Hi I'm Josh Stailey, A Founding Partner of the Pursuit Group. Today I want to chat about a business book that I think might be of interest to you if you have. It's about 20 years old; it's called the E-Myth, by Michael Gerber. The E-Myth is about entrepreneurship and the fact that most companies are entrepreneurial they're just sort of an extension of something that somebody does in life and enjoys doing and gets paid for it. So if you want your company to graduate from a practice to a corporation, to an entrepreneurial corporation, you have to break through E-Myth.

And the E-Myth is real simple. Basically what Michael Gerber says in the book is that most companies don't succeed at jumping the entrepreneurial curve because the founders spent all of their time working in the business instead of on the business. In order to grow past a certain point, a company has to... the company leadership has to get out of the business of delivering goods and services and into the business of the business itself.

From my standpoint, which is marketing, I see that happening all the time. In fact, marketing issues are a perfect example of the E-Myth. For example, we've got clients that start marketing programs all the time. They launch them with great promise, they get success, business starts coming in, and then all of a sudden they’ve got to go back and deliver on the business. And the marketing program gets second shift, if that. And they're a day late and then a week late on delivering on their marketing and then it just goes away altogether because you're just too busy, until they're not busy and then they need marketing again.

So one of the big challenges for any organization is carving time out on a regular basis, day after day or it at least week after week on a regular schedule to do marketing programs. It means first of all that you got to start modest, don't start a giant program whose success will demand enormous amounts of your time and resources. Start small and stick to it. Take the success you make off that and leverage it into the next bigger project; the bigger way to get more people in the door. And then the next, and then the next, and the next and then sooner or later you're going to find yourself in that entrepreneurial success where you no longer make and deliver products or services, but you see that they're done right and you see that the sales funnel is full of prospects because you're doing marketing and selling right.

I'm Josh Stailey. I hope you enjoyed this. If you have any questions or comments please fill out the form just below and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

About Josh

Our friend and contributor Josh Stailey passed away unexpectedly on September 10, 2011. We have valued his expertise and willingness to share his insights with us. We discussed the appropriateness of sharing content he provided before his death with his business partners at The Pursuit Group and they agreed sharing his expertise was a fitting tribute to Josh.

Josh Stailey was a 40-year veteran of the marketing and sales wars, a journalism-trained professional who understood the role of information and technology in today’s business world. A consultant and writer, he was a founding partner of The Pursuit Group, which specializes in designing and implementing demand-generation systems for small- and medium-sized businesses. He has also consulted with Fortune 500 companies on customer experience management and content system design.