I was reviewing one of my favorite books the other day, and one of them is The eMyth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It is a book that will remind you that you really should build your internet business just like Ray Crock did at McDonald’s.
A lot of people mistakenly believe that The eMyth is about the electronics age, or email, or e-commerce, but actually, E is for entrepreneurial myth. In The eMyth Gerber goes through an example of how McDonald’s was able to franchise its business all across the world and the systems they used to do that.
As a matter of fact, Gerber points out that a new McDonalds franchise opens somewhere in the world every eight minutes. This is remarkable and only possible because the McDonalds business is completely systemized.
Every tiny detail that is involved in running a McDonalds is documented in McDonalds’ procedure manuals. How big the hamburgers should be, what the buns should look like, how thick the patties should be, they even have a procedure for where the pickles go. Crock recognized that if you place the pickles in a particular configuration, you could keep them from falling off of the hamburger into the customer’s lap, therefore increasing customer satisfaction.
All of these tiny details are precisely documented in McDonalds’ procedure manuals. The impact of this careful documentation is twofold. One, it makes McDonald’s run like a finely oiled machine. It gives the consistency of experience at every McDonalds that you go to. In fact, I’ve been to McDonald’s in Tokyo and Korea, in Texas, in Tennessee, they’re all the same.
Actually, as a side note, McDonald’s in Tokyo also serves noodles, which kind of freaked me out a little bit, but that’s neither here nor there.
Do You Build Your Internet Business Like McDonalds?
So, the point is if you systemize your business you can give the consistency of customer experience. The other point is you can build your internet business where it can easily be run by someone else or sold. That’s what makes McDonalds franchisable.
When somebody buys a McDonald’s shop, they’re buying a turnkey business that makes it possible for anyone who’s got the money to invest in buying a McDonald’s and being successful on a very predictable schedule. The great thing about McDonald’s in this regard is that they have so much data because they’ve sold so many hamburgers they know exactly what’s going to happen the moment you buy the franchise.
How does all this gibberish about McDonald’s can help you build your internet business? Well, the same two ideas apply. If you can completely procedurize and systematize your business, you can easily do two things. The first thing you can easily do is you can easily outsource the work in your business.
If you’ve carefully documented the procedures, for example, for transcribing and posting a blog post, then you can outsource the transcription and posting of a blog post. In fact, this very blog post is being transcribed at this very moment by my transcriptionist, Loretta.
The second thing you can do is someday sell your business. After all, you would expect a website to typically be worth about 10 times the amount of money that it earns in a month. Some people say 12, some people say 14, but you get the idea. That value goes up tremendously if the business doesn’t depend on you actually running it.
There’s a third benefit, and that is if you have a successful business and got it carefully documented, that successful business can be duplicated, exactly in the McDonalds case. You can change these businesses and duplicate them yourself, or you can document the way you are running your business and sell that as an ebook that can help people understand how to successful run an internet business.
So, build your internet business like McDonald’s and just like Ray Crock you will love the results. Thanks. My name is Mark Mason, I’m from MasonWorld.com, and I’m happy to help you learn how to run a part time internet business successfully.
Have a great day!
photo credit: riNux
