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For a half hour once a week, eight people gather in a tiny conference room in the suburbs of St. Louis to talk about a book.
The book and the topic changes every week – sometimes it’s sales, sometimes its customer service – but the goal is always the same: improve the way things work at Dowco Enterprises, Inc.
Maurice Dowell, president of the Chesterfield, Mo.-based landscape and lawn care company, started the book club two years ago as a way to develop the members of his management team.
“It’s done wonders for us. It really has,” Dowell says. “It helps us understand concepts. It’s like growing together. It’s like having a brother or sister or sibling, you have people to help reinforce those ideas and principles.”
The club also acts as a litmus test. It’s a requirement for anyone on the management team, and if you can’t find 30 minutes a week to sit down and discuss it, maybe you’re in the wrong position.
“It really helps give clarity to contributing team members,” Dowell says. “It’s sort of a filter to see if you’re on board or not.”
So, was it easy to get his team to support the idea? “No, they didn’t want to do it,” Dowell says, laughing. But, part of the management team’s mission is to grow themselves professionally, and this program fits that bill.
“I hate to say it, but that was the attitude. It’s like medicine, (or) you’re going to school. One of our key deliverables is growing yourself. This is one of the ways we fulfill that goal. … It’s part of what they do to be a member of the team. I think most people look at it as an opportunity.”
Whatever the reading level, Dowell recommends contractors pick books that mirror their strategic goals for the year – sales, marketing, customer service, etc.
“Everyone on the team is not on the same level, so it becomes challenging when you’ve got to put together a book that will excite and stimulate an office management member as well as a key account manager. It’s been interesting finding the right book and the right format. For them to sit down and read Jim Collins just isn’t going to happen. We have to find that sweet spot.”
Two years later
Since starting the book club in 2008, Dowell says he’s seen his management team become closer, and he’s gained a better understanding of them.
“We’ve come out with a oneness – a very strong team spirit, and a better understanding of each other,” he says. “That’s the most important tangible benefit of these: You really see what makes the wheels turn, how individuals think outside the box. … You understand how they do what they do in a work environment. Once you sit and contribute, banter and share ideas, you get a clear understanding of the individual you’re interacting with on a daily basis.”
Setting out two years ago, that level of understanding wasn’t even on Dowell’s radar. “It was more of a tangible thing; we could reach out and touch some really powerful concepts and it would help, but I didn’t’ realize the human factor.”
The author is editor and associate publisher of Lawn & Landscape. Send him your favorite book title – business or otherwise – at cbowen@gie.net.
Editor’s note:
Dowell’s book club approach is laudable, but not everyone has the time to read everything they want. So, to help out busy contractors, each month, Lawn & Landscape will run a review and synopsis of a business book – either from the accepted literary canon or a more modern classic. The series starts with Michael Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited.” The rest of the year’s reading list includes:
Good to Great
Jim Collins
The Essential Drucker
Peter Drucker
Getting Things Done
David Allen
Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell
Linchpin
Seth Godin
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
212: The Extra Degree
Sam Parker
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen Covey
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli
Marketing Warfare
Al Ries and Jack Trout
See You at the Top
Zig Ziglar
Start your winter reading today. Order your copy at www.lawnandlandscape.com/businessbookshelf.
The E-myth revisited
By Matt LaWell
You might say that Michael E. Gerber has lived a charmed life. Whatever he has wanted to do during his last 73 wandering years, he has done. And whatever he has done, he has done well.
As a boy, Gerber studied music and played the saxophone. Some said he played it brilliantly. As a young man, he lost interest in college and dropped out after a year to focus on poetry and art.
He joined the Army for a stretch, but came home to care for his mother. He rode around Europe on a motor scooter and soaked in the continent’s cultures. He sold encyclopedias door to door across America for much of the 1960s.
During his 30s, Gerber turned his attention to contracting and construction, and studied the trade until he got it right, often working alongside men half his age.
Later, on the brink of 40, he landed in Northern California at the birth of the technological revolution and, after years of learning about what worked for businesses of all sizes, was welcomed as a consultant by some of the first companies in Silicon Valley.
And that consultant work is, more or less, what Gerber has been doing for the last 30 or so years. He founded his own company, E-Myth Worldwide, and authored more than a dozen books, including “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.” (The E in E-Myth stands not for electronic, but for entrepreneur.)
Along the way, business owners heralded Gerber as an expert and a guru. He has helped so many companies – more than 65,000 across 145 countries at last count – and so many of his business principles are available in the wildly successful “The E-Myth Revisited.” Here are a few of them.
All of us have multiple personalities. We all have an inner entrepreneur, manager and technician. The entrepreneur is the visionary, the manager is the organizer and the technician is the one who goes out and does the work. If those personalities were balanced, we would be efficient, but they’re not. For most of us, it’s about a 10-20-70 split, with a heavy emphasis on doing the work. Try to stay balanced.
Your business can be as big as you want it to be. Only you, as the owner of your company, can limit its growth and its size – and most owners do that by shrinking away from the unknown. The key is to step outside of your comfort zone and stay there.
Have an entrepreneurial perspective. How will your company work? How will it produce results that lead to profits? What is its future? And how can you get there? If you view your business as a job, rather than as a business, it will never be anything other than a job.
Plan every aspect of your business. The key to building your business – and, perhaps, ultimately selling it for a healthy profit – is to plan every last detail for the future. What are your business goals? Who are your customers? How can you better benchmark information? Without a plan, you have no business. And without a business, all you have is a job.
Work on your business, not in it. Your business is not your life, nor should it be. So many owners work 12-, 14-, 16-, even 18-hour days during the first months or years after opening a new business, immersed in every angle. But after a while, you need to step back and become less of a technician and more of a manager. Make your business tick, rather than doing the ticking yourself.
The author is a freelance writer in Cleveland, Ohio.
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