungeon?
Vision and Goals
As Gerber points out, when starting a company you should really sit back and think about your goals. Not your business goals, but your life goals. What do you want your life to be like? Do you want to work 40 hours a week, make a decent living, have benefits, paid vacation, and insurance? Or do you want to work 60 to 80 for the rest of your life, struggling to keep your company together, with little benefits, sacrificing your family life with no vacation, and if you leave for a week, it all falls apart? The first example is where many entrepreneurs start. The latter is where most entrepreneurs end up. So what are you going to do differently? Create a vision for your life. If it involves starting a company, build an asset. From day one, you need to think about how you are going to build your business. Yes, you need to do this while you are still figuring out what your business is and how it needs to operate. You need to slowly and interactively document how your company will do things and train your employees to follow the process.
Action Steps
So, you still want to start a company, or you are in the early stages of one, and you don’t want to build a dungeon. Here are my suggestions:
- Create job descriptions for every position in your company. Not one person, one position. If there are just 3 of you, you each may have 5 positions. This delegates and assigns responsibility and you get a great idea of everything that actually needs to get done.
- Document how important things get done. There are many little things and big things that happen in a company every day. I suggest doing this iteratively. Being proactive would be great, but I personally find that problems are more quickly solved reactively. Plug the holes as they come up. When you have focused on a problem, you can document the solution and hopefully prevent it from coming up again. Most quality standard systems have a continuous improvement process. It doesn’t need to be perfect the first time. Something beats nothing and done is better than perfect.
- Iterate and grow. These are living documents. Early on they will change often and you need to have ways of keeping everyone updated. Also, as you gain a broader vision for the overall system, you can begin to be proactive in your process documentation.
I fully suggest you find this book and read it, ideally, before you start your own company. I’ve found extreme value in it even 15 years into my Product Development and Design firm.
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Also I’d like to thank Jason Zook for the term ‘career dungeon’.