I just finished "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael E. Gerber (ISBN 0887307280). For those of you not in the know, it is a book about running a successfull small business. Even if most of the material was familiar in some form before I read the book, it still blew me away with some of the thinking.

Much of the book is about developing your business so that it isn't totally dependent on you. Parts of it is written as a dialog between Mr. Gerber and Sarah, the owner of a pie-baking business. Sarah has swamped herself in the business to the degree that nothing of it runs without her direct intervention. No holidays, no sickdays, no nothing but work for Sarah. Gerbers solution is to think of the business as a franchise. You have to imagine that the model of your business must be cloneable to thousands of instances, all working as peckable as the first. You don't actually have to franchise, but it is agreeable that this kind of thinking leads to businesses that have easier exit strategies, ie. you can more easily sell a business like this.

I did find this image of franchisability qute alluring, and then I turned back on our business and started thinking about the applicability. What I know about franchises (business franchises that is), they have a heavy reliance on written documentation for how things are handled. Initially this turned me down, how could our industry, based so much on creativity be modelled that exactly? How could you produce a "Operations Manual for Small Game Shop"? Wouldn't that just stiffle creativity?

Then it started dawning on me that I had confused product with process. What franchises do, they document the process. You can't reliably document a pizza can you? Now I started seeing parallels to software processes like Xtreme Programming. One part of the XP process is that a software team in itself contains much of the documentation of a projet. The team contains the spirit, something that is hard to transfer to paper. This does not mean that XP has to be transfered personally. It just means that XP projects needs to be transfered personally. Take the pizza franchise, the pizza needs to be served a certain amount of time after baking, it can't just be included in some manual. So the process, not the product.

Then the light finally ignited. I had personal history working in such a replicating organization that required outmost adaptability. I had been as a conscript officer in the army. This really hummed my ears. As a officer pupil we were required at times to lead and organize large events, my biggest task was running a qualification exam during a boot camp. The camp itself was two weeks long and the exam was the most significant scoring event for the recruits. Based on the results from the exam they were allowed into the different appointments there was available. The exam was organized as a course throught the woods with checkpoints were different skills were tested. Each pair of recruits took about 2 hours to get throught the exam and the course was some kilometers long. What immediately dawned was that there was no way I could run this thing by watching over each NCO that had a checkpoint. So instead we created a "operations manual" a set of guidelines for all the NCO:s that they had to follow. They worked independently on their appointed chekpoints but the overall structure was such that the course seemed like designed by a single individual. When the course actually started running all I had to do was run throught the course and tune it.
But the one who really used scripting was our drill officer, he had us essentially running the most important event during the recruit period without a glitch. People who six months earlier had been recruits themselves.

The thing that I really learnt in the army was that the script itself was not the goal, but the scripting. Anyone who has been to a larger camp, or been to the field, knows that most rules don't simply hold. But the desire to try to organize, and the foundation of organizing and creating scripts is what differentiates success from failure. The idea that all persons are essentially equal, most people can be trained for most duties. In such an organization even overperformers are at home, they can advance quickly to whatever job they like and in the end contribute to the system as whole.

I don't know if this is a thread started or just airing out a lot of food for tought. I would be very interested in hearing from you guys how you have scripted your business, how you are developing it.

I listened to one of Michael Gerber's audio programs years ago, and it really changed my thinking as to how I ran the business. It taught me the difference between being self-employed (i.e. an attorney who opens up a law practice) vs. being a business owner (i.e. the attorneys who founded California Pizza Kitchen and then sold it to Pepsi for millions).

I am definitely not there yet. Without my personal involvement, Dexterity would fall apart. But I am working to systematize more and more of the business so that it doesn't depend so much on me. My major goal is to get the business to the point where it can sustain itself and even slowly continue to grow w/o my presence. Then I can focus all my efforts on growing (working on the business) instead of maintaining (working in the business).

I suspect to a lot of indies I come off as being all about cold-blooded business and not about creativity and all. Nothing could be further from the truth!

But I do think that what you're talking about is extremely important. To my mind, this is probably the last difference between a hobbyist and a professional. There's nothing at all wrong with working as an indie game developer in your off-hours or full-time but on your own. But just as there's a definite jump between those two, there's another equally difficult jump to the non-personal "franchisable" model.

Which isn't to say that we ever become unimportant to our business, or that you could slot in any programmer or designer and it would run just as well. But the point is to get to the place where you aren't the bottleneck for everything, and where others can magnify your efforts. I hit this big time with my UI consulting -- I kept wanting to "grow the business" but all this meant was I was always doing 1.5 persons' worth of work. Getting enough work to justify 2 people will kill you; you can't grow that way. You have to de-personalize the business first, take it out of your head, and then you can grow it.

I haven't read the book, but none of this makes any sense to me. To me, a small game designer is more like a novelist than a fast food restauranteur. Could Orson Scott Card, or Stephen King, or Danielle Steel "franchise" out their businesses? Would it help any of them to have a process manual? Do they have "exit strategies" (other than an eventual personal retirement plan)? Why should a small game developer be any different?

Now, if you really want to be a game publisher, or if you want to become a large game development studio, madly churning out cookie-cutter properties in search of the elusive hit title, then all of this stuff starts to make more sense.

One great book I recently read was The Power of Focus by Mark Victor Hansen, Jack Canfield, and Les Hewitt. The first two authors are the same one who wrote the highly success Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

One problem that they tackled in this book better than any other I've read is what to do when you find yourself stuck in a situation with too many responsibilities. I.e. your business has grown to the point where you're stuck doing 40 different kinds of tasks. My current project list, for instance, has over 200 projects on it. It will take me over a year to finish just what's on the list now, and new ideas are spawned every week. If I include all the items on my someday/maybe list as well, we're talking 3-5 years of work. On one hand, it's comforting to have such clarity about what I'll be doing for years in advance. But on the other hand, I'd love to be able to acquire the benefits of those projects in a much shorter time.

So the advice in The Power of Focus is to hire a personal assistant. I really liked this idea when I first read it. Very few indies could afford to hire someone to perform any one specific task, since there just isn't enough work to justify hiring and training someone. But if you hire a person who can handle 10+ different tasks, it can indeed be worthwhile even when you're just starting out. Even a part-time college student working for less than $10/hr can handle a lot of simple tasks like screening/sorting email and postal mail, handle basic tech support, some QA, installing and upgrading software, running errands, doing basic market research, bookkeeping, burning and shipping CDs, etc. Even if you offload just a few hours a week of this type of work, it allows you to focus on the work that really makes a difference.

Originally posted by milo
I haven't read the book, but none of this makes any sense to me. To me, a small game designer is more like a novelist than a fast food restauranteur. Could Orson Scott Card, or Stephen King, or Danielle Steel "franchise" out their businesses? Would it help any of them to have a process manual? Do they have "exit strategies" (other than an eventual personal retirement plan)? Why should a small game developer be any different?


The E-Myth is about entrepreneurs who are working to build a business. It doesn't apply to self-employed people like writers and actors who are intentionally choosing to be self-employed. It applies more to someone like a lawyer who builds his own legal practice and wonders why he's struggling to grow his business when he's spending most of his time practicing law. So if you go indie to write games yourself, you may not really be building a business. You're self-employed, but there's no business that exists independently of you. One of the reasons I expanded Dexterity into publishing is so that we could serve indies who wanted to make games w/o having to become business experts at the same time. Some indies really do think and act like entrepreneurs, but IMHO most don't have that mentality. Growing a business requires a whole different skill set than making a good game.

Even so, there was a fiction writer (can't recall her name... V.C. Andrews maybe?) who died, and the company who owns the rights to her works continues having other writers create new books under her name. So her franchise didn't actually need her to continue to thrive.

And there are variations even within the "self-employed" model. Gary Trudeau reportedly hasn't drawn -- much less inked -- a final panel for Doonesbury for years and years. He still directs it, but has others doing this for him. And of course "The Simpsons" outgrew Matt Groening's ability to keep up with the amount of art needed almost immediately (probably before it graduated from the Tracy Ullmans show), but it has still retained its own identity.

And likewise, while Thomas Edison is often held up as a model of entrepreneurship, persistence, and invention, the fact is that he basically ran an "invention factory" with (I believe) dozens of people working on inventions for him.

Now, if you really want to be a game publisher, or if you want to become a large game development studio, madly churning out cookie-cutter properties in search of the elusive hit title, then all of this stuff starts to make more sense.

This suggests an excluded-middle fallacy to me. It's not that you have to choose between being a self-employed "doing it for love" indie developer OR becoming a large faceless studio unconcerned with turning out crap. There's a huge (and largely unexplored) amount of territory in the middle!

I read E-Myth last year, and the subject Sarah was frustrated with her career. Gerber told her she was trying to do too much and it was burning her out. For this woman, growing the business by not fearing growth and learning to delegate was the solution she needed. Gerber's idea of "approaching your business as a franchise" doesn't necessarily mean you have to hire people, but it does mean you document what you do and what needs to get done as a way of developing successful practices. Even if it's just you in the business and that's the way you want it, the act of writing down your steps as if you were putting together instructions for a franchisee is an excellent way to discover your processes. And if you ever started to burn out or wanted to grow later on, you'll be well on your way to handing off the information your staff will need to know.

Anyhow, that's what I got out of it. :D If you're happy with your work and how well your small game company is doing right now, you can safely ignore most of the advice in this thread. But if you're not achieving the success or happiness you want, you have to ask yourself why and what can you do about it. This is one thing to try. I thought it was a good read.