Working on the business, not in it — The owner's daily workflow

Intro

Michael Gerber wrote the line everybody quotes. Chapter 9 of The E-Myth Revisited is titled "Working On Your Business, Not In It." He put it more bluntly elsewhere in the book: "If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else's business! But don't go to work in your own."

Everyone agrees with him. Almost nobody does it. Not because they don't want to — because Monday arrives and the work is right there in front of you, and working on the business is never urgent.

So it has to become a habit with a time on it, or it never happens at all.

The four questions, every morning

Ten minutes, before the phone starts. I write the answers down.

What made money yesterday? Not what was busy. What actually made money.

What is the one thing that, if I fixed it, would stop repeating? Every business has a problem that comes back weekly. Fixing it once buys back time forever.

What am I doing today that somebody else should own? Write the name next to it. If there's no name, that's your next hire — and now you know what the job actually is.

What will I regret in five years? Almost always the thing you keep postponing because it isn't urgent.

The weekly hour that changes the business

One hour a week, in the diary, same time, not negotiable. Phone off. You are not available.

In that hour you do exactly one of four things:

Write something down that's only in your head. A process, a standard, a script. This is how a business becomes sellable, one document at a time.

Look at a number you've been avoiding. Margin by product. Cost per customer. Debtor days. The one you avoid is usually the one that matters.

Talk to a customer who left. They will tell you the truth your loyal customers are too polite to say.

Remove something. A product, a report, a meeting, a process. Owners add constantly and subtract almost never.

The rule I hold myself to

If I'm the only person who can do it, it becomes a document this month.

That single rule, applied every week for a year, is the difference between a job you own and a business you own.

"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

— Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review, May 1963

One honest caveat

Early on, you should be in the weeds. Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2013 called "Do Things that Don't Scale," and he's right — at the start, the founder doing unscalable work by hand is exactly the job.

The mistake is not starting there. The mistake is still being there in year five, and calling it commitment.

The line that matters

Working on the business is not a mindset. It is an hour in the diary, and a rule about what you write down.