The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is a book about small businesses and why the majority of them fail. Most importantly, it explains what to do in order to make a small business work.

The book is quite old, as the original version came out in 1986 and even the revisited version is from 1995, but it’s considered a classic and comes widely recommended as a “must read” business book.

The main reason why small businesses don’t work, according to Gerber, is the so called E-Myth, or the Entrepreneurial Myth. According to the myth, most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs, but in reality that’s clearly not the case. Embedded in the myth is also the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work.

The book contains a lot of gems, and I’ll explore more of them in future articles, but here I’ll focus on the three different business founder personalities, which are relevant for understanding the entrepreneurial myth. These are the Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician, and typically one of these personalities is dominant in a founder.

The Entrepreneur is the creative personality that turns even the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. It’s the visionary in us, the dreamer, and the catalyst for change. As Gerber puts it: “The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, and rarely in the present”. The Entrepreneur is happiest when left free to construct images of what if and if when.

The Manager is the pragmatic and managerial personality that likes planning. In fact, without the manager there would be very little planning, order, and predictability. If the Entrepreneur lives in the future, the Manager lives in the past, clinging to the status quo. Where the Entrepreneur sees opportunities, the Manager sees problems. The Manager is the one who often has to clean up after the Entrepreneur. There’s a crucial tension between the Entrepreneur’s vision and the Manager’s pragmatism, which according to Gerber “creates the synthesis from which all great works are born”.

The Technician is the doer who embraces the motto “if you want it done right, do it yourself”. The Technician loves to tinker, take stuff apart, and then put it back together. Instead of dreaming, the Technician just does. This is the personality that lives in the present and is happiest when working at one thing at a time, being in control of the workflow. The Technician often mistrusts those she works for, because they’re always trying to get more work done than is either possible or necessary. In Gerber’s words: “The Technician is suspicious of lofty ideas and abstractions, believing that all ideas need to be reduced to methodology, if there’s to be any value”.

As can be seen from the descriptions above, each of the three personalities wants different things. The problem is compounded by the fact that while each wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss.

We all have inside us an Entrepreneur, a Manager, and a Technician. Gerber points out that “If they were equally balanced, we would be describing an incredibly competent individual”. He goes on to explain that “the Entrepreneur would be free to forge ahead to new areas of interest, the Manager would be solidifying the base of operations, and the Technician would be doing the technical work. Each would derive satisfaction from the work she does best, serving the whole in the most productive way.”.

We realise, of course, that very few of us are balanced in such a way. In fact, Gerber claims that the typical small business owner is only 10% Entrepreneur, 20% Manager, and 70% Technician.

Whether or not those percentages are accurate doesn’t matter. What matters is that you should examine and understand what your own dominant personality is and then take corrective action. That could be done by attempting to rebalance yourself, which understandably can be very difficult, or by making sure that you’re not building your business alone, but instead have a team where the personalities are in balance.