The Balanced Perspective

byNumerous

1K followers

8 years ago

This is the seventh in my series of E-Myth Revisited posts. The E-Myth Revisited examines the core myth behind what people believe an Entrepreneur is and what it takes in reality to make a small business successful. This series of posts will cover the core topics explained in the E-Myth Revisited book and apply them to being a Wealthy Affiliate and making money online. Links to the complete list of posts in this series can be found at:

Internet Marketing and the E-Myth Series

The Maturity Phase

Previously we took a look at the first to phases of the Business Life Cycle as explained in the E-Myth, Infancy and Adolescence. We then added a missing phase, Conception, to describe the place most internet marketers find themselves in. Today we'll examine last phase described in the E-Myth called Maturity.

While the Infancy and Adolescence phases are examined in detail in the E-Myth, these two phases are most relevant to traditional small businesses and semi successful internet marketers. If you find yourself in one of those two groups reading those chapters in the E-Myth are recommended. However, most internet marketers do not get much past the Conception phase, and so these two phases never become applicable to them.

The Maturity phase, on the other hand, applies to all businesses because it is not the end result of going through the other phases, but rather the result of the mindset of the business owner from the very beginning. While a business must still go through the other phases, the way a mature business goes through them is different.

A Different Perspective

The E-Myth labels the difference in perspective of a mature business the “Entrepreneurial Perspective”. However, I believe this label is the product of the book's focus on traditional small businesses and their tendency to be Technician mindset driven. The label is an attempt to emphasize the need for a greater entrepreneurial perspective within the business.

However, this dynamic is different for an internet marketer where the Entrepreneur mindset is likely the most dominate. As a result, emphasizing the entrepreneurial perspective would simply cause internet marketers to place more emphasis on something they already over emphasize. Therefore a better, more generally applicable label, would be the “Balanced Perspective”.

The Balanced Perspective

In a Technician Perspective the business owner is too focused on the narrow details of producing the commodity that the business delivers to the customer. In a Balanced Perspective the entrepreneur pulls the technician out of the details to look at the business as a whole. It moves the technician's focus from trying to figure out what needs to be done to figuring out how it should be done to produce the product consistently and efficiently.

In an Entrepreneurial Perspective the business owner is too focused on the their vision for the future with no understanding or care for how to make it happen. In a Balanced Perspective the technician pulls the entrepreneur into the present and forces them to clarify their vision with greater specificity so that the technician knows exactly what it needs to create.

In a Managerial Perspective the business owner is too focused on the status quo and making sure nothing ever changes. This is what happens when a large business stops making advances and is soon eclipsed by smaller more entrepreneurial businesses. In a Balanced Perspective the entrepreneur envisions the change one piece at a time and the technician figures out how to make the change work. When this is done, each piece is handed over to the manager to fit into the larger vision of the entrepreneur kept working while the entrepreneur and the technician move on to the next piece.

Putting It Into Action

From the Balanced Perspective we can see that all three mindsets of the business owner are necessary to build a successful business. The E-Myth explains that this perspective must exist “from the beginning” to create a mature business. However, “the beginning” isn't necessarily the day the business starts, but rather the day the Balanced Perspective is adopted. Even if you already have a business in place once you adopt the Balanced Perspective you are basically starting from scratch. Your business can continue to operate, but step by step you'll examine each piece of your business and rebuild it from the ground up.