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This E-Myth notion of "working on it not in it" has to be – by far – the most unanimously embraced concept and seemingly, the most elusive. I would go so far as to say that it is the number one reason business owners from  around the globe attend a two-day intensive training here in the Sonoma wine country to work on their business not just in their business. They all have some moment of realization that they may have to actually leave it (work) – vacate it – in order to work on it. Oh yes, they come for the wine too. Over a bold glass of Zinfandel, most report that they have tried to balance their days, weeks & months to include some strategic work but have found that the seemingly endless tactical and technical needs of the business completely engulf any and all good intentions. Are you with me?

Becoming a True Business Owner

I’ll never forget the very wise and brave Insurance Agent at one of these seminars who decided that it was time he became an Insurance Business Owner. Don’t misunderstand – he had owned the business for years and had built a very successful practice – a place the technician in him could freely practice technical work without the interference of a boss. At first it was freeing and satisfying for him but later it became overwhelming and binding. He described the feeling he had when he stayed up all night reading The E-Myth Revisited and felt the excitement of a way out. As a result of reading the book, he decided he would start thinking more like an entrepreneur and less like a technician and would commit time daily to work on his business too. Years went by and he became accustomed to the idea of working on it, of having a business that was self sustaining but the idea never manifested into anything more than an idea and a few random documented systems.

Finally, tired of the routine, tired of feeling trapped with no apparent end in sight – he decided to make the boldest, scariest move that a technician can make; he decided to stop doing technical work – cold turkey! He committed to leaving the business for six weeks and focus completely on the business of building a business that works. He would spend the next six weeks in the library doing the strategic work of working on his business – or at least attempt to. He described the expectation he had that the business would suffer in new revenue and policy holders in the short-term and of the discomfort his staff and his wife at home would have during these six weeks. What he didn’t expect was that the person who would suffer the most and have the most discomfort was himself.

As any addict knows, detox is a hard journey and it is certainly no different for a "technical work" addict. The first few days away from the business in the library were painful. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Where would he start? What did it really mean to think strategically and systemically? Maybe he was a man without a vision and if so, what did that mean? He ached for the experience of feeling productive – of winning a new client or even answering the phone. He wondered what was happening in the business and questioned his sanity for even thinking of leaving it. Did he really want to blow up his life? What a mess! He decided after two days of torture that he would give himself until the end of the week and if nothing happened by then, he would return to the comfort and safety of the technical work on Monday.

Thursday morning came and he arrived at the library at 8:30 am as he had for the three previous days. But this morning he felt different. He felt a clarity he hadn’t experienced before. The day-to-day detail of the business seemed smaller while the overall function of an insurance business seemed larger. He felt lighter and in an odd way empty of the need to get to work - at least in the way he used to. Objective at last, he began working on his business.

A New Perspective

At the end of the six weeks, three unexpected results happened. First, his business did not lose revenue; in fact, it increased compared to the same time period the year before. Second, his staff had been more productive in his absence than ever before. They embraced the opportunity to rise to the occasion and enjoyed the experience of not having a technician for a boss. And third, he found that he was not the same person.

He defined being productive in an entirely new way:

• His business looked different – He saw the business as a highly functioning network of systems.
• His clients looked different – He could see his target market with clarity and had a new-found passion to better shape the business to serve them.
• His financials looked different – They painted a picture of the overall performance of the business and he embraced that information rather than hiding from it.
• His employees and his future employees looked different – He could see their potential and what he could – and should – expect from them.
• His life looked different – He could see the life he had created for himself and could now envision the life he wanted to intentionally create.

The Insurance Agent finally became an Insurance Business Owner.

Sometimes, we have to leave the business, vacate the comfort of our offices and daily interruptions to be able to see our businesses objectively.

Strategic work is difficult and does not come easy to most. The Insurance Agent had to leave his business to get the strategic perspective he knew he needed.

Once he did, he knew he could never go back to the reality of his "technician’s addiction." Sometimes the best thing you can do to work on your business is to free yourself from the technical reality of the day-to-day for a period of time – stop cold turkey – to leverage the entrepreneurial perspective in a different environment, and then come back to the business on your own terms, as an Entrepreneurial Leader.

Drs. Martin Elliot and Allan Goldman of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, Bloomsbury, London, England are cardiac surgeons and Formula One racing fans. The good doctors know first-hand that the transfer of a patient from their operating room to the intensive care unit is a complicated and error-prone event, demanding close attention, lots of equipment and much data in a short time span. They observed that their patient transfer procedure was similar to the complex, high-stress and time-critical tasks done by race teams. They decided to launch Operation Pit Stop.

They went to work, first with the McLaren F1 race team and then with Ferrari to understand the structured processes used by the race crews and to translate that knowledge into a restructuring of the patient transfer procedure.

The doctors and the race specialists worked together at the Ferrari home base in Modena, Italy, in the hot pits of the British Grand Prix, and in the Great Ormond Street Hospital operating rooms and intensive care unit. The medical team saw that each member of the Ferrari crew was required to do a specific job, in a specific sequence, and often in silence. In contrast, the patient transfer was often chaotic.

The result was a major restructuring of the patient transfer procedure that stemmed directly from the race team lessons. After adopting the new protocol, the medical team compared a total of 50 transfers; half before the new protocol, and half afterwards. The average number of technical errors per transfer fell 42 percent and information errors fell 49 percent.

"We had all being doing our jobs for years and we thought we were pretty good at it," said team member Dr. Nick Pigott. "Then, after we had been with the Ferrari team, we watched videos of ourselves at work and it was quite a shock to realize the lack of structure in what we were doing. There is no doubt that it is our research with Ferrari that has honed our transfer from theatre to intensive care to the level of silent precision it is today."

"When we look at the number of critical instances we encounter, they have reduced markedly since we introduced the modified training protocol developed from what we have learned from Formula 1," said Dr. Martin Elliott. "International, main-stream media interest has widely disseminated our results, engaging many more people in the patient safety agenda, and emphasising the need to look at the system – not just the individuals – to improve quality of care."

We congratulate the Operation Pit Stop team, and encourage all to seek innovative solutions, to orchestrate new systems and to quantify performance results in the iterative cycle of improvement.

Further reading

• Clinical Handovers: Patient Transfers - Learning from Motor Racing & Aviation
• Ferrari Pit Stop Saves Alexander's Life
• Ferrari Doctors
• How Can Formula 1 be Useful for Healthcare?

Have you adopted an innovation from another industry? Post a comment and let the group know.

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