Summary
This video discusses different levels of business ownership based on concepts from Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth, emphasizing the critical mindset shift necessary for business owners, particularly in healthcare practices like dentistry. The speaker highlights that not all business owners operate at the same level and explains why understanding and evolving through these levels is essential for sustainable growth and freedom.
Key Concepts and Levels of Ownership
- Technician Level
- Owners at this level focus primarily on doing the technical work themselves (e.g., providing treatments).
- The myth here is that being skilled at the technical work guarantees business success and patient flow.
- This approach often results in owners becoming overworked employees of their own business without real freedom or growth.
- Technicians tend to hire others to handle business systems but remain tied to day-to-day work, which prevents system development.
- Managerial Level
- Owners here excel at managing teams and sustaining existing operations.
- They are good at delegation, organizing, and interpersonal relationships.
- However, managers often resist change because growth requires breaking and rebuilding systems, which is perceived as risky or disruptive.
- This leads to stagnation, as managers maintain rather than innovate.
- Entrepreneurial Level
- This is the visionary, leadership-focused level, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos.
- Entrepreneurs work on the business by developing and optimizing seven critical systems rather than performing technical work.
- The seven systems identified are:
- Marketing
- Finance
- Management
- Leadership
- Lead Generation
- Lead Conversion
- Customer Fulfillment
- Success at this level requires phasing out technical duties and focusing on building scalable systems that attract and retain patients.
- Entrepreneurs continuously improve these systems to drive growth and build business assets.
Important Insights
- Working in the business (technician work) vs. working on the business (entrepreneurship) is a fundamental distinction. The former limits growth and freedom, while the latter builds long-term value.
- Marketing is a central, all-encompassing system that impacts every other aspect of the business, including leadership, lead generation, and finance.
- Dentists and similar professionals must embrace marketing and entrepreneurial mindsets to successfully grow their practices rather than relying solely on their technical skills or managers.
- Hiring others to manage aspects of the business without understanding or leading the core systems leads to a catch-22 where growth stalls because no one takes ownership of system development first.
- The speaker shares personal experience of gradually removing themselves from technical roles by delegating tasks and focusing on systems, illustrating the practical application of these concepts.
Recommendations and Conclusion
- Business owners, especially healthcare practitioners, should invest time in learning and mastering the seven key business systems, with a particular focus on marketing and leadership.
- The speaker offers a free course tailored to dentists to help them understand strategic marketing and entrepreneurial growth principles necessary for practice development.
- Embracing the entrepreneurial level mindset is essential for moving beyond merely surviving as a technician or manager to creating a thriving, scalable business.
Summary Table: Levels of Ownership
| Level | Focus | Strengths | Limitations | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technician | Performing technical work | Skilled practitioner | Overwork, no system growth | Business owner as employee |
| Manager | Managing & sustaining systems | Delegation, organization | Resists change, growth stagnates | Maintains status quo |
| Entrepreneur | Visionary & system builder | Leadership, innovation, systems | Requires mindset shift, risk-taking | Scalable, thriving business |
Core Takeaway
To build a successful, growing practice, owners must transition from technician or manager roles to entrepreneurial leadership, focusing on mastering and improving the seven key business systems, especially marketing and leadership, to create sustainable value and freedom.
00:00:00
So, I want to talk about levels of owners because not all business owners are the same. When I first started my business, one of the books I was lucky to have read was the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And if you haven’t read it yet, I really recommend you check it out, especially if you’re just getting into the world of owning your own practice. I think it’s a great fundamental introductory book into a mindset shift of how we need to engage as owners in business. So the way most people go about
00:00:33
ownership is that they want to be a technician. So he talks about three levels of ownership. A technician, a manager, and an entrepreneur. The E-Myth, right? And the E-Myth, the myth is that if we can start our own thing, because we’re a very good technician, we’re very good at what we do. If we go start our own thing that the patients will come. And I’ve seen this firsthand with a lot of clients and it it fails miserably because the myth is that if we go and be a technician somewhere else
00:01:05
that we will get freedom of time that we will get to set our own hours, set our own rules, do things the way that we want it to be. But the problem is that if we exist as a technician, what we’re essentially doing is we’re removing ourselves from an existing system that already worked. Whether it was your previous employer, a hospital, or whatever, we’re removing ourselves from that system. We’re saying we’re going to go create another system here, a business system. Yet, there’s so many components of it.
00:01:36
And we say that we’re only here to be a technician. And what I see these people do is that they end up hiring other people, other companies in order to do everything else around it, everything the other work of the system and wanting themselves to be propped up. But what that creates is that they just end up being an employee. They end up just employing themselves in a worse system. And the irony is that they never get patience as a result. that if you exist as a business owner in order to be a technician, in order to
00:02:15
get more work for yourself, you’re end up not going to be getting more work. And there comes the term or the phrase uh working on the business, not in the business. If you’re working in the business, you’re working as an employee. You’re not pushing the needle forward. You’re just doing what comes to you versus working on the business means working on the systems, working on the conditions that will bring more patience and growth and so on. All right. The second level is going to be the
00:02:44
managerial level. So I see this a lot in people who own multiple practices. They’re very good managers, but the problem with management is that it’s very good at keeping and sustaining what’s already there and it’s very difficult for growth. So when you’re at a at a managerial level, you’re very good at delegating. You’re very good at organizing groups of people. You’re very good at the interpersonal relationships there. But when it comes to the next level, which is actual entrepreneurship,
00:03:14
visionary work, leadership, and growth, the manager finds a lot of difficulty taking the next step. There’s a big barrier, a mental barrier in working on the business and actually improving it because the manager likes to keep things running smoothly and to improve things means you have to break stuff. You have to stop some stuff in order to start new stuff and that can be very scary for the manager. All right. at a third level, the entrepreneurial level, the visionary level, the level of Elon Musk, Steve
00:03:48
Jobs, Jeff Bezos, whether or not you look up to them, this is the level you must operate at in order to grow a practice. And there’s seven systems that the entrepreneur works on that he takes away himself from the equation of putting his time and energy into the technician work. Because when you’re doing technical work, treatments, when you’re talking with patients, it’s great. It is helping people, but it’s not building an asset. It’s not building the systems of the business itself. You technically are
00:04:26
building some soft skill or soft assets like reputation and so on, but you’re missing a lot of the actual systemic work that needs to be done for business. So if he talks about seven areas of work, marketing, finance, management, leadership, lead generation, and lead conversion. And you need all seven of these in order to create a thriving business. And so the technician will never be able to pull themselves out of the business in order to work on these seven systems and they will always be
00:04:59
focused on doing the work itself which is not part of the seven right and then the people who are managers or sorry it’s management, finance, marketing, customer fulfillment, lead conversion, lead generation and then leadership. So, I think I um messed up something there, but the technicians will never pull themselves out of the work to be able to work on the systems and therefore they will perpetually be out of work because they haven’t built the conditions that bring in more work and then the managers
00:05:35
are too afraid to break the system that’s already there. So, they’re not able to move the needle forward. They’re not able to improve stuff. So, we must exist in the entrepreneurial level. We must understand these systems and we must also be looking at how can we improve it all the time and also how and your job should be to phase away as quickly as possible and continuously phasing yourself away from the job of a technician. So I used to do all the work in the past. I used to be the technician
00:06:05
and when I started my my business I I would do everything and then slowly but surely with every new hire I removed from my plate the things I had to do at a technical level and I would start to work on the systems and marketing finance and all this stuff. So, as a business owner, we have to get very adept at the seven levels, which is one of the reasons why I promote the idea of dentists becoming marketers because it’s such a critical component of the seven levels of business, marketing and leadership in in
00:06:39
particular. So, I hope that is a mindset shift for you that we have to engage at that different level. And if you’re looking to learn marketing, which I hope you do because I hope you start to look at the level of entrepreneurship, if you want to become, if you want to engage as an entrepreneur, you have to learn these seven systems. I know a lot of people who will do business thinking they can just focus on one area and thinking that someone else will take care of the rest. But the problem is you can’t hire people
00:07:12
to take care of the rest unless you grow your business. It’s a catch 22. Like who starts first? And it’s going to have to be you. And one of the main things I believe is that marketing is all-encompassing. Marketing is going to impact all the other areas of your systems. It’s tied very closely with leadership. Marketing is going to affect your lead conversion, your lead generation. It’s going to affect your finances for sure. It’s going to affect your customer fulfillment because it’s
00:07:38
part of it, right? So, you have to understand marketing and dentists have to become marketers in a way. They have to understand marketing. They have to see through the lens of ownership, entrepreneurship and marketing. So if you want to understand that, I’ve made a course specifically for dentists and marketing so that you can understand a strategic level of marketing that helps you grow a practice. I’ll put it in the description. It’s completely free. Check it out. So, thanks for watching this video. I’ll
00:08:10
see you guys in the next one.