Jon Price, founder of The Golden Group

It's E-Myth week at ISP-Planet, and today we interview the guy in charge of ISPCON to learn how implementing the E-Myth system is changing his business and his understanding of it.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 2, 2006]

It's E-Myth week at ISP-Planet, and today we interview the guy in charge of ISPCON to learn how implementing the E-Myth system is changing his business and his understanding of it.

Jon Price says that implementing the ideas in The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It and the detailed system described in E-Myth Mastery: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company is no simple task, and it's especially tough when you have three full-time employees, if you include yourself.

"Right now, we're insanely lean, and we're caught up in the doing," explains Price.

Price has read both books and is taking E-Myth courses. For between $300 and $600 per month, he does homework and has regular phone calls with his consultant in Seattle. "It's like having a coach who helps you get your shit together," says Price.

One of the steps he recently completed was doing an org chart, which showed him how many people he'd like to have working in the company versus how many people are actually there now.

One question many small business owners seem to ask themselves is whether the mistakes described in the book were avoidable, or whether they had to make the mistakes in order to understand the book.

"Before I read the book, we had followed the path that Gerber describes at the beginning of E-Myth Revisited," says Price. "You start the company with huge ambitions, and your success becomes what hinders you. You start out doing everything yourself, talking to every customer yourself, and you cannot do it all yourself and keep growing. We had to retract. We could not handle the workload of our success. We looked at the retraction as an opportunity, a chance to look at what we needed to do well in order to grow without sacrificing QoS."

It's one of the insights central to E-Myth Revisited. "We had made it up as we went along. We need to create systems."

The E-Myth Mastery teaching system is broken down into modules, and Price says he can complete one per month at best, and that implementing the entire E-Myth system could take up to three years.

At the end of those three years, you would have a system for your business, the franchise prototype. Price mentions to us that he could see himself running conferences for others. Gerber warns that becoming a consultant can be your technical work, keeping you from doing everything you need to do to innovate and grow and change.

Of course, there are immediate rewards.

"You get juiced about the things you've done," he says. "You figure out what your key frustrations are, go through the system, design, build, implement, and the frustration goes away. When you don't have to train anyone when you get ready to plug in a person to replace yourself in one of the positions you occupy in the org chart, when you can just say, 'here's the book' or 'this is how we do it' or 'here's the page,' if that's the only thing we get done, that's huge. If you can do that kind of work regularly, you're working on your business."

To Price, the biggest, overarching insight in E-Myth Revisited is the difference between working in your business and working on it. Designing systems, rather than doing the routine, is working on your business. It's important to do, but difficult to find time to do.

Goals
The E-Myth system starts by asking the business owner to define their "primary aim" and build a "strategic objective" that supports that aim. It's a lot of information, about the self and business, that taps into the psychological makeup of the owner, but is designed to help the businss owner create something deeply meaningful and motivating.

Price has defined goals for his business, metrics, desired business size by 2012. It's a lot of information. The core, though, is the goal of the business, which is one sentence:

"The Golden Group provides the best environments for customers to engage in productive commercial dialogue and business development."

This chimes in nicely with Price's personal goal, which is to be a powerful force for abundant good. "I don't want to work with unethical people. Regardless of the potential reward, it runs counter to my aim."

The business is an important part of this personal goal. "Part of being powerful as a force for abundant good is that you need to have a certain amount of influence. This drives you to grow your business."

His one disagreement with Gerber is that he does not feel that just anyone can do exceptional conference programming. Price feels he needs capable, ethical people who can interact creatively and productively with others. All of that requires intelligence and more. He's currently developing a system for this part of his business, but has found it to be extremely challenging to "turn-key".

Price says the ISP business as a whole needs more systems. "The UPS Store has an operations manual. There's no manual for the ISP."

— End