Who is Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber (b. 1936) is an American author and founder of E-Myth Worldwide, a business skills training company based in Santa Rosa, California aimed at the small business and entrepreneurial community. He is most notable for his E-Myth series. (The "E" represents Entrepreneur and was coined by Gerber many years before the more commonly understood Electronic, as in E-mail)

His most popular work The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Dont Work and What To Do About It'' has been on business bestseller lists for years.

E-Myth in the business vernacular refers to the Entrepreneurial Myth, and refers to the idea that most businesses fail because the founders are technicians that were inspired to start a business without knowledge of how successful businesses run.

The mythic and often disastrous assumption is that people who are experts regarding technical details of a product or service will also be expert at running that sort of business. Many small business owners eventually realize that just as they had to learn their technical skills, they have to learn business growth and management skills.

E-Myth is also used as a verb, i.e., to 'E-Myth your business' means to build internal systems that control processes as they do in a franchise operation, so that results are predictable. A result of systematizing workflow is that owners are freed from most daily operations to spend more time on strategic issues. The methodology was first articulated in the 1985 book The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber who has since founded an organization called E-Myth Worldwide that promotes subsequent E-Myth publications as well as speaking events for Gerber.

E-Myth methods are taught in courses at Stanford [http://www.stanford.edu/class/me228/resources.htm ], BYU [http://marriottschool.byu.edu/cfe/curriculum/lectures.cfm] and Stetson University [http://www.stetson.edu/~khansen/Prince/BN_399.html ] and recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine[http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/leadership/article177286-2.html], Forbes Magazine[http://www.forbes.com/business/smallbusiness/2005/08/31/books-entrepreneurs-publishing-cz_mm_0831books.html] and Inc. (magazine)[http://www.inc.com/news/articles/200701/canyon.html] among others. In 2003 E-Myth entered the Fast Company (magazine) blogosphere [http://www.fastcompany.com/soundoff/reader_comment.html?cid=9894].