Management
The Entrepreneurial Seizure
In Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth — Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, he suggests that it’s a myth to even suggest that most businesses are started by entrepreneurs. Instead, he says, “?most businesses are started by a person suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure”.
Think about how true that is. The hairdresser who’s working in a salon gets fed up working for a boss and opens a hairdressing salon and, in doing so, she creates a worse job for herself.
Where in the past, she used to go home on a Friday and enjoy the weekend, now she’s doing the books, thinking about the new advertising campaign, paying wages, getting involved with employee issues, worrying about what her prices should be, and about the fact that a new salon just opened across the street.
This scenario doesn’t just relate to hairdressers.
Instead of creating a business that works independently of us, we’ve created a business that is us — one we can’t walk away from; one we have to go to each day; one where we heave a sigh of relief when someone finally buys it from us at a price
nothing like it could have been worth if we’d approached things a little differently.
By taking the time to think about what you hope to achieve from your business — by working ON it, as well as IN it — you can create a business that enhances your life and that of those around you, replacing stress and worry with order and success.
