The E-Myth Revisited

Most people working in small software shops know of and read Joel Spolsky. Not only does he write about technical aspects, he also comments on the business of software and how to make a business out of software.

Fog Creek Software has a management training program with an interesting reading list. As someone who wants to contribute to moving our business to next level, I'm looking for any books and blogs that can help us. I was encouraged that I've already read about a quarter of the books on Joel's list.

A friend of my wife's had a copy of "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber. The "E" in E-Myth is "entrepreneurial," and the main theme is that most people who start a business are technicians, and not entrepreneurs, and you have to move and think in an entrepreneurial way.

The first thing to get out of the way is that this book is not very well written. It really could have used a better editor. Lots of Capitalized Nouns to imply Important Concepts.

And single-sentence paragraphs.

However, there are some thought-provoking ideas in here. The main one being that we have to separate working in the business and working on the business. Gerber's idea is to model your business on the big business that you see yourself becoming. Not modeling another big business, but modeling the business that you see yourself growing into. And one way to do that is to see your business as a template for a franchise -- as you prepare your system to show to the franchisees, you document and build the actual systems that will run your business, even if you are not personally doing the actual work.

As technicians, we're really good at doing the actual work. Writing code is not our problem. Being an entrepreneur means working on the business, dividing up job descriptions, figuring how other people can do some of the stuff that we're doing now. We're not at the point where we can expand now, but we need to think about how we will expand so that we can act quickly when that time comes. So it's good that books like "The E-Myth Revisited" are getting me thinking about what will have to be done.

However, the rest of the book has some ideas that I don't really see. Gerber demands documented systems at a level that I don't see for our business; dress codes, operations manuals, things like that. We are working well at wiki-fying our current project and that will work well for some of the operational aspects of the company, but I don't see how we tell coders how to write code according to an ops-manual. Gerber also says to hire the lowest-qualified person that can do the job, which seems to go against the current "hire Rock Stars" tech meme. I'm not sure that we should only hire rock stars (I am more into the build a rock band idea), but the "lowest qualified person" seems a risky.

But the book served it's purpose -- get me thinking about what I need to do and how to do it. Now back to Joel's list to get my next suggested reading material ...