The Entrepreneurial Model

byNumerous

1K followers

8 years ago

This is the eighth 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:

The Entrepreneurial Model

As we've already seen we need a Balanced Perspective to build a successful internet marketing business and a way to put that perspective into practice. However, the E-Myth focuses on an Entrepreneur Perspective, so let's first look at how it puts this perspective into practice.

To examine this the E-Myth compares a Technician business model to an Entrepreneurial business model. The key difference is that in the Technician model the business is focused on the Technician's skills and how to sell them. In comparison the Entrepreneur model focuses on what the customer wants and how to deliver it.

The Customer Centered Model

It should be obvious why the Entrepreneur Model is better. Instead of trying to convince people to buy what you have to sell at the price that you want to offer it at, you're figuring out how to give people what they already want.

However, again there is the problem in internet marketing with focusing too much on the entrepreneur and not enough on the technician and the manager. While the entrepreneur may be great and figuring out what the customer wants and envisioning the product to meet that want, they're not so great at actually creating and delivering that product. This is where the technician and manager come into play.

The entrepreneur finds the customer's wants and envisions a product to fill that want. The technician creates that product. The manager ensures that the product is reliably delivered to the customer. This is the Customer Centered Model, because each mind of the business owner is now focused on the customer first.

Applying it to Wealthy Affiliate

So here's a question for you. How much have you focused on your customer when creating your website? Do you know what information your customers are actually looking for? Do you know how they want that information delivered, entertaining or technical, video, text, or podcast?

Wealthy Affiliate is actually an interesting set of contradictions. First, it does an excellent job of taking entrepreneur focused individuals and getting them to focus on the technical delivery of their product. All the opening certifications are essentially technical how to guides.

However, Wealthy Affiliates' training is, by necessity, explained in general terms while simultaneously teaching you how to build a site that is specific, or niche, in nature. By doing this, Wealthy Affiliate is able to do several things well. As mentioned it gets an entrepreneur to focus on the technical side of the business. This gets the internet marketer to start taking specific actions to produce tangible results. This further gets the internet marketer to start taking actions rather than getting lost in the clouds and moving on to their next project. It also ensures that the training will apply to a much broader audience and it allows that broader audience to engage from a common perspective.

However, it may have pushed too far into the technician model in one perspective by focusing too much on the site that the internet marketer wants to create and not enough on the site a customer wants. This makes sense up to a point because the whole process of building a site would be miserable if you had to create content for something had no interest in. However, while you can absolutely create sites in areas that you're interested in, your content and site should still be created and delivered in the way that is most appealing to your customer base.