EL 020: Awakening the Entrepreneurial Lawyer within, with Michael Gerber, Author of The E-Myth
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
If you have a chance, I would really appreciate your feedback on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking on iTunes greatly! Meanwhile, enjoy the show!
“My life was never easy. It was never an amazing breakthrough, and then everything was fine. I failed a million times in the process. It’s just this passion for discovering.” – Michael Gerber
Today’s guest, as I would describe him, is a legend. Starting a business of your passion is not like becoming a gymnast – that you have to start young. In this podcast, Michael Gerber’s passion and determination to help lawyers or just anyone ignite their inner entrepreneurial fire will inspire you immensely. At the age of 77, Michael Gerber preserves possibly more passion than a lot of 22-year-olds.
Ways to reach our guest:
http://www.michaelegerbercompanies.com/
Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies
Email Michael Gerber at Michael@michaelegerber.com and say “Jacob sent me!”
“I don’t take myself seriously. I take my life seriously. I take my creativity seriously, and I take the outcome of that seriously.” – Michael Gerber
I recently read an article based on a book called Rich Habits – The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals by Thomas Corley, listing the characteristics displayed by successful people. One of them is how much they value creativity. The same goes for Michael Gerber, who states that creativity is the juice of his life.
I like how Michael Gerber corrected my terminology when I asked him what drove him to start doing what he did. He insists that it was “the interest, the curiosity, the passion, the hunger” that he went after. The message he would like to send is that “we are all born to create, and we are all born to discover our purpose in life.” Look beyond our survival instinct, open our eyes to this extraordinary universe that we are part of, and begin to live.
In this interview you’ll learn:
- 03’04” How Gerber’s got into the business
- 08’57” What is Gerber’s driving force
- 13’03” Entrepreneurship
- 15’16” Gerber’s The Dreaming Room
- 23’01” What Gerber learned from failures
- 24’39” How Gerber sees technology
- 29’05” Gerber’s family life
- 31’51” One tip for entrepreneurs
Written Podcast Transcript:
Jacob: Hello everybody, this is Jacob Sapochnick with the Enchanting Lawyer Podcast; a podcast about marketing, leadership, and social media strategies. Today, I’m honored to have Michael E. Gerber as a guest on our show. Most of you know Michael Gerber but I still would like to introduce him briefly.
Michael has been known for his work around the E-Myth book and the E-Myth series. He has transformed over 50,000 entrepreneur’s lives through helping them develop systems, to duplicate themselves, and grow their businesses. He invented, as he puts it, the McDonald’s of small business consulting.
Michael is a true legend of entrepreneurship. Inc Magazine called him the world’s number one most small business guru. He started over 40 years ago addressing significant need in the small business market. Businesses owned primarily by people with technical skills but few business skills and no place to go and get meaningful help.
Of the years, Michael’s companies have helped tens of thousands of small business owners to successfully transform their businesses into world-class operations.
Michael, welcome to our show. I’m so honored to have you here.
Michael: Well, thank you, Jacob. I’m thrilled also at the enormous success you’ve had in reaching out to literally hundreds of thousands of people for whom your message has meant so much and your openness, your vulnerability, your passion for the work that you do and the access you’ve given them to a better life has truly been spectacular. I’m thrilled to be here and I’m delighted to be having this conversation with you.
Jacob: Thank you so much, Michael.
I first came to know about you probably about 15 years ago. When I came to the US, my first year in law school, I was here studying. We have in the law library, books about business. One day I was sitting there at the library and I was reading about startups and then this book, white and blue, E-Myth Revisited.
I start reading the book and I didn’t really paid too much attention in the beginning. I got some of the concepts and I found it to be pretty logical and I said “How come there’s nothing like that out there? Everything that you put in that book was so logical.” But I can tell you that the impact of that book … I read it maybe 100 times since then. Every time that I read it, I find something different and I find something useful that I can use and I still use today in my business.
Why don’t you share with our audience your journey, where you started and how you came about to write the first version of this book, everything that happened since then?
Michael: It’s, in one way, a very simple story. What happened and has happened in my life has been one thing happened then another happened then another happened. In the midst of all that, my imagination is stimulated, inspired. It was stimulated and inspired by a conversation in mid-70s that I was having with a client of my brother-in-law’s advertising agency. My brother-in-law had asked me if I would sit down with this high tech client and figure out why he was having difficulty converting the leads that my brother-in-law’s ad agency was creating for them into sales.
Of course, I didn’t know anything about business. I knew I didn’t know anything about business. I knew I didn’t know anything about advertising. But I did know something about sales because I’ve earned my stripes, you might say, calling on homes, door-to-door, to sell encyclopedias. These obviously had nothing to do with high tech, nothing to do with advertising, nothing to do with the problem that this particular client was experiencing ostensibly.
To continue reading the complete transcript from this podcast, click here.
“[Creativity] to me is the juice of my life. It’s all about creativity – that in fact is the driving force behind us.” – Michael Gerber
Is there any question you have regarding the podcast guest that is not addressed in this blog post? Please leave me a comment below or send me your thoughts at jacob@enchantinglawyer.com. I would really appreciate your feedback, your suggestion on future guests, or just an opportunity to chat with you!
