I took this title from a blog post on the e-myth website. I don’t think it could be more fitting for a large majority of IT firms and their founders.

I always tell people that the thing that sets us apart the most from other firms is that our founder is a business person not a technical person running a business. If you have read e-myth or e-myth revisited this will make perfect sense to you and if you have not read either of these books stop everything you are doing and get yourself a copy of e-myth revisited.

Ask yourself if you have the systems, processes, and the people that would allow you to walk away from your business for a month and come back to it humming along with no problems.

If you don’t you should really start thinking about the ways you can create these things for yourself and your team.

This is part of the blog post that I thought captured the thinking of e-myth, what an entrepreneur is, and why you should be excited to be thinking about it:

One of the most radical changes you experience when you work with E-Myth is a shift in thinking; a change in how you approach your business.

Central to this approach, the E-Myth approach, is that you must learn to view your business as separate from you. We say this all the time, but it warrants repeating: you are not your business. Even if you are the one who actually drills the teeth or performs the exam, you must view your business as your end product. You can be a Technician and not be the business. If you don’t figure that out, you’ll never be able to get free of the business, to retire or — and this is where it gets good — only work when you want to.

When you realize that your business is your product, you can step outside of it and reinvent it. And this holds true for any Technician, from a chiropractor to a contractor, hair stylist to a baker… It all starts with a change in the way you think about your business; it starts with entrepreneurial thinking.

The Technician thinks: Time = Work = Money. I spend the time, I work hard and I earn money. To get more money, I work harder.

The Entrepreneur thinks: Time = Equity = Freedom. I spend the time, I build the equity of my business and I get free of the business. To get more freedom, I build more equity.

The Technician thinks: I do the work.

The Entrepreneur thinks: Someone else does the work.

You can find the entire post here:  e-myth post

Let me know how you plan on changing things in your organization to allow you to work more on the business.

Josh

In an economy like this, it’s prudent for all managed service providers to look at your expenses to determine where you can cut – even if you aren’t in any sort of financial trouble.  It’s much more fun to be proactive about this rather than being forced to be reactive!

But cutting expenses needs to be done thoughtfully and strategically, otherwise you risk “cutting to the bone” as they say, and starving your company of the resources it needs to be successful.

How to do this?  I read a newsletter article from the folks at the E-Myth today and thought is perfectly captured the key questions you need to ask yourself before cutting an expense:

1. Will you reduce your ability to compete effectively?
2. Will you reduce the quality of your product?
3. Will you reduce your client’s experience with your company?
4. Will you reduce the good will you have worked so hard to create?

If the answer to all of these questions is NO, then you can probably cut the expense and feel good about it.  If the answer to any of these questions is YES, you’d better be very careful.

You can read the full article here.

Mike Cooch

PS -Anyone that has spent any time with me talking about business knows that I’m a huge fan of the E-Myth.  If you haven’t read it yet, pick up a copy today – The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – and get started. It’s a very quick and easy read, and it will change how you think about operating your company.

In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions I thought I would talk a bit about planning. We have always planned our business at a high level but in the last 18 month and really this year we have taken our planning to another level that I believe is going to make all the difference.

Planning, especially financial planning can be painful. In fact our team had a 3 hour torture session just this week as we mapped out the exact steps we are going to take and the products we are going to sell in order to add almost ten points to our gross margins as a business. The great thing about having gone through this process is that it gave everyone clear play book for 2009 and how to grow our gross margin dollars – something that will be very important if growth slows down due to the economy.

It always surprises me how many business owners that I speak with that do not even know their gross margins. So many of us live so entrenched in our business from day to day that we forget to to a look at what value we are really building. Thankfully at Everon Mike makes it a point for our team to work on the business regularly so that we have a healthy business at the end of the day.

Now if figuring out your gross margins and your profit / net margins and mapping out a plan to increase these numbers gives you anxiety you are not alone. Ultimately this does not have to be some fancy spreadsheet with fancy formulas you just need to spend some time understanding what is coming in, what is going out, and what levers you can pull to keep more of what comes in for you and your team.

Once you simplify to this level you can then begin to share the numbers and the levers with your team and from there amazing things will happen. You will have people come up with solutions to problems or take ownership of costs that you never would have thought possible.

So I guess what my message is for the new year is to make sure you are taking time out with your team away from the office to analyze where your gross margins are currently, where you would like them to be, and what steps you are going to take to get them there.

I wish us all the best in keeping as many pennies in our pockets as possible in 2009!

JC

PS – If you are working on planning you should check out the planning materials / worksheets Mike made available on MSP Coach in the bonus content area.

It seems like a silly question on the surface but I would have to guess that like everyone else this day and age you check email too frequently.

Don’t get me wrong, I am just as guilty as the next guy, I can spend a whole morning feeling like a I have been working away never leaving my inbox.

I understand that most executives run their life out of Outlook. Between the instant communication, the calendar to keep you on track, and the task tracking to know who owes you what you never have to go elsewhere. But for the majority of employees checking email, checking IM, and poking around the web can create a tremendous drain on productivity.

I have often longed for the day our CRM software can replace our teams personal email boxes, capturing everything in the relivant spot for future record and use. Unfortunately this day is far off in the distance and instead I spend a significant amount of time trying to get my key people to create daily priorities and manage to them in spite of the numerous high priority interuptions that will come their way during a given day.

The reality of running a service business is that you have to respond to clients in a timely fashion. Availability is a basic tenant of providing OK service – you need to be there when your client needs you – never mind providing remarkable support (this is what Everon strives for).

A recent study put out by the makers of rescuetime software (I have not yet tried nor am I endorsing their software) suggested that a typical office worker checks email 50 times a day, checks IM 77 times, and visits over 40 web sites daily. Now even if this is close to true think about the productivity problems this presents. If it takes 4 minutes to get back on track with what we were doing after a distraction then this represents a butt load of lost productivity during a typical day.

So with all of this said I am not sure there is an easy solution. Time management is something we all will continue to work on during our careers and none of us will ever perfect.

Being congnicent of the type of things that can drain our productivity and constantly asking the question ‘what the the most valuable use of my time right now’ should help keep us, our employees, and our organizations on track and growing.

JC