“The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” by Michael Gerber is a business development classic, and strongly recommended for anyone who wants to scale up their business while also creating a balanced lifestyle Gerber has apparently determined a new way to further monetize his E Myth dynasty by co-authoring new E Myth books for niche occupations and self-employed businesses. “The E Myth Real Estate Investor: Why Most Real Estate Investment Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It” is the one relevant to us. It is co-authored with TV show “Flip This House” stars Than Merrill and Paul Esajian. Overall, it makes some solid high level points that should get your business process juices flowing, although the book is also full of embedded indirect upsell pitches for each of the co-authors’ coaching and other services.
“The E Myth” is based on the idea of building streamlined processes, training, and hiring programs so that you can both expand your business and essentially enable the business to run on its own without you. These original themes are reinforced throughout this new book. However, the E Myth story is told in a more eloquent, inspiring fashion in the original book than this book. Even though this new book is targeted to real estate investors, I would nonetheless recommend the original if you were to only read one or the other.
The format of the book ping pongs chapters between Gerber and Than/Esajian, alternating and expanding on certain concepts from their individual viewpoints. Sometimes the back and forth is a bit disjointed, but Gerber speaks more broadly about business development in general and then Than/Esajian discuss anecdotes from their background and real estate specific systems they have developed.
Unfortunately the book is repeatedly interspersed with thinly veiled recommendations for readers to take advantage of (pay for) the coaching and seminar products that all of the authors offer. The indirect upsells were frequent enough that they became a bit tiresome. Sometimes concepts were lightly fleshed out, only for the authors to say that they explain the actual mechanisms only for their students but not in the book.
Management in general, people management, and training are all addressed from various perspectives of how to work with and optimize the performance of staff in your real estate investing company. In true E-Myth fashion, there is emphasis on written procedures that utilize repeatable procedures. These should distill the owner’s style and experience such that any good employee can replicate the same successful approaches over and over again.
Business expansion is also addressed through marketing, systems, and thoughtful growth that doesn’t overcome actual business capability at any given point. Steady growth in step with expanding procedures, staff size, and team structure is explored here.
The importance of your time is key, both in terms of your personal life as well as ensuring that you are truly working on the highest business value items. Everything of lower value needs to be outsourced or insourced, but not done by you. This is hard for many entrepreneurs to let go of that direct, but tedious, control of all the steps.
“The E-Myth Real Estate Investor” is an interesting variant on the original (and superior) “The E-Myth Revisited” book. The focus on real estate systems is a beneficial twist with the new book, though, while sprinkling in the key concepts from the original classic.
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