Work on your business not in your business

[Abdul Wahid Tanner]

That is the main theme from a book that I just finished reading called the E-Myth Revisited. I sure wish I had read the original book 10 years ago when I started my first business. At that time, I was doing mostly software consulting which meant that I would travel to my client's office and do programming. When I closed the business a few years later, there was nothing left because I was the business. Sure, I had some computers and a library of books that I brought with me but that was about all. I thought then that I was running my business but after reading this book, I realize now that I was just working in my business.

Now, I am changing my plans to create a big business that will start small but will grow fast to a big business as long as I remain focused on doing the work that an entrepreneur needs to do on the business instead of getting caught up in the job of working in the business.

Have any of you got so caught up with the work that you failed to devote the proper balance of time to grow the business too? To grow your business so that it no longer needed your personal time and constant attention to succeed? An interesting point about this is that I realized that this was my biggest mistake but until I read this book did not know what to really do about it. I had been blaming it on just a consequence of doing consulting.

What I learned is that I need to treat my business itself as the product that I am working on. I need to create a vision of what my business will look like when it is done and work towards getting it there. I need to avoid getting so engrossed with the commodity that my business will sell and plan properly to train others to do this work by following a system that I will work on documenting and specifying.

What other experiences have you had that are similar to this way of approaching the role of an entrepreneur?

[Jason Held]

We had the opposite problem when we started: spent time building the "entreprenuership", i.e., making contacts, solidifying the vision, writing proposals to seeking funding, etc. At the end of the day we reached a certain threshold, where the marketing started paying off and the ball started rolling, and people who had funding asked the question, "so....do you have a prototype?"

So what we learned is that, by definition, "building the business" in a technical company, especially the high-barrier-to-entry types like space engineering ventures, involves both marketing and IP development. I think that the lessons you learned are correct though-- spending all your time solo subcontracting will pay the bills but won't have the same growth. Note-- not the same growth does not equal *no* growth, as you have built a resume of customers for your company.

I've seen some people do one month on, one month off....the "off" month was building their own IP and the "on" month paying the bills via subcontracting.

[Abdul Wahid Tanner]

Regardless of what your business does, the main lesson that I learned from this book is the need for the entrepreneur to focus on creating the systems. If the work being done is writing a proposal, then the entrepreneur should create a template so that another person could do the same thing later. This may mean that the entrepreneur needs to write the first few proposals personally in order to figure out what should be in the template but the main point is to not get distracted by doing the work and forget to create the system so that another person can then do the same thing. The same rule applies to creating a prototype; don't just create a prototype, try to do it in such a way that somebody else could take over.

When you look at it this way, there should be no need for on or off months because it should not matter what the actual work is. The real work of building the business is in creating the vision and documenting it for how the company will operate. Part of that process should also be the means to evaluate and make improvements to the process.

[Ashique Atul Desai]

I think you are right about building the systems and procedures. Without these a business can never scale up.
But if you are talking about a start up at an early stage or a set-up stage, then I don't think that building systems or organization charts should be a priority. Building a paying customer base is what you need.
At this stage one must rather focus on evaluating the viability of your idea or business model by actually trying it on real customers.
Getting this feedback and making the changes or improvements in the product or the business model will be the most crucial factor in determining the success of a start-up. And it is especially important at this stage to keep the fixed cost as low as possible because you still don't have a steady stream of paying customers!

So what I suggest is you rather go easy on building the organization, at least initially till you explore a viable business model.