Episode Details

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Every Small Firm Architect Should Read This Book

Fivecat Studio Architecture launched in 1999, and Mark discovered a book that changed the way he viewed business. It helped him realize that running a successful architecture firm required so much more than designing great architecture. Inside the owner of every small firm exists a battle among the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician. If we don’t attend to the needs of each one, our firms are destined for failure.

This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Every Small Firm Architect Should Read This Book.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber inspired Mark to build Fivecat Studio Architecture as a franchise prototype. Even though they knew selling their business systems as a franchise was never a goal, it was still important. Those systems have allowed them to thrive and have given them the tools needed to balance the requirements of the firm with the responsibilities of their family.

This book inspired Mark to work on his business rather than in his business. Since 1999, Mark and Annmarie have experienced the startup pains of infancy, the hard-earned successes of adolescence, and the launch of a new virtual business model.

Part 1

Michael E. Gerber defines the E-Myth as the entrepreneurial myth and discusses how small businesses are often the result of entrepreneurial seizures. What does that mean? “The technician suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure takes the work he loves to do and turns it into a job.”

Have YOU done that? How many architects do you know who have launched their own firms with the goal to do it better than the firms they worked for?

The three phases of business are infancy, adolescence and maturity. It’s important to build a mature company right from the beginning. “A mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view about building a business that works not because of you, but without you. Because it starts that way, it’s more likely to continue that way. Therein the true difference between an adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped.”

Part 2

Gerber introduces the concept of the franchise prototype and working on your business and not in it. He encourages the creation of systems, and the predictable results and happy clients that come from them. “The systems run the business, the people run the systems. The system integrates all the elements required to make a business work. It transforms a business into an organism, driven by integrity of all its parts, all working in concert toward a realized objecti