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Concept

Entrepreneur, Manager, Technician

Entrepreneur, Manager, Technician is Michael E. Gerber's model of the three working roles inside every business owner (the visionary, the organizer and the doer), in which whichever role claims most of the owner's hours quietly ends up running the business.

In The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber argues that anyone running a business carries three working personalities, and each one wants to be in charge. The Entrepreneur lives in the future. It asks what the business could become and turns possibilities into direction. The Manager leans on the past in a useful way. It keeps what has worked and wants order, predictability and repetition. The Technician lives in the present. It wants to do the work with its own hands and judges a day by what got finished. Most small businesses are started by Technicians who assume that knowing the work means knowing how to run a company that does the work. This isn't a personality test, because every business needs all three. Trouble starts when one role swallows the others. Usually it's the Technician, because the urgent task in front of you always feels more real than a plan or a system.

A real-life example

Dana opens a bike repair shop because she's the best mechanic in town. For two years she fixes bikes from eight to six, answers the phone between jobs and does the books at midnight. Revenue is fine, yet nothing moves: no trained second mechanic, no written procedures, no plan to grow. When she logs one week hour by hour, 51 of her 58 hours are Technician work. Her Entrepreneur gets none, and her Manager scrambles on Sunday nights.

How to use it

  1. 1Track one ordinary week and label each block of time E (shaping where the business goes), M (building systems and order) or T (doing the work itself).
  2. 2Read the split honestly. If the Technician holds nearly all the hours, nobody is steering, so call it that instead of calling it dedication.
  3. 3Book one fixed weekly hour for the Entrepreneur and one for the Manager, and protect both the way you'd protect a client appointment.