I Read the Book. Then I Built the Trap Anyway
Part I of The Checkmate Strategy traces twenty books that shaped the way I think. This is the fifth — and the last formation post before the lesson series begins on 3 September.
There is a particular kind of professional failure that looks, from the outside, exactly like success.
The business is growing. The clients are satisfied. The work is good. And the person at the centre of it is working harder than they have ever worked in their lives — not because the business demands it, but because without them, nothing moves.
Michael E. Gerber called this the E-Myth. And he was right about almost everything.
What Gerber Argued
The E-Myth Revisited is built around a single, uncomfortable observation. Most people who start businesses are not entrepreneurs. They are technicians — skilled practitioners who have decided to work for themselves rather than for someone else. And the fatal assumption most of them make is that understanding the technical work is sufficient to run a business built around it.
It is not.
Gerber's distinction is precise and devastating. A business built around a technician is not a business. It is a job — one the technician has given to themselves, with longer hours, more responsibility and no one to blame when things go wrong. The moment the technician stops working, the business stops functioning. The owner has not built something. They have trapped themselves inside something.
His solution is equally precise. Build systems. Create processes that do not depend on your personal involvement to function. Design the business so that it could, in principle, run without you — not because you intend to leave, but because a business that requires your constant presence is not a business at all.
The Honest Admission
I read The E-Myth Revisited before I started my practice.
I understood the argument completely. I agreed with it. I found it compelling, well-reasoned and practically useful.
And then I built exactly the practice it warned me not to build.
Not through ignorance. Not through carelessness. But through the slow accumulation of decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time — taking on the client who needed a quick turnaround, handling the complex case personally because it was faster than explaining it, being the person who knew every client's situation because that was what they were paying for.
By the time the practice had grown to six people and hundreds of clients, I was the system. Every significant decision passed through me. Significantly all the relationships were mine. Every piece of complex work required my involvement.
The book had named this trap years before I walked into it. I walked in anyway.
Why This Happens
Gerber understands why technicians build technician-dependent businesses. It is not stupidity. It is identity.
The technician's value — the thing that made them good enough to start a business in the first place — is their personal skill, judgement and relationships. Systematising the work feels like replacing the thing that made the work good. Delegating feels like diluting. Building processes feels like bureaucracy imposed on craft.
So the technician keeps doing the work personally. And the business grows around them until the work has grown larger than any one person can sustainably carry.
The recognition that this had happened in my own practice was one of the more uncomfortable moments in a career that had several. Not because the practice was failing — it was not. But because the gap between what I had read and what I had built was impossible to ignore once I looked at it directly.
What It Eventually Produced
The E-Myth did not change how I built the practice. It changed how I understood what I had built — and what to do about it.
The eventual decision to sell was shaped, in part, by this understanding. Not a failure but a recognition — the practice had been built around me, had served its purpose well, and had reached the natural limit of what that kind of structure could sustainably produce. Selling it was not retreat. It was the honest conclusion of a chapter that the E-Myth had helped me read clearly.
It also changed how I worked at i6. A technology business navigating a pandemic, a Venture Debt round and a Series B cannot afford to be built around any single person's involvement. The discipline of building systems, creating processes and ensuring that the work functions beyond individual contribution became not a theoretical preference but a practical necessity.
The Connection to The Win
The Checkmate Strategy describes The Win as the discipline of defining success honestly before pursuing it. Winning that is not defined deliberately will be defined by default — by whatever arrives fastest, rewards most visibly or feels most natural to the person doing the work.
The E-Myth trap is a failure of The Win. The technician does not decide to build a technician-dependent business. They simply do the work that comes naturally — and the business forms around that default rather than around a deliberate design.
Gerber's book asks the question The Win insists on answering first. What kind of business are you actually trying to build? And is the way you are working right now moving you toward that — or away from it?
The Question Worth Sitting With
Most capable professionals are extremely good at the work. The question The E-Myth forces is a different one entirely.
Is the way you are currently working building something that could function without you — or are you the system?
If the answer is the latter, the first step is not to work harder. It is to look honestly at what has been built — and decide whether that is the business you intended to create or simply the one that formed by default while you were busy doing the work.
That is the E-Myth. And reading it before you build something does not, as it turns out, guarantee that you will avoid it.
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