I have recently been introduced to the entire E-Myth philosophy and way of thinking by some colleagues and wanted to share some thoughts and comments about it. After reading through their book, “The E-Myth Revisited: Why most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” by Michael E. Gerber, I quickly saw some great insights from a whole new perspective (great book). The concepts are clean, straightforward and spot on in my opinion. My next task was to check out their website and see what they had to say about Customers and Employees and how these tied into both the strategy and execution of their organizations (my passions).
After searching their website, it was clear they had a model that was both strategic and executable – something that is hard to find these days. Rather than just talking about something they actually had numerous cases of doing it and how they helped entrepreneurs and small businesses (probably some larger ones as well). One section, of course, that caught my eye was about Customer Experiences and what they focused on in this area. Usually we find a lot of marketing hype about how to better serve your customers – lots of great comments and quotes but nothing tangible. I found just the opposite here. They hit on something we talked about in our first book, “Creating and Delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences,” the issue of psychographics and the role it plays in helping to determine the best way to approach your customers. I won’t go into the details of this right now but wanted to offer some additional thinking on the subject.
When we wrote our book, psychographics was a key component to our Customer Experience Mapping effort and still is a key component today – and it works! However, over the past year or so we literally stumbled onto something that takes psychographics and other tools to a much higher and more powerful level – PROMISES. We have extended our original thinking to included a very simple, yet powerful concept: Promises Made = Promises Kept. This basically says if you really want to take your company to a higher level and excel above your competitors, you have to first UNDERSTAND the PROMISES your customers want you to make them and then build the operational and delivery portions of your business to KEEP these PROMISES. If you can be successful at this, then, and only then will you build true loyalty with your customers and significant differentiation from your competitors.
When E-Myth gives an example of a customer situation, they do so around the psychographics model – take a look at some of the articles on their website. Now, envision this same example, only adding the strength and emotional bond to it if they also understood and could deliver on the core set of Promises that this customer really wanted them to make, each and every day – WOW, that is real power to a business. I feel the typical business could really take E-Myth to a higher level than it already is – incorporate a Promise Architecture into the model and leverage all the benefits of an E-Myth program. The combination would seem to provide a set of complementary tools to create clear and concise market differentiation, while simultaneously streamlining the development of operating processes that are required to support any business that intends to build scale.
Blaine Millet
