Back Home and Some Required Reading

Looks like the extra hour today is just what I needed to completely recover from my travels. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been out of town attending and even presenting at (yikes!) a few conferences last month. Now that I’m back home for at least a few weeks until I take a much needed vacation to Florida (yay!), the blog and the newsletter will return to it’s regularly scheduled programming.

One good thing about traveling cross country in an airplane is that you have plenty of time to catch up on reading. I finally got around reading those back issues of American Style, American Craft, Ornament, and The Crafts Report that I’ve been meaning to get to for the past few months. The most dangerous thing in my carry-ons was my magazine stash…ouch those things can get pretty heavy.

In addition to the magazines, I’ve even managed to get to some books that’s been on my reading list for a while. One of the books was “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber which is I guess the sequel to this previous book, “The E-Myth”. Now I hadn’t read “The E-Myth”, but I found “The E-Myth Revisited” to be a great read especially if you’re like most artists who run a one person shop.

The main point of the book is that most small businesses fail because the business ends up running the owner’s life instead of the owner running the business. Most small business owners start their businesses so they can make a living doing something they love or so they can be their own boss. But after a while, most small business owners find that they are just as controlled by their business as they would by any “boss” because the day to day operations of the business are totally dependent on them…even (or especially) if they have employees. So the business they built to escape from having a job, becomes just that…another job (does any of this seems familiar?).

Author Michael Gerber explains in “The E-Myth Revisited” that business owners should design their businesses like a franchise. Not in the literal sense in that we should all build the next McDonald’s or big box chain, but that we should design our businesses so that they can run without us. Rather, we should have our business become a means to an end rather than to be an extension of ourselves.

All in all, it was a pretty good read and the author gave some good tips on how to design a self-sustaining business that I plan to try out in the future.

The second book was Seth Godin’s newest one called, “Tribes“. Like most of his books, it was a really quick read, I managed to get through it on my car ride from Virginia Beach to Baltimore. But the small size shouldn’t fool you. As usual, Seth packs some pretty thought-provoking stuff in this book. In a nutshell, “Tribes” is about the power of groups and the necessity for leaders coming forth to lead them. With the advent of the Internet and especially with the explosion of social networking tools like Facebook, self-selected groups or “tribes” no longer constrained by geography are multiplying at a rapid rate. Tribes are described as groups of people brought together around a common interest, like a hobby, or a sports team, or a social cause, a product, or business interest. In the book, Seth talks about tribes, leadership, and how people are using some of the social networking tools as a way to create and lead various tribes all around the world.

Like most of Seth’s books, Tribes is not a “how-to” book, but a grand “idea” book. With examples and case studies on how people lead tribes all over the world, this book is great if you’re wanting to learn more about how followings and tribes get built and maintained and how ordinary people can lead them.

If you’re more of the “how-to” rather than a “big idea” person, you can download the companion ebook that has more case studies here. Plus you can get a big list of tribe building ideas here. But either way, it’s a good idea to read Tribes to get the basis premise.

Tagged as: art business, art marketing