“Work on your business, not in it.” Huh?
If you’ve never heard the motto “Work on your business, not in it”, then you probably haven’t spent much time hanging around business coaches, or fans of the various iterations of Michael Gerber’s E Myth.
I haven’t read Gerber myself, but from what I can gather, “Work on your business, not in it” means roughly this:
If you own a business, you shouldn’t be spending your time doing the day-to-day things that keep the business ticking over (“working in your business”). Instead, you should hire, outsource or automate these tasks, and concentrate instead on the “big picture” strategic tasks that will make your business bigger, more scalable, more efficient, more saleable down the track, and so on (“working on your business”).
Now, obviously there’s something to this idea, otherwise half the business people I know wouldn’t devote their lives to realising it. The problem is, these same people are often so enamoured of the phrase itself that they want to use it in their marketing copy. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons:
- Some people prefer working in their business to working on it.
- If you haven’t read the book, it’s not that easy to see the difference.
The first of these is a problem with the underlying idea of the phrase, the second a problem with the wording. But both of them lead to what I’d describe as “huh?” reactions. Something that seems totally self-evident to the person saying it seems either wrong or confusing to the person hearing it. And that’s never good marketing. read more >
