E-myth

All right, welcome to today's episode, I've been rereading the classic E Myth, the E Myth revisited.

First came out 986.

And then I believe the E Myth revisited kicked off around 1995.

And this is a work where the idea of the turnkey business first came in that, essentially He was talking about McDonald's and turning one business into 28,000.

Now, clearly, there's something that works, if you can take that same single restaurant and make it work across the board, 28,000 restaurants, whether you like the food or not, doesn't really matter.

What they do have is a guaranteed way of making businesses work.

And so He goes on, and He talks about the model, not necessarily the requirement for you to go and franchise your business, but rather, that the model of the franchise in forces the business owner to build a business that works without him.

Could it work with him? Sure, if you love your business, great, but do you want to be tied to your business and locked in your business until you like, Man, I hate this thing.

This thing sucks.

Where's that dream? And so I was thinking about this, I was thinking, Why doesn't it work? What is it about the growth of a typical business that creates the problems that many businesses experience, there's the startup part, and they like they get it working, and then they bring on team and then there's the plateau, potentially decline, there's certainly not the 10 million, the 20 million, the 50 million 100 million in revenue that comes because of what well, the people that are in the business don't work.

At least they don't work without the business owner.

And this is the real trick that I was thinking about.

It's like, as that business owner brings on another player into the team, then the problem is if they do not free themselves fully from the requirement for that worker to come in, ask them, if there's any dependency, even if it's only 20% of the time, they're required to come to the business owner, then that model will propagate and the next team member comes on, and you're going to see a one plus one doesn't equal to one plus one might equal two and a half, because there's one person with to 20%, the next person's 20%.

And then there's an interplay between those that might be 10%.

Now 50% of your business owners time being consumed by just two employees, add three, add four.

And the crazy thing is that it's possible to add way more employees.

And then the problems start, like you can force it for a while, but things either will break, or there will be significant risk that is not being managed.

And it's like, Ah, man, I hope everything goes well today, not really sure what's going on, not really sure what my team are doing.

I don't think they're asking me.

And they probably should be.

But man, I hope that it's all okay.

This is a stressful experience, particularly when you throw in a COVID like experience of the last 18 months and throw everything sideways.

Remember, it hasn't just being COVID It's been black lives matter.

It's been Afghanistan, it's been all sorts of Trump the election.

I mean, wow, that thing, just like these are all significant major events to disrupt a business that is not working well.

And so what's the lesson here? Well, the thought is how do you dis connect your team's requirement to ask you, and this is where McDonald's knocked it out of the park, the operations manual, the operations manual.

The interesting thing about a McDonald's is they're essentially all the same, the work is all the same, the operation manual, does not change.

Now, this is no longer true for most businesses.

If you're operating a business that is dealing on the internet at all, then you're going to be dealing with a set of instructions that changes so you must have a way of updating your instructions of making them actually come alive, that people use them and they edit them and they improve them.

There's so many advantages to setting up your business like this.

Number one, it frees up your employees from having to ask you.

Number two, you actually have an operations manual that works that people use and this is your real problem.

How do you get your team To use the damn instructions, if you need some help with that, and you're like, Man, I know that I need to systemize I know that we need processes, but how do you do it? Then you should talk to me.

Like straight up systems is hard.

Unless you know what you're doing.

If you know what you're doing suddenly it's like, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow, this is cool.

That's your opportunity.

If you want to do that, head over to systemio.dev.

Thanks so much for tuning in today.

I hope you got a lot of value out of it.

I certainly enjoyed making it for you and I look forward to our continued journey tomorrow into this exploration of how systems create results.

See you then.