Gerber To VARs: "Create A New Version Of Your Company"
Renowned small business author Michael E. Gerber opened his Feb. 18 Business Solutions webinar telling solutions providers in no uncertain terms, “You can’t fix your broken business. Stop trying to!”
“Because even if you do,” Gerber goes on to say, “it will only need to be fixed over and over again.
“Instead of spending all your time and effort trying to fix what’s not working in ‘OldCo’ (your current business), what’s needed, instead,” Gerber says, “is a new perspective — a perspective that focuses on starting your company from scratch. To create ‘NewCo’. To create a company to do what you’re setting out to do in the most innovative and righteous way!”
Gerber, 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, said that VARs, MSPs, and ISVs will always be “frustrated” and “upside down” if they don’t begin to go to work on their business rather than just in their business.
“All you guys know software,” Gerber says. “You know you can’t just fix one piece of the software; you need to address the whole of it if it’s going to work. In short, you create a new version of the software, rather than patching pieces together.”
Gerber goes on to say, “In much the same way, you can’t just fix your broken sales system or your broken administration system or your broken ‘whatever system. These are just symptoms masking the real problem. Instead, you have to create a new version of your company by following a series of steps that can be replicated, steps that no one has ever spoken to you about before.”
Gerber joined Business Solutions president Jim Roddy for Part Three in their webinar series to help VAR, MSP, and ISV executives improve their businesses.
The webinar explained the gap between your current organization (the one that is causing you so much frustration) and your new company – the one that can grow and thrive because it was built that way, with a true entrepreneurial mindset, rather than built simply to satisfy the owner’s personal skillset, experience, and need for income, the guy who Gerber so memorably refers to as “a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.”
The path from OldCo to NewCo begins in what Gerber calls The Dreaming Room, an incubator in which you create “the Dream, the Vision, the Purpose, and the Mission of your new company.” These are the fuel that will continue to drive your company as you build it and grow it.
Then you can engage in the four phases of building a true entrepreneurial enterprise. Gerber describes these four phases as follows:
- The Job: Here is where you build your turnkey client fulfillment system, which is the system that produces the product or service that your company sells to its customers every day and the way in which it does that.
- The Practice: Here is where you create the turnkey systems for acquiring clients for your product or service: lead generation and lead conversion. When added to your client fulfillment system, they create what Gerber calls “The Three-Legged Stool” of your company.
- The Business: The Business is the aggregate of up to seven turnkey Practices, plus a turnkey Management System.
- The Enterprise: The Enterprise is the aggregate of up to seven turnkey Businesses, plus a turnkey Leadership System.
With these four steps, guided by the owner’s Dream, Vision, Purpose, and Mission, Gerber has uncovered why the survival rate for small businesses is so abysmal, and why trying to “fix what’s broken” doesn’t work.
By building the systems as Gerber has set forth, and by working on your company, at the same time you’re working in it, Gerber says you can bridge the gap between your company as it is today and the growing enterprise it is destined to become.
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.
Click below to access the full webinar.
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.
