13/04/2022
What do we do now as our business works without us?
I have written this short story in homage to Michael Ge**er of The E-Myth Revisited who used a story in his book of the same name written in the 1980s to help small business owners understand the context and effect of them having an entrepreneurial seizure. As the majority in his opinion and mine are technicians as a result.
It has taken me since then to discover the E-Fix for the majority of business owners as you will hopefully gather from this story and the following summary. Something and with the greatest respect I don’t believe Michael Ge**er did or anybody else has achieved. Given the stubbornly low number of small businesses that still only make it to their tenth year of trading!
A few years ago I was referred to a great couple who had started their business with a loan from an organisation who insisted they needed my earliest MVP (minimal viable product) of my E-Fix coaching methodology.
The wife was particularly frosty towards me as she was the technician who had left a successful corporate job to create the more perfect one. It was her ex-military husband who had joined her to help her make it a bit more like a business or regiment as it emerged!
Suffice to say I gained a bit more rapport with him as his wife concluded how could I know anything about what they did as well as She did. Given that I did not have any direct experience in their sector.
Anyway, I continued to visit them on a monthly basis as contracted. At each monthly session, I delivered another one of the twelve coaching platforms (now 4 steps) and we then had a session on where they were and going next. Obviously, these platforms introduced the first principles of HOW TO THINK that would help them make the key strategic decisions for themselves.
By about the sixth month they were now employing quite a few people and working incredibly hard to build the business. Also most worryingly their relationship had become a bit tested. The wife was desperately trying to create the perfect job, but her husband was trying to control that and lead it by numbers too much, in her opinion. One of my earliest coaching platforms was called ‘leading by numbers’ at the time and he had leaped at it and was measuring everything in terms of profit and cash flow. As I inferred, he was almost managing the business like an army unit!
So fortunately at this time in the 12-month coaching process, I delivered a Coaching Platform called ‘working downhill’ which was an early but obviously effective way of empowering them to think about the ‘place’ they were trying to establish a business in. I also had to backtrack a bit and coach the husband to make sure he took everybody with him in his leading by numbers surge!
Yet again by the time I returned the next month the ‘penny’ had totally dropped and they explained with some glee how they had DECIDED they were moving roughly 60 miles up the road to a bigger and more affluent town. Not only that, they had identified a great gap in the premium end of the market one that they could easily fill. This is a classic great mindset coaching outcome as I’m pretty sure if I had advised (challenged) them to move then they would have not, but by coaching them HOW TO THINK they went on to learn WHAT they needed to think to make the decision to change the place they were in business.
The next platform at the time was titled “Flipping burgers and fries” which introduced HOW Ray Kroch of MacDonald’s fame THOUGHT to take the original brothers' methods of producing a unique meal and systemising it so well that it created the core of the global business it is today. This of course led them to learn WHAT they needed to think about to create their own unique, simple, and fully repeatable service product.
So within 3 months this move (pivot) was complete and very quickly proved the tipping point in terms of revenue and gross profit creation. It was just like ‘working downhill’ and not up to where they had just started. As you see I believe the majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners just start where they are and then struggle for years stuck in the wrong ‘place’ or trying to sell even the wrong product! Not knowing how to think to decide whether to move, to a better place/position, and most crucially how.
Without the pressure of searching for sales something so many businesses continually suffer from and now making a real profit, I finally had gained sufficient rapport with the Wife to start introducing HOW TO THINK to create the perfect business model that firstly delights the customer consistently but of course, makes a profit. The “making a profit” was a very interesting point of belief I also discovered was causing a block for her as well. The primary reason for starting the business was to make an impact, which given her corporate experience was totally unrelated to making a profit. She felt they could make the same sort of living without fleecing the customer to make a profit. Once I explained that profits should be reinvested in a private business to make it even better at what it did, I finally saw her eyes light up in our sessions!
As the business model (the right way) was discovered and established I delivered my then last coaching platform ‘mind the middle’. It gives the basis of HOW TO THINK from the key topic of "competitive advantage" to make sure you grow or scale to the right size to maintain your competitiveness. As it means the business can support somebody operating in an active leadership role. Too many Founders and business owners don’t think that when you are more than one you are exposed to and thereby under threat, hence they stay stuck in the middle ground of not being small enough to react quickly or bigger enough to react and innovate consistently. That is until you grow or scale to the right number and with the right type of people. This coaching platform worked well again and they quickly decided not to recruit apprentices or less able staff as the majority do and went for a very able management team first. Then they ‘back filled’ the recruitment of the team eventually hiring apprentices, which is the right way to do it.
I finished the 12 months and they kindly agreed to ‘keep me on’ on a rather ad-hoc basis. It was about six months later when I received a telephone call from the Husband, which went a bit like this,
“We’ve arrived!!” You mean you are just back from your first serious family holiday in years, was my response.
No, we have been away for nearly 4 weeks and in that time we have had no urgent calls from the business, in fact, it's been operating better without us, so we are finally working on it!
Then came this question: ``But what do we do next?”
Well of course they both needed to start leading the business as opposed to working in or managing it! So I arranged a full-on session with them both. The outcome was that they then both realised that they had different tasks to fulfill. They needed between them to be ‘out there’ observing the new trends and opportunities. Thereby making sure the business was in the right place, serving the right customers with the right services and in the right way If not they were able to change things quickly. So they joined various trade bodies and traveled to see other similar businesses operating in other parts of the world. They engaged and observed on a regular basis with their customers and non-customers not to sell them anything but discover what they were not getting from the market that they could innovate on. They worked hard on their behaviours and thinking to become even better entrepreneurial leaders. They occasionally enjoyed working in the business, but they certainly enjoyed supporting and coaching their excellent management team and staff. Then applying the governance when occasionally needed!
Finally, they discussed with their team and captured a very meaningful vision and thereby mission for the business. One they are still leading (from behind most of the time) very successfully today. Which is giving them a great deal of emotional and financial rewards. Oh and boy it is still making a great impact on the world (well their small part of it)!
Now I need to make clear that this story like many of mine is based on an actual case, but slightly altered for confidential reasons and to be honest, is embellished slightly to highlight the type of thinking I’m now coaching folks to have to be more effective at leading their businesses. Because what I have discovered is that the majority of you are great managers and as a result absolutely what you do is done right. However, leadership is not management and is entirely about making sure you and your business are doing the right things in the first place.
There are four things you as the leader need to make sure your business is right about all the time! So obviously as in the story, they are:
Being in the right place doing your business and at the right time.
Attracting and serving the right customers in that place.
With the right products and services that they need and want
Finally, do that in the right way so you have a viable and consistent business model.
Now because the majority of you have been taught or gathered by experience how to think to be a great manager, you currently do not think like a leader of a business. Even if you have been taught or tried to learn what you need to think to do so. If you want more convincing of this fact then I would simply encourage you to certainly consider if not research how lacking the evidence of great leadership is in many other settings of our lives, I would even be so bold as to suggest it is even lacking in Politics. Therefore please do not take this comment as a criticism directed at you personally, it is hardly surprising that the majority of business owners don’t know how to think like leaders when even the principal qualification in this country for business is based on Leadership & Management being treated as one and the same thing, when they are clearly not!
Hence why my E-Fix to the E-Myth problem is focused on firstly coaching you on HOW to think like an entrepreneurial leader. There are so many ways and other offers to enable you to learn what to think to lead your business but nothing that I know of that focuses just on the HOW. If there were more leaders out there in life and business then it would not be necessary for me to start with the HOW you think as most of the time you could experience it and then emulate it from your peers and others, but there is not.
Now if you really want to be in the position the great couple in the story is now in your business then the first step in that direction is for you to potentially take my Entrepreneurial leadership assessment. A process that coaches you to conclude whether you do or do not think well enough to lead your business so you can lead it from behind. An outcome that is far more meaningful and believable than me telling how you think.
I do this virtually and very quickly for free, there is no catch. I can assure you I’m absolutely on a mission to make a sizable dent in that dreadfully low number of businesses that survive for 10 years.
So I’m hoping you would join me
