I set aside the three (or so) books I’ve been reading consecutively after I spent a little time at Barnes & Noble evaluating another book. I’ve heard about it for years, even picked it up a couple of times, but never read more than the flaps and maybe a chapter introduction. But once I committed to looking closely and started reading, I was mesmerized. Two days later I was deflated and, well – forlorn.

The seemingly innocuous book is The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber. I first heard about this book a few years back. I was told it was groundbreaking, even revolutionary, for people who wanted to run their own business (this might even have been before it was “Revisited”). The problem is, the people telling me it was revolutionary misrepresented it.

They described it as a book that smashed the belief that people have to have an entrepreneurial nature to be successful at business. They told me it showed that most successful business owners aren’t really entrepreneurial. It doesn’t take special vision or a knack, they said, just good planning and management.

When I skimmed the book back then, I couldn’t make much sense of it. Turns out that’s because the people who were excitedly describing this book didn’t have a clear idea of its theme. The “myth” is easily misunderstood.

As he develops his ideas, Gerber proposes that people start businesses when they have a burst of entrepreneurial inspiration, but they quickly fall into an employee mindset. He doesn’t use that phrase, which I picked up from Barbara Winter. I prefer her way of explaining it. Because they think like employees, they get an idea to start a business and wind up building an overwhelming collection of jobs.

As the ideas in the book develop and solutions are offered, it seems that the myth is that entrepreneurial innovation makes businesses work while the truth is that mundane activities make businesses work. There is a section where the solution to business development difficulties is…. (drum roll)… to be like McDonald’s!

That’s when I became forlorn. To have a successful business, the books seems to say, I have to develop carefully crafted, routinized operations that can be taught to any willing person. Creativity and variation must be supplanted by regimentation. This is shockingly close to my view of hell, so I wanted to shred the book.

But that doesn’t actually capture the myth. To be successful developing a business, Gerber says a person has to balance entrepreneurial innovation with a mundane, orderly management mindset and the technical skill of the worker. Successful business developers are entrepreneurial, but they are not only entrepreneurs. Thank goodness I kept reading!

In fact the stages where the business is designed on paper, where each step is planned and then implemented and experimented to get it right, is a creative process. Once every detail is defined and specified, ongoing innovation is used to test better and better ways to provide a more satisfying experience to customers and more clearly express the business owner and developer’s underlying mission.

And there, finally, is the myth explained. The myth is the belief that most businesses are started by entrepreneurs who risk money in order to make a profit. The truth is most businesses are started by people with an entrepreneurial, innovative spirit who are trying to express something about their view of the world and how it can be. They just don’t know it! So they unconsciously try to put their signature on every aspect of the business by doing everything themselves because they don’t believe anyone else can do it their way. They burn themselves out.

The solution, it seems, is to make the unconscious expression into an intentional purpose, put the attention to detail in designing and planning how the purpose is expressed in each function of the business, and then share the vision with others and train them in the system.

Once the theme got back to self-expression and creativity, I was greatly relieved. I just never thought of the perfect crispiness of McDonald’s French fries as creative self-expression before!

Now I understand the myth and the solution. This process of business development makes perfect sense for someone who wants to create a business that other people will run. The developer expresses himself or herself through the system developed with such specificity and detail that his or her vision can be implemented by other people in a consistent way.

But I can’t get it to connect to the idea of solo entrepreneurs, those of us who are self-employed and work directly with our clients. When you personally work with clients you don’t really have a business you can sell. You have a practice, into which you can bring a partner or from which you can make referrals or to which you can add associates. But that is not something you can sell outright. It is something you may be able to transition slowly and carefully from one primary provider to another.

In coaching circles, new coaches are told often that we have to remember we have a coaching business, especially those of us who have had therapy practices. The distinction is meant to increase a focus on marketing and customer service. However, since I work with people who are self-employed and people who own small businesses, and with people considering becoming one of them, I have to make a finer distinction.

Coaching is a practice. Selling information products is a business. I can pour my vision into the details of operating a business that develops information products, finds products created by other people, offers them in carefully targeted marketing, and makes the experience of buying and receiving the products consistently pleasing to customers. And that is something I could sell, because it would be a system other people could run.

But a coach is the product. Once I have enough history to have dozens of former clients who have completed coaching and have a full schedule of ongoing clients, I can’t sell that to someone else. This helps me evaluate marketing and business development ideas and sort out what applies to a coaching practice and what doesn’t. I’ve been frustrated with some of the ideas because they just don’t fit, but I hadn’t understood why. Now I do. It’s just a little more light on the twisting road ahead.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey