Three Stages of Growth

Gerber argues that most businesses go through three stages: infancy, adolescence, and maturity. See Michael Gerber, in The E-Myth Revisited; Why Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. New York: Harper Business, 1995, pp. 35-67.

Infancy

During infancy, you are the business. You're doing everything. You're working all the time, having a great time, "doing not only the work you know how to do, but work you don't know how to do. The technician is doing what he wants, not what the business wants. [p. 35].

I went to an entrepreneurship conference yesterday in which three "entrepreneurs" talked about their business. Each of them was in infancy. They didn't want to grow a business, they wanted to own the place they went to work.

Adolescence

Gerber says, "Adolescence begins at the point in the life or your business when the technician decides to get some help." [p. 44] Business has grown and the Technician can't do it all. But the Technician hires someone else like him, but he won't give up what he does, and he gives his new employee everything he doesn't like to do. But business grows and the Technician has all he can handle. Pretty soon the employee quits and the technician's left working for a maniac--himself.

I used to use a print shop here in Philadelphia. It was run by a rather obese women whose employees were standing around while she did everything. I watched for a while, and I saw that every time one of them tried to do something, she came over and did it for him. So, they went back to standing around. I bet if I went in there today, none of them would have been working there.

Maturity

When the Technician is passed out of his comfort zone, he has three options open to him: (1) Get rid of everybody and go back to being an infant; (2) "Going for broke", continuing to grow and grow until he self-destructs; or (3) adopting The Entrepreneurial Perspective.

"A Mature business knows how it got to be where it is, and what it must do to get where it wants to go." [p. 68] Pretty soon the business has grown out of the Technician's comfort Zone, "the boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment, and outside of which he begins to lose control. [p. 51] The technician's comfort zone is those things he knows how to do.

A friend of mine ran a strategic planning company who worked for hospitals. He did well and his business grew. But it exceeded his comfort zone, and he terminated everybody and went back to doing everything himself. That was probably the best decision for him.

We shouldn't be bamboozled into what we don't want to do. We shouldn't just do things because Michael Gerber says so. We need to filter his advice through our own experience, but where what he says rings true for us, we have to consider it.
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