Glow Pros Academy
Mini Module I
Why being good at the work makes the business harder
The Glow Edit. Business education for the aesthetic and wellness field, written from a working clinic.
Module specification
- Framework
- The E-Myth Principle, Michael Gerber, 1986
- Field
- Small business management
- Duration
- 10 minutes reading, 20 minutes practical
- Prerequisites
- None
- Strand
- Pillar VI, Systems & Standardisation
- Benchmark
- National occupational standards for enterprise
On completion you will be able to
- Distinguish the three operating roles within a small business
- Audit how your own working hours divide between them
- Identify one undocumented process and begin standardising it
Being excellent at the treatment is part of why the business is hard, not proof that it should be easy.
Section A · The situation
Nine at night, and the laptop is still open
The treatments went well. The clients were lovely.
Now you are sitting with a laptop doing the part nobody trained you for. Rebooking. Invoices. The reply to the woman asking whether it will work on her. Ordering. The post you meant to write on Sunday.
And underneath it, quietly, the thought that you are somehow not very good at this. Despite being extremely good at the actual work.
Michael Gerber wrote down why that happens in 1986. Not about clinics. About bakeries and plumbers and small firms of every kind.
Section B · The theory
The entrepreneurial seizure
Gerber begins with a moment he calls the entrepreneurial seizure. The day the skilled person thinks: I am good at this, and I am doing it for somebody else, so why not do it for myself.
A reasonable thought. Built, he says, on a fatal assumption.
That being good at the work means you can run a business that does the work.
Those are not the same skill. They are barely related.
Three roles, one of you
Every small business needs three roles filled. Most of us are one person doing all three, and doing two of them badly, because nobody mentioned there were three.
What Gerber found in a typical owner's week
Not through laziness about the other two. Technician work is urgent, visible and immediately rewarding. Somebody is in the room. Somebody is grateful.
Manager and Entrepreneur work is none of those things. So it slides to nine at night, and then to never.
You were never doing it wrong. You were handed one of the three roles and left to work the other two out alone.
Before you go on
- When you picture the business two years from now, is the picture mostly about the work you would be doing, or what the business would be doing without you?
- If you were ill for a fortnight, which parts would simply stop, and which would carry on?
- Whose job is it to decide what your prices should be next year? Answer honestly rather than technically.
Section C · Mini audit
Practical
The Role Allocation Audit
Take last week, not this one, because you will be optimistic about this one. Go through the diary hour by hour and put every working hour into one of the three roles. Include the evenings.
If your total is small, the split still matters. A quiet diary is capacity, not failure, and the same three roles decide what fills it.
| Role | Hours | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TechnicianTreatments, consultations, aftercare | |||
| ManagerSystems, ordering, admin, the diary | |||
| EntrepreneurPricing, positioning, direction | |||
| Total working hours | 100 |
Now shade your own bar, one block per ten per cent, using the three colours.
Section D · The reveal
What you have just done
That was a role allocation audit. It sits in the Systems and Standardisation strand of the Glow Pros method, and it is the kind of diagnostic a level four operations unit opens with.
You did not need a classroom for it. You needed somebody to tell you the three roles existed.
Section E · Your action step
Twenty minutes this week. One process, out of your head and onto a page.
Name one thing nobody else could pick up if you were ill tomorrow. How you set up a room. How you handle a late cancellation. What you say to somebody who asks whether it hurts.
Then write it down so a stranger could follow it.
Type it here, or print the page and write it by hand.
Mini Module I at a glance
- Skill at the work and skill at running the business are different things
- Three roles: Technician, Manager, Entrepreneur
- Most owners sit near 70, 20 and 10, and the 10 is where growth lives
- A business is the sum of what it can do without you
- It grows one written-down process at a time
From the deck
Card
The E-Myth Principle
· · ·
Most clinics are not businesses. They are jobs that own the person who created them.
Every framework in the Glow Mastery Programme has a card. More than a hundred of them, one for each thing you learn.
The reverse carries the origin, the theory and the standards it maps to. That side comes with the deck, which arrives when you enrol.
You have just earned this one.
Reply and tell me which of the three roles you have not been in for a month.
I read every reply myself, and it decides what gets taught next.
Amelia x
Founder, Glow Pros Academy
The Glow Edit is the weekly mini module from Glow Pros Academy, the business education for UK aesthetic and wellness clinic owners. Written from a working clinic, not a coaching desk. This page prints on two sides of A4 if you would rather work on paper.
