When I read The E-Myth Revisited, I have to admit my first impression was “What a load of crap!” After all, it takes 200 pages to say what could be said in less than 10. I’m busy. I don’t have time for that.

Through analogies to the world of McDonald’s franchises and small bakeries alike, author Michael Gerber treads old ground about standardizing and optimizing your business processes. I’m no snobby process wonk, but the smell of old-school TQM Duh-ness, re-branded for entrepreneurs lingered in the air.

In the year since I read it, I’ve launched my first product and gone through the kind of metamorphosis that can only occur once you’ve become a business owner. You get deeply entrenched in what you’re doing, and it’s really hard at times to step back and look at the big picture.

That’s where the appreciation for The E-Myth Revisited comes in.

The E-Myth Revisited is like a piece of string tied around your finger to remind you to document your business processes. Once you have them documented, you can start to analyze them and see where they can be improved.

Little issues keep on popping up because I’m forgetting where I stored this file or that. I forget how I performed a certain task the time before and have to re-figure it out. And worst of all, last month I forgot to do one manual step in the release process that ended up costing me a lot of time and money.

Obviously, I needed to start E-Myth-ing my own dog food.

Now, I document practically everything I do. I just open up Excel and knock out a quick flowchart. I save the file to a designated directory then print out the flowchart. The flowchart goes into a 3-ring binder that contains all my business process information.

My goal? To be able to tell my wife, “If I die, everything you need to know to run BreezeTree Software is in that binder.”