This was a good read. The main take away from this book is to work *ON* your business and not *IN* your business. If you watch any of the business reality shows like "The Profit" you will see examples of this all the time. What does "working on your business" mean? Read the book and find out, but essentially it means to develop systems and processes that are documented, so that these systems and processes run your business. Once this has been accomplished you could then franchise the business if desired, because you can now train other people to run the business using your systems and processes.

Content of this guide is very good. Timeless information when you consider display advertising in the electronic world is called a landing page, yet concepts of good copy with call to action offer are identical regardless of medium. Same can be said of all other facets of business definition. Without enough definition you can't delegate the daily tasks with any consistency. Unless you clearly specify your values in the form of clear definition, supporting compensation plan paying on net profit revenue, and directing how your staff will support your marketing or the whole thing collapses. Then you are stuck inside the business on a daily rescue mission. Definitely not the independence you dreamed of which led you to start the business. Look at McDonalds or Toyota as examples of well defined well delegated businesss where employees know exactly what you want done, when. how and why. Consider hjis book a textual version of a business designer's mind mapping of tasks & answer selection. Also read the book on "How to Avoid Mistakes in Selling a Business" for specific examples of what to do in order to improve your business. (Bloomberg reports 86% of businesses are designed to be sold. 2016) After you get your plan definition down on paper the next step is to automate the functions into your sales & marketing automation CRM. Long ago a wise man mentioned "a man needs to own his own underwear, you can rent a suit or tuxedo but you need to own your own foundations". This book is designed to help create your foundation. Plenty of coaches will sell you boiler plate plans, but it's not your vision and you can still get boiled alive by just using boiler plate. If you are fan of cloud services remember it's just someone else's computer that you don't control. Only idiot would place their life blood of business (the plan this book helped create) under someone else's control that can be stolen or gifted by the cloud providers employees to their friends to jump starting a competitor. You'd have no meaningful recourse only a long legal fight with huge lawyer bill attached. Make your plans a declared proprietary document, "on loan" during employment with provisions of penalties for sharing, copying or any form of disclosure. Then run an automated version of this from a $500 computer internal to your office. Setup automated shutdown during hours your office is closed limit remote attacks since nobody can attack a shutdown system (7pm-6:45am). Now with things automated you can live life anywhere, while your CRM enforces your sales & delivery directives, employees have all the deals inside which you can view from anywhere. You work on business (or take vacation) while your employees stoke the boiler in the engine room (office) to sail towards your dreams. Using a paper based operation is outdated, you'll always have problems unless you remain in the paper run business supervising everything, a hard fact of life since this book was written. Nobody follows paper daminstrative rules unless the boss is right there checking up the whole time. Let the computer be your enforcer. Plenty of local programmers are available in meetup.com groups that can tune campaigns and online forms in a low cost program without blowing bunch of money. All the programmer needs to do is setup the CRM's calculated fields like an internal spreadsheet within the CRM for one stop repository that feeds the CRMs internal compensation tracker. (Even CRMs available on free download have this capability). Next time you go to McDonalds look closely and you'll see network switches in kitchen area with way more cables than for cash register.s everything in the kitchen except the coffee maker is networked to collect statistics for a remote boss to see. That's how to run an operation that frees you from tedious the office tasks. It's the next step after this book that puts you into the real game of profitable growth. Good luck in your endeavors. Semper fidelis, Dave

This books ranks up there with E-Myth Revisited. Once again, Michael Gerber delivers a winner and a holy grail! He writes out a structure/foundation for the seven essential habits for running a business: Leadership, Marketing, Money, Management, Client Fulfillment, Lead Conversion and Lead Generation. Do not forget to go to the book website and download the worksheets. Use this book as a textbook on how to run and operate a business and you will not regret. Do not read this book like you read a novel, it is not that kind of a book. Like E-myth Revisited, this is a book that you will refer time and time again and you will need to read this book more than once if you are serious of operating a business. Like Michael Gerber says "Work On your business, not in your business".

This book was written in 2005 before the huge rise of the internet social media. This book needs to be updated with a section on that. Still, this book is still a great read.

I understand the usefulness of a literary foil, to make theory more personalized for people who hate to read theory. But for anyone who appreciates an author who gets to the point, reading this book is torture. For every useful line, there are pages of made-for-Cinemax dialogue that reads like an uninteresting 50 Shades of Gray. This is especially frustrating for an author who has so much useful insight to share.

I took over the family mail order business in 1978 and sold it in 2004. I had to learn by trial and error over those 26 years how to stop trying to do everything myself, and learn to hire good people, create procedures, and then delegate tasks. If I'd read this little book way back when it was originally written, I could have played a a lot more golf!

It's an excellent motivator and guide for anyone who is thinking of starting their own business, or is in business and finds themselves working way too many hours a day.

WOW is this book wordy. I personally couldn't stand the fake conversations between Sarah and Gerber that make up about 30% of the book. Very contrived, not engaging, and not particularly helpful.

But the meat of the book is very valuable, especially if you are in the middle of running a business and have never done this type of analysis about your customers, your operations, your marketing, etc... I am taking a business course that uses this book as one of the texts, and it has given me much guidance in building my management/operations guide for my three year old photography business.

For me, the client fulfillment discipline was the most valuable, as I am in a highly competitive business and getting all of the systems in place to surprise and delight my customers, every time, is very important.