The Entrepreneurial Seizure Revisited

Michael Gerber, on p. 17 of The E-Myth Revisited; Why Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. (New York: Harper Business, 1995)expands on what this does to the person who gets "afflicted" by an entrepreneurial seizure:

The technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure takes the work he loves to do and turns it into a job. The work that was born out of love becomes a chore, among a welter of other less familiar and less pleasant chores. Rather than maintaining its specialness, representing the unique skill the technician possesses and upon which he started the business, the work becomes trivialize, something to get through in order to make room for everything else that must be done.

I interviewed a representative of a small manufacturing firm south of Madison, Wisconsin, in 2003, in conjunction with a consulting firm I was designing. They said none of them was making any money. They had to pay ever higher wages to their employees. To conserve funds they were manning the phones and doing all the office chores. They were working longer and longer hours and not seeing any benefit.

[They were suffering from one of the worst things about business, devoting their lives to support the business rather than running a business that supported their lives.]

I was asking them about what price to charge, and they said the problem wasn't money it was time. It was just two difficult for any of them to take time away from what they absolutely had to do.

Does this sound like you? What do you think? I'd like to know. Share your experiences. Post to this blog.

Entrepreneurship informs all of my professional activities. Entrepreneurial ideas are their life's blood. For my ideas on entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com