The recent spate of damaging hurricanes is a stern reminder of how suddenly disasters can strike businesses and devastate communities. While your business may not be located in an area prone to hurricanes, you could still be vulnerable to other kinds of natural and man-made disasters such as fire, tornadoes, earth...
This week we're dipping into the Ask EMyth mailbag to have an EMyth Business Coach answer a few of your questions. Thanks to everybody who submitted questions, and keep them coming. We love to hear from you.
As the old saying goes, "The only constant is change." Nothing drives this point home more clearly than the devastation in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The hurricanes' devastation affected thousands of businesses whose buildings were destroyed by the wind or ruined by the flood waters, or w...
Are you building a business, or are you simply self-employed? Do you understand and recognize the differences? And are you intentional about which path you're on? If you presently have a job but want to strike out on your own, do you want to be self-employed or realize the benefits of true business ownership? Aski...
Let’s say you’re walking down the street and encounter someone who expresses their negativity to you and every other passer-by. In this kind of situation, it’s easy to avoid them; you just walk right on by. Maybe shake your head a little. But if that negative person is an employee or customer it’s not so easy to w...
This EMyth notion of "working on it not in it" has to be – by far – the most unanimously embraced concept and seemingly, the most elusive. I would go so far as to say that it is the number one reason business owners from around the globe attend a training here in the Sonoma wine country to work on their business n...
One of the critical instruments in any transaction, whether between a vendor and a customer, an employer and employee or even two private parties, is the basic contract. For some business owners however, the contract agreement isn’t so basic. Some feel that using an agreement is an unnecessary inconvenience. Some ...
Are you one of those business owners who works and works and works all the time? Is your business the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning? Have you lost sight of the big picture? Can you even remember why you started your business in the first place? Let us make one thing very clear: your bu...
At the core of the EMyth approach is that every small business owner plays three roles in their business: the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician. Defining the business is entrepreneurial work, doing the hands-on work is technical work, and managerial work is the bridge between the two. For many of the bu...
You know what a bad sales call feels like. The aimless small talk, the thinly disguised attempt at ‘relating’ to you, and the ever-present background anxiety of the sales person desperate to meet their monthly quota. All you wanted was a real conversation with a real person to help you make an informed decision. N...
You have a dozen chances every day to change something fundamental in your business. It happens every time you delegate work to a member of your staff: do you manage by agreement or by accident?
We define business frustrations as a series of specific recurring events in your business over which you feel you have little or no control.
The first step in any successful endeavor is defining what a win will look like once the project is complete. When an artist begins a painting, he typically has a vision in his mind of what the painting will look like when it is finished. When a football team takes the field, they know the definition of success—a ...
In our article Revisiting the EMyth we debunked a couple misconceptions about the EMyth Point of View; namely that: 1) the business owner should never do the technical work of the business and 2) every business should be franchised. But the point was that you needn’t abandon the technical work you love nor do you ...
Lewis and Clark, Sears and Roebuck, Hewlett-Packard, the Wright Brothers. What do these names all have in common? Aside from being almost universally recognized, they were also incredibly successful partners. Despite the seeming preponderance of advice on the challenges and pitfalls of having a business partner, t...
If you want something done correctly, you’ve got to do it yourself, right? That’s a wonderful philosophy if you want to create a lot of work for yourself. But if you want to create a business that works for you, you can’t do it alone. You’ve got to enable other people to do at least some of that work—and you’ve go...
Owning and operating a business isn’t something you take lightly. It requires a huge leap of faith. It’s exciting to live your entrepreneurial dream but it's also innately scary because there's no guarantee you'll succeed.