Michael Gerber says most business owners run a job, not a business. The speaker tried making every employee document everything, which broke operations. The fix: document only 15-20 critical processes, the ones that repeat constantly or go wrong easily.
If you haven't had time to read The E-Myth, here's everything I learned from implementing it in my 8-figure business. Now, Gerber's argument is that most business owners aren't actually entrepreneurs. So they start a company and now they own a job and they own a job with a crappy boss because that boss is them. His fix is that you need to build the business like it's essentially going to be a franchise prototype. So document how everything runs so it can work without you. But when you implement it, don't do what I did. Okay? I read it while I was on vacation and when I returned back home from vacation, I was so excited that I called a company-wide all-hands meeting and I announced to everybody there's going to be no new hires. We're going to greenlight no new projects until everyone has documented every single thing that they do. Within a few weeks, my team was spending way more time documenting their work than doing it. It basically shut down the entire company for a month. But I persisted, by God, and eventually we had it. We had binders full of beautiful color-coded tab checklists and SOPs for basically everything that everyone did. Just one problem, nobody used them, not even once. In trying to document everything, we basically made it impossible to find the checklists and SOPs that people actually needed. So don't do what I did. Instead, just document the 15 to 20 things that are highly repetitive, meaning it happens daily or at least weekly, maybe monthly. Number 2, high stakes, meaning you can't afford to screw it up, it really matters. And 3, high chance for human error, meaning it's easy to screw up. Document those and just trust your people. Trust smart people with everything else.
