When my husband and I travel, we spend a lot of time in bookstores. I'm always in the self-help or the business/marketing section. In September 2006, we were in Chicago, and I found The E-Myth Revisited on a table marked the "best" business books. What caught my attention was the headline: "Why Most Small Business...
Every great business has its verbal story: how it got started, where it’s going, what the culture is and who the key characters are. But while your words are important, your numbers are your validation. Without understanding what the numbers are telling you, you can’t ever quantify what your business is actually d...
As an EMyth entrepreneur, I find myself increasingly prepared to face the challenges of managing a law firm (and myself) through a recession and dramatic industry changes. Like all business owners, I have big dreams for my business.
Raphael Neff built his business out of pure passion for the product, which led to its early and consistent success. But after years of running an unsystematic business, Raphael knew there must be a better, less frustrating way. He partnered with an EMyth Coach and set out to systematize his business and change the...
I was beginning to grow my business and I knew to make it out 'alive' I was going to need a better grip on what we were doing and where this would all lead. The concerns that I remember voicing to my coach were that I was working too many hours and not really seeing any financial reward. I had no way of knowing wh...
I read an article in a remodeling industry magazine called “Letting Go.” It was about the process of developing a business that worked without you. I immediately felt like that’s what was missing from my business. I realized that I’d developed a business that was completely about me. I was central to every signifi...
Fred Wittenburg spent over three decades running a successful—yet disorganized—business. When he had the opportunity to pass that business down to his daughter, Fred knew he couldn’t do it without first creating a structure to ensure the business lasted as he envisioned it would. Working with their EMyth Coach, fa...
My father was a diplomat and as a young boy I always thought I wanted to be a diplomat like him. But my mom, who had a clothing and textile business (which she started in 1971) always pushed me to work with her. In 1985 she finally won out and during my last year in university I decided to join her in her business...
You know what a bad sales call feels like. The aimless small talk, the thinly disguised attempt at ‘relating’ to you, and the ever-present background anxiety of the sales person desperate to meet their monthly quota. All you wanted was a real conversation with a real person to help you make an informed decision. N...
I had been in the copy business for 18 years. My husband was in sales in the same industry for 10. I was looking for a new challenge, and we decided it was the right time to do this for ourselves. We named it after the place we enjoyed our honeymoon, and it has become much more than a name. Every year we take a fe...
I am a family physician in Old Saybrook, CT. After being in a group of four doctors for twenty-five years who had no desire or ability to deal with the business side of the practice, the practice dissolved. This required that we had to capitalize the dissolution with our families money. After 25 years of hard work...
Why you're frustrated and what to do about it Employee turnover. Customer complaints. Unplanned expenses. Competition everywhere you look. Pain in the neck vendors. An endless string of new technologies you’re supposed to learn how to use. Social #%?@! media. It’s enough to make you want to go get a job. This isn’...
You’re always looking for new ways to grow. But the trap most owners fall into is that they spend too much time figuring what they’re going to do, and not enough on what they’re not. It’s the ‘secret ingredient’ to our 6 step planning process—the simplest way we know to figure out where you want to go and what nee...
In 1995, I was 24 years old and I had the opportunity to buy a martial arts school from the Master I was originally training with. The school was a year old when I took it over, and at the time the monthly revenue was about the same as the rent so I quickly realized that I needed to institute some things that woul...
I've been working with a client who was struggling with self-organization and time-management. After our last meeting, he took it upon himself to create a weekly list and make note of all of the different projects, initiatives, conversations, and people that he was avoiding in his business that built up during the...
You need to get out there and be 'social' as the business owner, right? Getting active on Twitter, LinkedIn, to tell your story and be transparent–that's all the rage. And while it might be good advice, there are some crucial nuances that we rarely pause to think about in terms of what's actually in the best inter...
Working with people you have personal relationships with can be a wonderful thing. And it often doesn't turn out that way. It can easily get 'complicated' when you're trying to juggle two kinds of relationships with the same person. And while it's easy enough to say 'just be yourself', we all know that when it com...