E-Myth Author Gerber Sounds Wake-Up Call For VAR, MSP Owners

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

In addition to being recognized worldwide as a small business guru, Michael Gerber is known for his straight talk. And he’s eager for solution provider owners to be candid with themselves and embrace their reality as well.

In a recent interview with Business Solutions President Jim Roddy, Gerber said, “Until the straight talk happens, until somebody pulls the chain, until somebody says something that strikes (VARs and MSPs) so deeply that they can't avoid it or ignore it any longer, nothing's going to change for them.

“It's not going to get any better; it's going to stay the same and get worse. Because it gets worse as they get older, and they haven't the energy that's needed to make the shift that's got to happen, and the shift is not in his business. It's not a new business system; it's not a new tool that you can give them. It's not a new something that he can take on that's going to make the difference. It's got to be a complete shift in his mind.”

To understand where Gerber says solution providers need to shift their minds to, click below to access audio of the interview and scroll down to read the edited transcript.

Gerber is author of the bestseller The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, and 23 other books on the subject of small business and entrepreneurship. He has formed an educational partnership with Business Solutions designed to benefit the entire channel. Gerber has co-produced with Business Solutions a series of free webinars, articles, and podcasts for VAR, MSP, and ISV executives.

Roddy: Hello and welcome to this Business Solutions podcast. I'm Jim Roddy, the president of Business Solutions. Thank you so much for joining us today. As always, we are here to provide actionable information on how VARs, MSPs, and ISVs can sell more products, penetrate thriving vertical markets, and improve their business operations.

Our guest today is the author of the business bestseller The E-Myth Revisited and other books on the topic of small business and entrepreneurship. Inc. Magazine calls him the world’s number one small business guru, and he's impacted the lives of millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide for over 40 years through his thought leadership.

This year he's formed an educational partnership with Business Solutions designed to benefit VAR, MSP, and ISV executives. It gives me great pleasure to welcome back again Michael Gerber. Michael, how are you?

Gerber: It’s a delight, Jim. Wonderful to be here.

Roddy: Always a pleasure to talk with you. So Michael, I was attending a conference last week and there were a lot of small managed services providers and VARs at this event and, boy, the folks who I talked to – a lot of them were struggling and have been struggling for 15 years to get anything beyond, maybe them and their son, or them and one other person, but the folks who were up on stage, the managed services providers, focused in a vertical, became specialists, they really learned the business.

They outsourced a lot of the marketing activities. They had a vision for where they wanted to go and have a real business as opposed to just struggling to make ends meet and hoping that somebody picks up the phone and calls them because they're having a technology problem.

I guess if we can start there and you can give me your take on the difference between the folks who are in the seats, most of them, and the folks who are up on stage and a real business that you want to emulate.

Gerber: This has been a conversation we've been having for quite some time. The understanding of what is it that differentiates those small handful of guys, women, in your audience who grow exponentially and become the leaders in the industry, and everybody else? And the everybody else, really, is spoken to quite eloquently and tragically when you look at the stats about business in this country. But of course, it's not just business in this country, it's business in every country, but let's just look at business in this country.

70%, at least, of all businesses in this country called “businesses” are actually sole proprietors. They're the guys who were in the audience that you just described. And, what's also true about that, in the latest statistics, and this comes from 2011, of the number of businesses in this country, new businesses in this country, fully 80% of them will fail in their first two years.

The statistics from the Small Business Administration keep on saying that in fact it's getting worse; it isn't getting better. So if there are roughly 400,000-500,000 startups in this country every year, and there are, that in fact, there are more companies who die that year than are born that year. Now what in the world is it that populates the folks that you were speaking to? In Milwaukee did you say?

Roddy: Correct.

Gerber: Yeah. And, in fact, in Santa Ana or, in fact, in Schenectady – wherever you go, Jim, I mean this is the preponderance of the folks I would suggest in your audience. The people you speak to every week, every day, every whatever, and so forth, and have been speaking to. What is it that is so impossible for them to see? As you've said, they've been “in business,” in quotes, for 15 years and yet nothing has changed.

It's Jerry and his son or Jerry and his virtual assistant or Jerry and himself doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it and facing the same problems in the same way to produce the same results, and the only thing that's true is that they are getting older. So now it's Jerry 15 years older doing it, doing it, doing it, busy, busy, busy, busy.

How do you wake Jerry up to tell him that all he has to do to get evidence of the fact that he's been doing it all wrong is to look at his life's experience? Are you willing to do this, Jerry, until you simply drop? Are you willing to do this until you simply just come face-to-face with the reality you can't do it anymore, you don't have the energy to do it anymore and, in fact, you're not building any equity in your company because your company isn't a business – you got a job, you're self-employed? What does it take to wake them up?

So you know, in The Course, and we've been talking about The Course off and on, and I'm sure the guys in your audience who have received an invitation from me to join us in The Course, I know that, in fact, the vast majority of them are saying, “Ah, just something to buy, something to buy, something to buy. Another $295 that's going to just go down the drain, it's not going to give me what I need. What do I need? Well I need this to work better than it does.”

But, in fact, they don't even understand what it is. They really think they've got a business and, in fact, they don't. And that's the first critical thing that has to happen with your audience. It's not getting guys up there who've been successful because the guys who have been successful have a completely different internal clock than the guys who are just doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. In short, they're talking about the wrong things, Jim.

They're talking about how they've been successful. And the guy in the audience is sitting listening to that and obviously, internally, he's saying to himself, “Yeah but not me. Yeah but not me. Yeah but not me.” In short, the guy in the audience is terrified to grow because he knows something the guy on the stage doesn't know.

And that is, the guy in the chair, the guy in the audience is terrified of what he doesn't know how to do and is constantly, constantly, constantly depending upon what he does know how to do and thinking that all he's got to do is do more of it.

And when the economy changes, and when the market changes and when, and on and on and on, all the things outside of him, which are the, made his problem all that more apparent, change, then his life is going to change. Ain’t gonna happen.

So the very most important thing that can happen with your audience is to hear the process. To go from a job to a practice to a business to an enterprise because the vast majority of them don't own a business, they've got a job. And it's the worst job in the world because they're working for a lunatic. So then the question becomes, how do you get their attention? How do you get their attention?

How do you get straight talk to happen? Because until the straight talk happens, until somebody pulls the chain, until somebody says something that strikes them so deeply that they can't avoid it or ignore it any longer, that nothing's going to change for them. Absolutely nothing is going to change. It's not going to get any better; it's going to stay the same and get worse.

Because it gets worse as they get older, and they haven't the energy that's needed to make the shift that's got to happen, and the shift is not in his business. It's not a new business system; it's not a new tool that you can give them. It's not a new something that he can take on that's going to make the difference.

It's got to be a complete shift in his mind. And that's the only thing that we've been doing for the past 40 years: changing people's minds. And until that can happen in Jerry, in Judy, in John, and whomever and whatever, until that can happen, nothing's going to change. You understand?

With everything that's available to help him make the change, nothing's going to change until he makes up his mind that he's got to change. It's not about his “business,” it's not about the software, it's not about the consumer, it's not about better marketing, selling. It's not about any of the things that everybody talks to him about. It's about his mind. He's got to change his mind. His mind has got to be shifted into a completely new paradigm.

And then what he's got to understand is that anybody can do that. You understand? The only reason he's not doing that is because he's shut down as firm as a stone, shut down tight, locked in tight to “yes but, yes but, yes but, yes but.” He's got all the reasons in the world for not changing his mind. So that's the first thing that has to happen – he's got to change his mind. He's got to say, “Okay, you're right. We've got to do it differently. How do I do that?”

Well, I've spelled it out in The Course. This is exactly what needs to be done. You need to start at the very beginning. You need to start with a blank piece of paper and beginner's mind. You need to start not thinking about the job you've got; you got to start thinking about who, in fact, you are, and what, in fact, you wish to do, what is really calling you to do other than going to work every day to make a living. So that's always the first conversation. So what would you like to say about that, Jim?

Roddy: I've been nodding my head. I know you can't see me, but I've been nodding my head. Somebody who I bumped into at the reception there is a managed services provider who we actually wrote a story on because he almost lost his business until he shifted to the managed services recurring revenue business model. So he saved his business.

But I bumped into what was new with his organization, and he was talking about just what you were saying in terms of, “Yes, I've got my business, but I'm working in the evenings almost every single night. I've got weekends – I've got something going on that the business pops up.”

You used a phrase like “blow up the business and start over.” He was essentially saying that in terms of, “I have to go back to in terms of what do I really want out of this job, and I think I'm going to find out that a lot of my customers, who are just pain-in-the-neck customers, I'm going to be way better off without them and really focusing on something that's going to be fulfilling for me and can really develop me into a real organization, like that's kind of my next phase.”

So it was one of those things of, “Hey, how are you doing? What are you up to?,” and 17 minutes later he's like, “Oh, I should probably ask how you're doing, and maybe I went into too much detail.” But I was thrilled to get the information from him because it ties into what you and I have been talking about, and exactly what he said. Now that his mind is changed, he has a fighting chance of doing something differently and building a business beyond just himself or just beyond his small universe.

Gerber: Did you, did you happen to ask him if he bought The Course?

Roddy: I did not ask him, but I have a note here to make sure, because I know he's on our email list. But I'll make sure I send him a personal note and send him a copy of The Course and some of the things that you and I have been talking about.

Gerber: You see, what happens in this, and this is a very, very ticklish moment. He comes to that place where he just says, “This just isn't working anymore; I just got to stop this.”

He's thinking about all the customers who are a pain in the butt, and all the guys he wastes his time and energy with, and he spends all that time thinking about them, when in fact he should be thinking about himself. And, in reality, that moment is a rich and vital moment, but invariably what happens is they go off track, and they go off track with this idea that I've got to find out what I want. Do you understand it's all about me? It's all about me. I've got to find out what I want.

That's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying when I talk about the dream, the vision, the purpose, and the mission, which is really the first step that one needs to go through when that decision has been made – I'm not doing it, I don't like what I'm doing, I don't enjoy what I'm doing, I don't get pleasure from what I'm doing, I don't even believe in the meaning of what I'm doing, I couldn't even articulate why I'm doing what I'm doing, other than to make a living. So what typically people do then is they look for another “job.”

So understand what they do, the person who they are does exactly one would think one would do. They're dissatisfied with their current job – he's a VAR. And they begin to look for a different job, and they get all hot about getting a different job as though the different job is going to have something, possess something that his current job doesn't. That's not what I'm talking about.

Roddy: Right.

Gerber: In fact, that's just more of the same. It's called a different dress, but it's exactly the same.

Roddy: Right. It's just a different perspective on misery.

Gerber: Exactly. So nothing's really shifted other than this belief that this lousy job, this lousy job, I've got to get another job, a better job, and all the energy says now that I've got a better job, now I'm moving to Minneapolis, now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that, and I've just changed my life. We haven't changed anything.

So what I'm saying – a blank piece of paper, a beginner's mind. I'm saying you've got to start anew, not with the guy who you know already, not Jerry, not the guy you know already, but you've got to start anew, and you start anew with a blank piece of paper – completely blank – and you begin the process to discover what's important in the world.

What's missing in this picture? And it's not about what I want to do, it's about what they need done. So it's really beginning to create a completely new relationship with yourself and with the world.

And so I like to say I have a dream, I have a vision, I have a purpose, I have a mission. My dream is to transform the state of small business worldwide. My vision is to invent the McDonald's of small business consulting. My purpose is to make my clients as successful as every one of Ray Kroc's franchisees are.

And my mission is to invent the system through which I can do that, a scalable system through which I can do that, so I can grow it exponentially beyond myself, not by myself, not for myself, but for this market of individuals – these business owners, let's say – who are in need of something I'm not currently giving them. And so how do I do that?

I have to begin by asking what does that look like? What is that most important thing? What form will my company take? What am I going to deliver for my customer that, in fact, they so absolutely desperately need, but they don’t know they need it? And how am I going to turnkey my system for doing that, my business operating system for doing that?

Then I provide the path through which anybody can in fact produce that result. So it’s clarity that’s missing in all of these conditions. They’re so caught up in habits, they’re so identified with being a VAR, they’re so identified with the product, the product, the product; so identified with doing it, doing it, doing it, they haven’t any room to see the possibility there’s something extremely and uniquely different.

Roddy: There was somebody on stage and I ended up talking to them, and I ended up writing an article on them, where they had the vision – I think it was all the way back in 2003, he talked about – where he transformed his business, where he decided to serve the dental vertical.

He wanted to be that expert in the dental vertical and now he has all sorts of packages and systems put together for dental offices. He’s offered a solution and he’s very, very much an expert and very much helping those folks, and it’s incredibly fulfilling to him.

Is that, to some degree, some of the vision that somebody has to start off with in terms of that’s where I want to be long-term? I know that doesn’t answer the whole picture of what it does, but that’s almost like somebody can envision to be that as opposed to, “I’ll take whatever business comes in the door, and whatever I can scrape and scramble together.” It seems like that presents more of a vision and a higher purpose for a market than “I’ll just take whatever I can get.”



Gerber: Absolutely, and if we were talking about that market, the dentist, if we were to talk to him about so what is it that they find constantly problematic, why is it that dentists struggle, why is it etc., he would have and begin to create a whole subset of answers, a point of view about that.

That point of view ends up being his position in the universe of providers of practice management systems to dentists, because ultimately, he’s also going to be in competition with everybody else in that marketplace.

So the company he’s about to invent has to own its own space, and it’s not him, it’s not him being the expert. It’s it being the expert. It’s the story about how he came to realize that he could make a unique contribution to the entire field of dentistry, wherever it’s being practiced, by enabling dentists to understand how to be entrepreneurial, let’s say, or better leaders in their companies as opposed to simply better dentists.

To do that, the dentist has to take on a significantly broader, more strategic view to liberate themselves from doing it, doing it, doing it as a dentist – to free them to become a leader in their community with the systems in place within their practice, their business and their emerging enterprise. Your exemplar, your friend, the gentleman you’re speaking about, had to go through that entire process.

So going through that entire process is rich and always frustrating, challenging, but deeply rewarding process that everybody’s got to go through. You’ve got to choose who you’re going to become – not you, but it. And the distinction is absolutely critical, Jim. It’s not who I’m going to become, it’s what it’s going to become. It, the creation of my imagination that’s in service to a very specific human being, whose focus I’m focused on, whose success I’m focused on.

In my vertical books, The E-Myth Dentist, for example, I’m the generalist, the coauthor is the specialist, but we’re both speaking to the same audience about the general rules of play and the specific way to implement those general rules. Without the general rules, the specific rules are meaningless.

Without being a grand generalist about the condition of people, economically, in the work that they do, in the companies that they create, without being a generalist with a perspective, with a point of view, with a philosophy at the heart of what I’m about to do, I’m simply creating stuff to deal with the tactical necessities that exist inside of my customer’s company.

To do that is to miss the big thing. To do that is to miss the great joy that comes from truly awakening the creator, the entrepreneur within your guys. Every single one of them have to hear this, Jim.

They’ve got to hear this and hear this and hear this and hear this, and to understand if they’re not doing this in the way it’s been exploitated clearly to do this, all they’re doing is resisting, resisting, resisting, resisting what’s so transparently obvious as I say it to you. That nobody could sit there and say, “Well, Gerber’s just smoking dope.” They couldn’t do it, it’s impossible.

Because what I’m saying, in fact, is exactly the reason why Inc. calls me the number one small business guru. Not because I’m so smart, but because I have communicated a message that is so absolutely core to growth, to a philosophy of growth, to a philosophy of meaning inside of a company. What’s the meaning of what I’m doing, what’s the meaning of what I’m doing? Why is it so important that I do what I’m doing? It’s because if I can contribute something to the lives of people, then what I’ve done has made sense.

Roddy: Yes, and I like how you said that this message is core to growth. One that’s really kind of crystallized in my mind over the past six or nine months is a lot of times people are waiting for, “Hey! Somebody, come tap me on the shoulder and give me guidance!”

It’s a personal journey that you have to go on and you can obviously get guidance and assistance along the way, and that’s part of what you offer with The Course in The Dreaming Room, but folks need to take that initiative and keep figuring it out, because if you’re not going to be curious, if you’re not looking to get better, if you’re not looking to serve more than just like you said fixing a few things and solving a few problems, you’re not going to grow. You’re going to be stagnated, and that’s a real shame. Somebody shouldn’t go through life with minimal growth. They should be looking to accelerate their own personal growth and to accelerate the growth of others.

So I don’t know if maybe it’s you, your voice burning it into my brain, or if it’s just something else, but folks really need to go out and seize that on their own. But too many people wait and think personal development is somebody else's responsibility for them.

Gerber: A great message for you to send out to all of your folks is “it's not about income, it's about equity.” It's not about income, it's about equity. Ninety-nine percent of the guys in your audience are all about income. It's about income, it's about income , it's about income, it's about what I made, what I made, what I made. But you understand if in fact it's all about income and it's not about equity, there's no end to this game.

There's no fulfillment date at the end of this life-cycle. In short, the gentleman who you spoke about whose working to develop a company that serves the dental marketplace is building a methodology – call it his software. His software's his leadership software, his management software, his marketing software, his lead generation software, his lead conversion software, his client-fulfillment software. That whole nest egg, the software, which is his core operating system, which effectively is building value, increasing in value, every single month, every single year to the point where someone is going to acquire that enterprise.

So this guy is working every day but understand that he's building equity every day, and the vast majority of (VARs) aren't building anything because there's nothing they can sell. They don't own their customers; they can't sell their customers. So they’re not building equity, and it's because they’re not thinking equity.

Let me read something to you. It's an email I sent out to my Dreaming Room Monologue subscribers. After a year that I've been doing this, we now have some 6,000 subscribers to the monologues. It says:

Dear Ianela, The question often comes why do I spend so much time writing and sending my Dreaming Room Monologues to you guys? It's a great question. The answer is simple. I have a dream. My dream is to transform the state of small business world-wide. I've been committed to it since I first said it in 1977 upon founding my first business development firm, The Michael Thomas Corporation.

Understand the dream wasn't a “mission statement” in quotes. It wasn't simply a corny way of motivating the small business owners I cold-called on every day. It wasn't a pitch. It was the why of it. The why of what we set out to do back then, to invent the McDonald's of small business consulting.

We were on fire with it, so bringing us up to date, Ianela, my Dreaming Room Monologues are what I call “The Poetry Of Commerce,” because without poetry, without music, without songs, without art and passion and lyrics and imagination, without ideas to me and to the millions of small business owners I've shared myself with over the past 40 years in my books and in my work, the entire idea of business is dead.

So here's to life, Ianela, I trust you’re enjoying my monologues.

So Ianela just wrote me back, and she said:

Thank you Michael. You’re the reason why I keep pushing myself every single day after I've almost given up. “Keeping the curtain up” truly became my mantra. Thanks for helping make sense out of all of this. Ianela

So “keeping the curtain up” is simply part of a story in The E-Myth Revisited I talk about in an E-Myth mastery. But my point being the heart of it, at the heart of it, at the heart of it, there's something significantly more than just doing, doing it, doing it, doing it, because just doing it, doing it doing it is brain dead.

Do you understand why it's so frustrating? It's brain-dead, it's a habit, it's stupid, and it's stupid because it misses the most important point I can communicate to everybody listening to us today. This ends – meaning I'm 80, this ends, this life ends. The only question that I'm asking is how do I make the most of it? How do I make the most of the gift I've been given? That every single human being on the face of this Earth has been given? How do I make the most of it?

Well, in order to make the most of it I've got to understand what “the most of it” means. Which means if I'm spending all of my time for income, for income, for income, I'm missing the whole point, and what a tragedy that is. I missed the whole freaking point.

And then to see and to know when that time comes which I refer to not so kindly is “our crap-out date.” When that time comes I want to know that I made the most of it. And all I'm saying to your guys is you’re not making the most of it guys, not by a huge, huge, huge bit.

But there is a way to make the most of it, but it's got to start with you, and that is with the person in you who says, “I got to do this. I've got to do something, I've got to do something differently, I've got to make the most of it, help me make the most of it.” Which is, “Help me the most of the gift I've been given.” It's quite extraordinary, it's quite extraordinary. When you think about that you think about all the customers these guys have who are also doing it, doing it, doing it, busy, busy, busy.

Roddy: Yes. I've told you before I was self-employed for five-and-a-half years and was very much the technician, publishing a sports magazine, and a lot of my customers were small business people, sole proprietors. And when I told them, “I'm leaving. I am actually going to work for a publishing company,” they were like, “Man, I wish I could do something like that,” and I was thinking, “Well, whose got you handcuffed to this?”

But there's a thing you’re talking about is if they would just really focus on something else – on leaving a legacy, like you said, building that equity rather than just producing whatever product or service that they have, it's a way more fulfilling life rather than looking back and saying, “Well I survived this year again.” That's not fulfilling, that's not something that's great.

Gerber: And let me suggest something else as well, Jim, and it's this is as much a message to you as it is to them. Listening to success stories doesn't make any difference. It's like talking about The Martian, did you read the book The Martian or watched the movie?

Roddy: I watched the movie, I haven't read the book.

Gerber: Read the book. Absolutely read the book. It's such an extraordinary story, but it's like The Martian, the guy who succeeded to leave Mars behind telling you how he did it, and you’re sitting in Minneapolis, and understand the point is, you’re in a completely different world.

The trick is to get everyone to choose to live in a completely different world, is to choose to take a leap out of their current circumstances, and to ask themselves, “What would you do if you found yourself in the circumstances that “the Martian” found himself?” Now, that was a novel, but it’s a powerful, powerful story.

A gentleman I’ve been mentoring, an extreme engineer, a guy who’s a brilliant engineer, enormously successful, senior vice president at a very large manufacturing firm – I’ve been mentoring him through The Dreaming Room.

Here’s a guy in his late 50s who’s been enormously successful, but something’s missing in this picture. Something’s missing in this picture. Something’s missing in this picture. What is it? What is it? What is it? Well, for whatever reason – and we don’t have to go into that – he did join us in The Dreaming Room.

We’ve gone through this incredible process, and the incredible process that he went through was to discover a world that he’s been living in, but hasn’t been truly conscious of, a world of engineers who graduate out of engineering school and get a job who are, in fact, when they graduate, completely incapable of doing the most ordinary things.

He said, “I swear to God, Michael, they couldn’t fix a flat tire on a bicycle.” That’s how completely stupid they are. He said it takes maybe 10 years on the job to develop any truly worthwhile skills. And he said, “Why is that?” What’s missing in this picture?

We got involved in that conversation. It’s an intriguing conversation, because we didn’t start it with an answer. We started it with a question. We started with the question, “Why is it that? Why is it that? Why is it that?” We talked about visiting the Imagineering. We talked about what happens at Disney Imagineering, and the complete reinvention – not the reinvention, but the invention of new rides, new programs, new systems, etc., and so forth.

And Walt Disney said to every single one of his people, “Forget about everything you know. What you know is useless. What we’re creating has never been created before. What we’re about to do has never been done before. That’s the only reason we’re doing it.”

We have to learn how to do something we’ve never done before, and to challenge ourselves in ways we’ve never been challenged before, in order to discover something we’ve never discovered before, and nobody else has discovered, either. That’s what Disney Imagineering is all about.

Can you imagine operating your life with that philosophy, with Walt’s philosophy to discover something that’s never been discovered before, to do something that’s never been done before, to create something that’s never been created before?

Because the world is telling us that it’s in need of it, it’s in need of it, it’s need of it, but we don’t even know the “it” of it is. That’s what Steve Jobs did. Steve Jobs was, in metaphorical terms, a Disney Imagineer. Steve Jobs didn’t do the obvious. Steve Jobs did exactly the opposite of the obvious, and in the process reinvented the world.

How does a guy go – a college dropout in his first year, a dropout from a spiritual search in India, a terrible engineer on the job – go into a garage to create something that had not been created before, didn’t even have the technical capacity to do that, (Steve) Wozniak did, but Wozniak didn’t have the dream that Steve Jobs did or the passion for it that Steve Jobs did.

To constantly go farther, farther, farther than he’s ever gone before, simply because he’s alive. That’s what’s missing in this picture. I challenge anybody, everybody who’s listening to this podcast to say, “I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to get out of my own skin. I’ve got to discover something I’ve never discovered before. I’ve got to awaken the creator within me, to get out of doing it, doing it, doing it, to make a living, to make a living, to make a living.”

This is not about making a living, everybody. This is about living. To reduce it to making a living is to reduce our life to the trash that so many of us live in. It’s so important.

Roddy: The word that I’ve struggled over is “leap.” People have to leap and start with that blank sheet of paper and get that vision first.

Gerber: They’ve got to say they want to, Jim. They’ve got to say they want to. Without all the information I need, without all the information, without all of the due diligence, without all of the crap everybody puts into it, to keep themselves safe, to keep themselves safe – they could just simply say, “I’m sick and tired of doing it, doing it, doing it. I’ve got to break free of this and I don’t know how. Help me. I want to do it. I’m absolutely committed to doing it, whatever it is. I don’t know what it is. That’s the problem.”

The “it” I’ve created is a prison. I want to be free, and anybody out there who says that to me, I’ll tell you exactly what your first step is. Your first step is to buy The Course. Buy The Course and to watch it, watch it, watch it, three times. Not once, not twice, but three times.

Make an honest commitment, three times. It’s three-and-a-half hours long, and then you’ll understand what’s missing in this picture. Then you’ll understand exactly what needs to happen for every single one of you, in order to grow beyond it.

This is not about fixing your broken business. This is not about doing what you do better. This is about breaking free. You have no idea what’s waiting for you, and that’s what’s so exciting about it. It’s called a new life.

I thank you, Jim, for giving me an opportunity to speak to your folks.

Roddy: Michael, it’s always a pleasure, and folks, if you scroll down on this webpage, you’re going to see Michael has a special solution provider offer to Business Solutions subscribers for The Course, $295. We have a link right there, so you’ll be able to click right through to that and register for The Course for just $295.

Again, it’s received a lot of good feedback from folks who’ve engaged with you over the years and just recently, too, to improve their business. Michael, thank you so much for your time today. It’s always great to talk with you.

Gerber: My delight, Jim, thanks.

Roddy: To our audience, thank you so much for listening. As always, our goal at Business Solutions is to provide growth strategies for the IT channel. For more information, please visit our website at www.BSMinfo.com. Goodbye, everybody.

As a special gift to Business Solutions readers, Michael Gerber will answer your questions at no cost. Just click the “Ask Michael” button to submit your question.

Special Solution Provider Offer! Michael Gerber has extended a special offer to Business Solutions subscribers for his product called “The Course: Beyond The E-Myth: The Evolution of an Enterprise from a Company of One to a Company of One Thousand.” For $295, you can learn what Gerber calls “the secret sauce for creating a Great Growing Company.” For more information or to purchase The Course, please click here and you will be redirected to Michael’s website.