The E-Myth Revisited

Did you know that one million small businesses are founded in America each year, but 40 percent of them fail in the first year and 80 percent in the first five years? That’s 800,000 failed businesses, and most of these failures are due to the E-Myth.

The E-Myth, or entrepreneurial myth, is a fundamental misunderstanding in American business. It’s the notion that skillful technical work and a good idea form a sufficient basis for business success.

People often start their own business merely because they excel at work in a certain field, such as a machinist, barber or computer programmer.

Then one day the entrepreneurial seizure strikes. They realize they don’t want to do technical work for someone else. They want to work for themselves as per their own ideas for their own business.

Let’s say you work as a barista. You’ve mastered coffee roasting, brewing and latte art and you have lots of ideas of how to run a cafe. Suddenly, you realize you’d rather open your own cafe.

Such a realization is the reason behind the one million new businesses each year.

But if you start a business from the basis that you have technical expertise and new ideas, you’ve already started on the wrong foot. Your business will probably fail.

You’ve made the fatal assumption, the mistaken belief that knowing how to do technical work means you know how to run a business.

In fact, technical work and the work required to run a business are two completely different things.

Here’s an example. A barista opens her own cafe, and soon realizes that her coffee skills are not enough to make her business successful. She has to know how to hire more employees, organize tasks and grow her business.

This is why so many small businesses fail!