Work On the Business, Not In It
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The E-Myth principle applied by a coffee roaster who started out believing that being good at coffee qualified him to run a coffee business. The mechanism: skill at the craft is unrelated to the skill of operating the machine that sells the craft, and until the founder climbs out of the daily manufacturing into the higher-level view — people, marketing, sales, economics, balance sheets, cash flow — the business cannot outgrow him. Its extension is knowledge retention: if training walks out of the door with every departing employee, you are pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. Businesses that survive for centuries do so because systems and structure let the entity itself retain knowledge independently of whoever executes it, which also frees individuals to leave without breaking the company.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Separate the craft from the business of business
Name explicitly which of your skills is the craft (roasting coffee, making videos, teaching) and accept that the business surrounding it is a separate discipline you do not yet have. Understanding coffee has nothing to do with understanding a balance sheet.
Watch out When the business side feels alien, most founders retreat to the safe space of the thing they know and care about — which is not healthy for the business long term.
- 2
Learn the machine deliberately
Treat the business as a machine whose cogs you tweak: people, marketing, sales, economics, finances, reading a balance sheet, and the effect of today's decisions on future cash flow. Read heavily and accept a steep learning curve.
Pro tip Reframe the 'boring' operational stuff as the new subject you get to learn; it becomes the fun part once you see how much system there is behind it.
- 3
Convert reading into knowledge by doing
Books create information; only application converts it to knowledge. Expect to do it, mess it up, do it again and mess it up before you truly understand how the ideas work — hiring is the canonical example.
Watch out Advice from experienced operators will sound blasé until you live it. Assume 'hiring is the hardest bit' is literally true and stays true.
- 4
Audit where the business lives inside your head
Find the tasks only you can do — the supplier nobody else knows how to deal with, the delivery you personally chase at midnight. Each one is a hole in the bucket and a ceiling on the business.
Pro tip List every task you performed last week and mark the ones that would fail if you were unreachable for two weeks.
- 5
Systemise the knowledge, not just the training
Keep training people, but simultaneously collect and systemise the knowledge you deliver so it belongs to the business regardless of who is executing it. The business becomes a thing that can learn independently.
Pro tip Frame it to staff correctly: documented knowledge makes their job easier and more enjoyable because they can still access it, and it means nobody is trapped.
Watch out This sounds dehumanising if framed badly, but the alternative — someone who cannot leave because half the business would break — is bad retention and an awful thing to do to a person.
- 6
Bind purpose into the entity
Alongside systems, give the business a purpose that exists independently of the founder or key people, so it can survive and be sustainable beyond the will or ideas of one person.
In the wild
As a coffee roaster and supplier, the guest ran extensive barista training for customer cafés. He trained batch after batch of staff, and they left — hospitality turnover is fast — so the knowledge left with them and the café itself retained nothing. His response was to change what was being delivered: keep training baristas, but work with the customer to collect and systemise the knowledge so it became the café's asset rather than an individual's. Looking at businesses hundreds of years old, he concluded the difference was always systems and structure that let the entity retain knowledge independent of the people working within it.
→ Training stopped leaking, and customer businesses kept the capability after staff turnover.
Ali's first business taught medical school applicants. What began as enjoying teaching courses turned into an operation, and he found himself staying up until midnight personally confirming that book deliveries for tomorrow's Manchester course had arrived — because he was the only person who knew how to deal with the supplier. He describes recognising this as 'probably bad': the founder being the single point of failure on a routine logistics task. Reading the E-Myth in 2019, five years into that business, produced the reaction that he wished he had read it five years earlier, having already made every mistake under the sun.
→ The realisation reframed the boring operational layer as the actual work of ownership.
Common mistakes
Assuming craft skill qualifies you to run the business
The classic founder path — I understand coffee, I'm good at making coffee, I should open a coffee business — collides immediately with the business of business. Being good at the product does not make you a good owner, manager or operator of a company built around it.
Retreating to the work you already enjoy
When confronted with marketing, finance and systems, many founders are immediately turned off and go back to the safe space of the thing they know and care about. The business then stalls at the founder's operational ceiling.
Letting key knowledge live only in people's heads
If the company rests on what individuals know, they feel stuck and unable to leave, and the business loses capability every time someone does. Both outcomes are worse for the humans involved, not just the balance sheet.
From the transcript
“what you end up feeling is that you're just pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it because you train a bunch of…”
“you get into the boring answers of like systems and structure and you build a business that is able to retain knowledge independent of the…”
“just being good at making coffee does not does not make me a good”
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