“This excellent book is a must-read for current and aspiring entrepreneurs.” — Booklist Discover how to turn a great idea into a thriving business with The E-Myth Enterprise, using the proven methods that bestselling author Michael  E. Gerber has developed over the course of his more than forty years as an entrepreneur and coach. Michael  E.Gerber is THE #1 name in small business and his company, E-Myth Worldwide, boasts more than 52,000 business clients in 145 countries.   The   E-Myth Enterprise shows readers how to get started—because simply coming up with a brilliant business idea is the easy part. “[A] straightforward book that distills the essential knowledge needed to create a completely original company…This quick, original, well-organized read is a valuable tool for budding entrepreneurs.” - Publishers Weekly “This excellent book is a must-read for current and aspiring entrepreneurs.” - Booklist The latest book in the Michael E. Gerber franchise, The E-Myth Enterprise explores the requirement that any new business must meet: the satisfaction of its four primary influencers—its employees, customers, suppliers, and investors. The E-Myth Enterprise is an indispensable follow-up to Awakening the Entrepreneur Within , showing would-be entrepreneurs how to put a promising idea to work and helping to transform their dream into reality. Next, readers can turn to The E-Myth Revisited for tried-and-true advice about avoiding the pitfalls that prevent most small business owners from succeeding. The E-Myth Manager provides essential guidance for the management of any business. Finally, E-Myth Mastery offers valuable advice on how to take an existing business to the next level of growth and opportunity. Michael E. Gerber is a true legend of entrepreneurship. The editors of INC magazine called him "The World's #1 Small Business Guru." He is Co-founder and Chairman of the Michael E. Gerber Companies—a group of highly unique enterprises dedicated to creating world-class start-ups and entrepreneurs in every industry and economy. The Gerber Companies transforms the way small business owners grow their enterprises and has evolved into an empire over its history of nearly three decades. The E-Myth Enterprise How to Turn a Great Idea into a Thriving Business By Michael E. Gerber HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2010 Michael E. Gerber All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061733826 Chapter One The E-Myth Enterprise and the Position of One: A Business Exists Only as it is Preceived by Others In too many situations we automatically experience people as “them”—not “us.” These jungle-type habits of mind are dangerous to our species. —Ken Keyes Jr. This book is meant to be a prescription for building a successful business in a free market system. As you will find out, it probably serves as well—if not better—as a polemic against such prescriptions. Please excuse the apparent contradiction. I know that if you’re patient, somewhere in the middle resides a truth worth digging for. But to get there, you’re going to have to do some of the work. You’re going to have to stretch where I stretch and let go where I let go. In other words, you’re going to have to be willing to play an always frustrating, but sometimes enlightening, game, a game I call how do you provide an answer to a question that you know has no answer? In a free market system, that’s the game called business. To anyone with even a passing interest in the comings and goings of the free market system in the United States, it should be apparent that the life of a business here is a precarious thing. If the business is a good idea—that is, if it does all the right things in the right way and at the right time, and is lucky—it succeeds. If it’s a bad idea, it doesn’t. Even worse, it could appear to be a good idea, but shifts—more like earthquakes—in the economy can sink it. Wasn’t Washington Mutual a good idea? Wasn’t Fannie Mae? Wasn’t Lehman Brothers? Wasn’t AIG? Unfortunately, the truth is that for the -people who invest in other -people’s businesses, for those who start a business of their own, or for those who work for either of the other two, most businesses turn out to be bad ideas; most businesses fail. Even the so-called giants. More frustrating is that, in a free market system, even the good ideas—the businesses that succeed—turn into the bad ideas in time. The weather changes. A new company moves in across the street. People stop having babies. Somebody comes up with a better idea. The economy experiences a so-called correction. Or—and this happens—someone comes up with a worse idea but implements it better. In short, a free market system provides all of us with significantly more opportunity to fail than to succeed. What worked yesterday will most likely not work today, and the fact that something works today is insufficient justification for planning to do it the same way tomorrow. How can we minimize the risk