Many people try to escape from their job in order to start their own business and be their own boss. Most of them fail. The owners often don’t know what went wrong. Michael Gerber says, he knows.

According to Gerber, many if not most entrepreneurs start their business, thinking they will be successful for one reason: They feel confident about their technical skills from their previous job. The fallacy is obvious: running a business consists of more than just knowing the technical aspects. One has to know how to manage, organize and plan all aspects of the business in advance. Gerber divides the responsibility of a business owner into three personalities:

• the entrepreneur
• the manager
• the technician

Each of them has a unique set of responsibilities and requires a unique set of skills and special attention. The entrepreneur has the vision, the idea, the plans for the future. The manager takes care of daily planning, makes sure that people are doing their jobs right and keeps order in the business. The technician takes care of the practical things that need to get taken care of, the production of the goods and services. Each of these characters is concerned for his own problems. If a technician starts his own business, he will not be in a position to be successful, until he realizes that has to take over a set of completely new responsibilities than he is used to. But it is not simply that he has to take on new responsibilities. He has to take them over in an orderly, systematic fashion and begin to think strategically:

“There’s nothing wrong with being a Technician. There’s only something wrong with being a Technician who also owns a business! Because as a Technician-turned-business-owner, your focus is upside down. You see the world from the bottom up rather than from the top down. You have a tactical view rather than a strategic view. You see the work that has to get done, and because of the way you’re built, you immediately jump in to do it! You believe that a business is nothing more than an aggregate of the various types of work done in it, when in fact it is much more than that.
“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. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.
“No,…there’s nothing wrong with technical work; it is, it can be, pure joy.
“It’s only a problem when The Technician consumes all the other personalities. When The Technician fills your day with work. When The Technician avoids the challenge of learning how to grow a business. When The Technician shrinks from the entrepreneurial role so necessary to the lifeblood, the momentum, of a truly extraordinary small business, and from the managerial role so critical to the operational balance or grounding of a small business on a day-to-day basis.

The Franchise Model

Gerber goes through the different stages of a business from infancy to maturity, pointing out the particular challenges. This leads to the core idea of this book: When you build a business, do it as if you’d want to sell it as a franchise. You may or may not want to actually franchise it, but you should approach your business with the franchise mindset. The key is to build a turn-key business, that has all the structures in place so that anyone could run it. This forces you to think strategically and approach your business in the most methodical and scientific way possible. Every action of every employee will be carefully optimized to work together with the rest of the business to give the consumer the best and most consistent experience possible. This requires of the business owner to step back right at the beginning and think carefully about his mission, ideals and the organizational structure of his business. He describes a process of how to optimize each function of the business in three steps.

As an example, Gerber mentions how a business tested the correlation between the colour of their sales persons’ suits and the number of sales they make. The surprising result was that blue suits always outsell the other colours. From then on every salesman had to wear a blue suit. This kind of quantified testing can be applied to almost any aspect of your business. The numbers will then tell you how to do things better. Whether it is colours, positioning of objects, phrases or gestures, almost everything in a business can be tested and then put into practice and codified in an operations manual.

The franchise model allows you to systematically build a business, that will just work out of the box. After you’ve put everything in place, it won’t need you to make it work. How do you build a business like that? Gerber gives the reader an outline to follow. It consists of seven steps:

• Your Primary Aim
• Your Strategic Objective
• Your Organizational Strategy
• Your Management Strategy
• Your People Strategy
• Your Marketing Strategy
• Your Systems Strategy

Each point is explained in a separate chapter. Throughout this part of the book, Gerber guides the reader through the entire process of building a business, starting from nothing but an idea. He begins by leading the reader to examine himself, his life and his overall goals. In this context then, the remaining steps have to be worked out. Here you will learn how to think strategically about every aspect of your business. You will learn to think about every position’s role in advance. You will learn to think about your business in terms of particular functions that have to be executed instead of particular persons working for you.

It should not matter who is working for you because they are meant to follow a carefully crafted operations manual. Gerber explains when it is time to employ someone and what you are supposed to do afterwards. You will learn what it really means to do marketing. It involves learning as much about your customer as you can and Gerber shows you how to get that information. He also gives you an outline on how to sell, based on what is being used in his own company.

Gerber teaches a lot by story telling. This will appeal to different people to a different extent. I found it to be very helpful when illustrating a particular principle. I found it less helpful when he reproduces extensive dialogues with Susan, a woman who has trouble running her bakery. These dialogues constitute the framework of the whole book. It becomes somewhat tiring and it’s more difficult to quickly draw out the information. But apart from this, the book is highly readable, logically structured and full of explanations and examples that will give the reader an immediate sense of clarity. Gerber will give any entrepreneur or potential entrepreneur a solid outline of what exactly it takes to succeed.