bombs in bottles
I did two things last week: I ran a band camp, and I read The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber.
The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber (full text pdf at the Internet Archive)
I picked up The E-Myth Revisited on a recommendation from a family member. Said family member suggested it would help me understand what a business with solid fundamentals looks like, which in turn would make it easier to identify good stock picks.
The E-Myth Revisited is a quick and easy read; it's reasonably engaging, but it doesn't get too deep or technical.
What stood out to me, reading it during the same week I was running a marching band camp, is this: Running a well-ordered business is exactly the same thing as running a well-ordered marching band program.
It is EXACTLY the same thing. There are ZERO meaningful differences.
Both systems depend on a leading vision, from which the system derives. Both clearly define roles and tasks within those roles, so anyone can do any role and see how any role fits with any other. Both, when done correctly, free up the head of the whole thing to handle the truly "big picture" tasks: envisioning a way forward and making it happen. Neither runs well when the head tries to pull the cart themselves; both run well when responsiblities are clearly defined and shared across the organization.
In a well-run business, the owner spends zero time mopping floors or sorting out disputes between workers who are confused about their roles. In a well-run band program, I spend zero time picking up after kids or reminding them to grab their stuff. (There is drama, but they're high schoolers.) An owner of a well-run business can walk away for a year and come back to find the business doing better than when they left. In my best programs, my subs have complained about boredom because "the kids just did everything. They all know what needs to be done and they do it. I just took attendance."
In both systems, the system running well makes any attached numbers - revenues, profits, headcounts, scores - take care of themselves. In both cases, you can't get consistently good numbers without a system, but with a system you don't have to care about those numbers at all. They're just good.
I've spent most of my life telling myself that it's fine I don't understand business, because there's something sordid about the whole thing anyway that We Artists are meant to rise above as people (perhaps to compensate ourselves for the lack of basic respect for what we do). The more I've gotten interested lately in tracking my own finances, however, the more interested I've become in how business runs the world.
There's something relieving and something galling about realizing that I have, in essence, been running a well-ordered business for over a decade now. It puts the lie to any remaining assumptions I had that business is too hard for me to grasp. Running a well-ordered business may be hard, but so is running a well-ordered marching band program. "Hard" doesn't mean "undoable"; "hard" is well within my wheelhouse.
It's mildly annoying that I spent so much of my life hearing the arts were somehow inferior to business as a career, only to discover they require THE SAME SKILL SET to run well. I want to call up anyone who ever gave me crap about working in the pageantry arts and say "my marching band program experience taught me how to pick stocks; how's your portfolio look?"
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