298: Book Nook - Six Takeaways from The E Myth Revisited with Bjork Ostrom

Hey, folks. Bjork here. We are doing a new type of episode today. It's a solo episode, which isn't new, but what's new about it is the focus of the episode. We are calling it the Book Nook. You can imagine that we are huddled up in a corner of a coffee shop to talking about some of our favorite books. Credit to Alexa on the team for coming up with the name Book Nook. Ugh. It's always awesome when you nail the name. And Alexa did. The basic idea is, hey, we wanted to come up with a series that we could do to highlight some of the things that we talk about on the podcast occasionally. One of which that we talk about a lot is books. We talk about these books that have had a big impact on us. Why they've had a big impact on us. But we've never done a deep dive on some of those books. And it's a great excuse for me to pull up some of the books I've read in the past, maybe reread them, or to pull out some of the highlights from those and to pass them along to you. Because for some of us, we are just not book readers or we don't have time. As much as we would love to read books, we just don't have time for it. So I want to take a pause occasionally to do a deep dive into books. And we are calling it the Book Nook Series. So this first one that we're going to focus on is the E. Myth, and there's actually the official title is the E. Myth Revisited. It's an older book, but they've updated it by Michael Gerber. And it's one of the first business books that I read. And the basic premise of it is at a super high level. Like, if you were to boil it down, my dad's been making maple syrup. You start with this massive amount of syrup or SAP, and you boil it down and you have just a little bit that is the actual product. A lot of times business books are like that. But the basic premise of the E. Myth is you need to be working on your business as much as you're working in your business, or maybe even more than you're working in your business. But there's some key takeaways from that that I want to highlight. There's actually six of these that I'm going to go through. So the first one is, as an entrepreneur, you should be ready to wear a lot of different hats at the same time. And I think sometimes when people hear about the E Myth, they're like, oh, my gosh, I just need to work on my business only. But you're actually working on it. And in it, there's a balance. And there's three different areas that they talk about. In the E Myth, it's the technician, it's the manager, and it's the entrepreneur. And the technician is the one that's like, nitty gritty details, right? So if you are building a food and recipe blog, the technician is gonna be the person who's developing the recipes, or that part of you is the person developing the recipes, photographing it, maybe troubleshooting WordPress. There's the manager. The manager is what it sounds like. We're all familiar with that. It's the person who is kind of managing the day to day. Maybe you have a team or contractors or a bookkeeper that you work with. That's going to be the manager role. And then there's the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is looking out, it's thinking ahead. What are the things that are going to be coming down the line? And especially in the early stages, you're going to be mixing up all of those different skills into one big melting pot of you as the operator of the business. But what can happen a lot of times is you can get stuck deep down in just the technician or potentially just the manager. But for most of us, we're stuck in that technician role. We're just operating day by day, week by week, in a role where we are producing, we're creating, and we don't ever step back and look at the manager role. And that's the second takeaway. So the first takeaway is you need to wear many hats at one time, and you need to be comfortable with that, especially in the early stages. But the second piece is you need to figure out how to switch between those things. You can't get stuck in those. So if the first is ready to be ready to wear lots of hats, the second is think about working on your business and in your business at the same time. And when you first get started, there's a really good chance that you're going to be dreaming up your ideal vision of what your business is going to be and how it's going to work. But very quickly, we can get sucked into the nitty gritty details and you can kind of lose track of that vision. You can lose track of what it is that you're actually building. And. And so my advice or my recommendation for you would be to actually schedule that time in, because if you don't there's always going to be enough technician work to keep you busy. There's never going to be a day where you're going to completely catch up. It's kind of like working out, right? There's never going to be a day where there's not anything else to do but work out. You have to prioritize it in the same way you have to prioritize working on your business, not just working in your business. And my advice would be to schedule that. Take a couple hours, maybe it's a week, maybe it's an hour a day to build the systems and the processes of your business that can then support you as the technician so you can have other people start to come in and help with that. And that's actually the third element. It's building systems into your business, not relying just on individual people. So for a lot of us, we rely on ourselves. We are the technician. We are operating day to day and delivering the product. And if we stopped for a month, if we went on a vacation, if we had some other greater responsibility that we had to prioritize, everything else would stop, right? Blog posts wouldn't go out, social media wouldn't go out. We wouldn't be developing new recipes or shooting new photos. Everything would stop. And that's because we haven't prioritized building systems and we haven't stepped away from relying on individual people. So for a lot of us, that individual person is ourselves. But for some of you who have a team, maybe you're also relying on people who are really, really good. And they are. It's kind of the same scenario. If they stepped away, those things would stop. We're starting to learn that as a team, we're kind of in this season of having a lot of babies coming to the tinybit team, which is awesome. Our family included, but also other members of our, of our team, Jenna Aman, they are welcoming new babies into their family. And we're having to learn, okay, what does that look like? If somebody steps away for months at a time to backfill their position, we need to make sure that we actually have systems that people can understand. We can't just have Jenna understand sponsor content, and then if she leaves, then nobody knows how to do it. So she had to create systems for when she stepped away. And what we're learning is we should probably have those in all the different instances of our business. And what that allows you to do then is you can, this is point number four, allow anybody who steps into that, or I would say exceptional People in E Myth talks about ordinary people, but I would say exceptional people. You still want to work with exceptional people. You want to be an exceptional person. But you can allow those people to step in and do extraordinary things based on the incredible systems that you've created. So that would be kind of the fourth takeaway that I had from this book was you don't want. For myself, I want to be an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. Not because I'm an extraordinary person, but because I've created an extraordinary system, and it allows people to be excellent. It's not. It's not me. You're not having to go out and hire and find these, you know, world's most incredible, you know, photographer. It's. If you have a system for that, somebody can come in. They can be really good, they can be exceptional, but then if they follow that system, they can produce extraordinary results. As opposed to, let's say if you hired somebody, or maybe it was you doing this, you brought somebody in, you're like, hey, this just needs to be excellent. And I know you're excellent, so just go figure it out. That'd be one extreme. The other extreme is, hey, we know you're really good at photography. We know that you understand how to use the camera and how to do lighting. Here's the system that we use, the process that we use to get really good results. That is where you're gonna really excel as a business owner, because there's some element of that being a repeatable thing, and that's what we're trying to go for here. And that's really what the E Myth is about, is they use in the book the analogy of a pie shop. You can have somebody, and we know these people who are really good at baking pies, right? And you could hire that person and you could bring them into your pie shop, and they could create the most incredible pies. But what happens when they retire, or what happens when they decide that they want to go on a vacation for three months? Or what happens if they decide that they're just going to work in a different area, they don't want to bake anymore? If suddenly your product then becomes not as good, and people who are really excited to get the blueberry pie, they show up and the recipe is different, that's going to have a huge impact. There's a bakery in the hometown that Lindsey and I grew up in, and it recently has gone through multiple different owners. And I have a friend who's really particular about the bread pudding recipe, and he's like it changed. The bread pudding recipe changed. And I'm outraged. And that's because, I mean, there's maybe reasons. My guess is because there's something that happened that was a little bit of a change and there was a system or a process that maybe lived in somebody's head that didn't get passed down or that wasn't documented. So it's important that we think about creating extraordinary processes or systems, not by bringing in or thinking about how can we be extraordinary. That brings us to the fifth point, which is the business is really the product. You are not the product. And that's really hard in a world where we are thinking about being an influencer or we are thinking about building a following on our personal lifestyle content or telling stories and getting people engaged in who we are and what we're about. I think that stuff is still important. And I think there's a spectrum, right? You can be really personal in your brand, can be the one thing that you are all about. This podcast being an example, right? It would be a different podcast if somebody came on and they were talking about different things and they had kind of different frameworks in ways that they viewed the world. But that's also an issue for us, right? It has to be to, for the most part, me doing this podcast every week, and if I was gonna go away for three months, I'd have to build a big queue or we'd have to go and pull up old content and bring that back in. So there's a gap there for us. The same can be true for a certain extent for a site like Pinch of Yum. Right? It's still very much so driven by Lindsay as the main voice for that site. So there's a spectrum. We can also bring people in. We can create processes around that. Right. I talked about sponsored content. We have video process, we have a process for doing accounting and bookkeeping. So we can have that kind of backfill for those processes, but it's really not a repeatable process and it's not necessarily an instance where the business is the product. So Pinch of Yum Food Blogger Pro, we would be on, you know, if it's left to right spectrum, if left is more of like personality driven, we'd be more on kind of the left side of that where it's kind of personality driven and great. Like, that's awesome. We can connect with people and I think there's power and I think there's impact, and I think you can maybe make more traction in a shorter amount of time with that. But on the other side, it kind of restricts you in certain ways, right? So we've all felt that where we're like, oh, man, we gotta deliver that blog post, that podcast episode, it's on us to do it. There's not a system that somebody can step in and help out with. So that's the fifth point. The business is the product. In this book, at least, they talk about that as the important thing. The bakery example, again, if you are just an awesome technician when it comes to baking pies and you have the most incredible pie in the world, maybe you did the Minnesota State Fair and you won the blue ribbon for the best blueberry pie. People are going to come from all around to have your blueberry piece. But until you teach somebody else the ins and outs of how to make that an awesome pie, every single day, you are going to be the one making it. You're going to have to show up and you're going to have to create that pie. You are going to have to be the technician until you start to manage somebody. You build a team, you bring people in and say, here's how you do it. And as the entrepreneur, then as that work starts to get passed out to a team, as you start to build people around you, then you can start to think, hey, maybe I can create another pie shop. Where would I create that? What's some other things that we can do? You start. You can start to think as an entrepreneur. So that goes back to that, that first point. You need to wear many hats at the same time. Don't get stuck just as a technician. Also think about, how can you be a manager? How can you be an entrepreneur? And if you look at that, this is a lot of pie examples, but if you look at that as a pie chart, that's always going to be shifting and changing, right? There's going to be times where you're going to be heavy in the technician area, especially early on, probably then you might start to build in kind of some of the management stuff. But always make sure that you still have the entrepreneurial element there, because that's going to be the thing that's going to allow you to build and grow. Now, it's not to say that you shouldn't be a technician or you should stop doing that. As a matter of fact, some people love to be technicians and they want to stick to that for a really long period of time. Lindsay, to use the pinch of yum example again, is has kind of made that decision. She's like, I Love doing recipe development. I love writing, I love photography. That's the world that I want to stay in. I don't want to branch out and suddenly think about building a team who's doing recipe development. Me, like, managing that process. She wants to stay as the content creator. The director of content is essentially the title that she has at Pinch of Yum. It's like, that's what she wants to focus on. She doesn't want to do entrepreneurial things like thinking about, hey, is there a site that Pinch of Yum could acquire? And then, you know, merge that together. Her sweet spot, what she's really good at and where she wants to stay is developing recipes, testing recipes, photographing recipes, creating content. And that's awesome because she's really, really good at it. And that is a huge engine. It's like the engine for a Pinch of Yum. So it's not to say that you need to move away from that. Another example would be my dad. He does pottery. He's a. He. He creates these beautiful, incredible pots that he's learned to, you know, he's learned this craft over 40 years. And for him, it's like, bonkers to think about him thinking about, like, hey, how can I create a process around this and, like, bring people in who can then do it so we can sell more and scale more? And, like, if I were even to bring that up, he'd be like, what are you talking about? Right? He's an artist. That's what he does. And it's. There's maybe things he could do to, like, support himself around that area, but his craft is pottery, and that's what he wants to do. And that's true for a Pinch of Yam as well, but for this book, the E. Myth, right, It's a business building book. And so the focus of it is, hey, if you want to build, if you want to scale, here are the things that you need to think about and consider. You have to stop being the technician all the time. You have to stop being the manager all the time. You have to balance those things, and those are constantly going to be shifting. But the point here, to put a bow on it is all of that to service this idea of the business being the product. And if you are following kind of the advice or the guidance of the E Myth, you will approach your business as if the thing you are building is the product, not just the product that the business is selling. Now, what does that look like for a content business? Well, the product that we usually think about is a Blog post, it's social media, it's video, it's content. Right? We're doing essentially content marketing. That is usually what we think of as the product. How do we get more traffic to that? How do we get more sales? How do we increase ad revenue? What the E Myth would say is, actually, you gotta go one level up and look at your business as a whole as the product. So if you were gonna take your site to market, a great example. We talked about, you know, flipping blogs in the previous episode with Chelsea and just this idea that, you know, blogs and sites and websites can be sold. We've had a few of those conversations in the podcast over the year. You can years. That's a great example of fitting into this idea of the E Myth, where the thing you are building can be a product that other people look at and decide if they want to buy or not. And if you are only thinking of the product as a blog post or if you're only thinking of it as a social media post, if you want to follow the E Myth, you need to level up and think of your actual business as the product. And in order for a business to be a valuable product, it has to have some level of like, predictability, transferability, meaning somebody else could come in and take over, and scalability. So it has to be able to grow without you needing to be super actively managing it. So a recap of a few of those things before we hit this last one, which is a really important piece. Number one, you need to be ready to wear lots of different hats. And specifically in the category of entrepreneur, technician, and manager, related to that, you need to be able to kind of have this hybrid role. You have to work in your business and on your business at the same time. And for a lot of us, we get stuck in the business, but if we scale back and we look from a high level, we need to work on the business. What are the things that you can create a process around? Maybe once a day? You want to create a little simple process that's like, here's how I approach photography. Here's the photos that I need to take and to document that. We're going through that process of documenting processes right now with our business. And one of the things that we learned, we're using a system called eos. One of the things that we learned is like, you don't have to be super detailed with it, right? You're going to assume that the people that are going away, that are, that are, that are using this process are like, smart, capable, People. So you could have a couple bullet points. If it's your photography process, you could say, here are the five different shots I try and take and here's how I get those, right? So it's like listing out what those shots are and then listing out how you store those when you bring them into your computer, listing out how you name the files. But it doesn't have to be like screenshots and a video tutorial. It can be relatively simple. But that's an example of working on your business and in your business at the same time. And even if it's just you, if you go through the process of doing that, number one, it helps you refine what that is, makes it easier for you to follow. And number two, at a point when somebody does step in and start to help out with certain elements, whatever that might be, it's going to be a lot easier to get them up to speed when you can say, here's exactly what I do and here's how you go about doing it. So we're in the early stages of doing that, but realistically, you know, at any point you could do it. We're probably. We've documented things along the line. We use a tool called Process street to do that. But we're really starting to take it seriously now as we go through eos Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is part of it is the documentation and processing of how your business runs. And that is, number three, it's, you know, thinking about systems, not just individual people. So we talk about hiring, how important it is to build an awesome team, but that awesome team is going to be even more awesome if they have systems to run on, not just them creatively coming in and being like, here's how I'm going to figure out how to do this. And they might do a great job with it, but then if that person moves on, if their role changes, how does the next person step in and do a good job as well? And that also ties into the fourth point, which is create systems that allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things, right? And I would say instead of ordinary, you could have exceptional people doing extraordinary things. Because it's still important to think about how you bring in awesome, incredible people that you can work with, whether that be contractor agencies or individual team members. But if you have those systems, it's going to allow them to do extraordinary things. Number five, the business is the product, or it can be the product. It doesn't have to be. But if you're following the E myth, I would say that's an important consideration is to think about your business as the product. And number six, think about how you can play an active role in your life, in building your life, in crafting your life. One of the reasons why we build a business, why we create a site, is because we want to have autonomy in the world that we are creating. And this might also be true for you if you just want to find work that you really love and enjoy as well. So find work that allows you to have the autonomy to be the person that you want to be, to live the life that you want to be, as opposed to kind of completely getting sucked into or absorbed by or allowing the thing that you are doing to control you. And sometimes, you know, we can feed the beast, the content monster. We always need to be feeding that as content creators or business builders. And we can get stuck doing that for a really long time and it's hard to pull away from that. So as an entrepreneur, be thinking about how you can build your business, but also be thinking about how that fits within your life. Right? Our businesses are not our life, they're a component of them. And think about how you can craft them in a way that serves the thing that you are after. And for some of us, we love the idea of working really hard every day and maybe it's, you know, 12 hour days and you're hustling because that's what you want to do. But for others, we want to have time for our family. Right? Maybe you have parents who you are caring for and you want to build something that allows you to do that. It's an important consideration as we are thinking about how we are building a successful business, to think then about how that fits into our life. Right. To use the pie analogy again, this is going to be kind of pie inception. If we have our business, the business is a slice of pie on our greater life. And if that takes up our entire life, right. If the slice of pie is the whole pie and our business is our life, for most of us, that's going to be a failure of building a successful business. Not for all of us, but for most of us. So to be aware of that, it's not just about building a successful business, getting a bunch of whatever it is that you want, money, traffic, influence, recognition. But it's also about how do you build the thing that you are creating in a way that fits well within your life. So it's an incredible book. It's one that I've really enjoyed reading, that I've gone back to multiple times that you'll hear a lot of people talk about. One that I would recommend you checking out if you have the time to read, but hopefully if you don't. This little recap of some of my key takeaways from the book hopefully will allow you some actionable items or things to ponder as you are working on building your thing. These podcasts are always fun for us to do. I would love to hear hey, when it comes to the book Nook, what are the other things that you would be interested in hearing us talk about or the other books that you'd be interested in hearing us recap or review? We talk about a lot of different books and we'll pull lessons from those kind of passively as we're having conversations. But the book Nook allows us to do a little deeper dive on those, so we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out podcastoodbloggerpro.com and we will be back here same time, same place next week. We appreciate you and until then, our encouragement to you is to get a tiny bit better every day forever. So signing off. Bjork Ostrom, thanks for listening.