Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies

In this companion to The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber focuses more directly on how entrepreneurial ideas are imagined, defined, and translated into businesses. The book encourages owners to begin with a clear vision of the customer, the experience they intend to create, and the enterprise they ultimately want to build. The book is less operationally indispensable than The E-Myth Revisited and occasionally presents entrepreneurship in overly sweeping terms. Nevertheless, it can be useful for owners who have become trapped in daily work and need to reconsider the larger purpose and design of their business.

Readers will learn how Gerber distinguishes the entrepreneur from the manager and technician, how an entrepreneurial vision is developed, and how a business can be intentionally designed around a customer promise. Mentors can use the book to move conversations from immediate operating problems toward the owner's longer-term conception of the enterprise.