Michael Gerber

Here's the problem with phones - they are a ready-made diversion from the considerably harder work of growing a business.

Opening a business is going to be hard work, no matter what choices you make. If you decide to fall on your sword and just slog through all the work as an operator instead of an owner, then you take responsibility for the entire operation and the actions of the business.

No matter what your company does - build, manage, produce, import - as an owner, you can't avoid the hard work and skip straight to success. No class can give you that, no YouTube video can teach it, and no book can mark it off your list.

The kind of work you do, when you do it, how much of it there is, and who you delegate it to are often the cause of the quasi-schizophrenic behavior seen in many business owners and entrepreneurs.

There are three things that can be organized: time, space, and work. Note that, despite what many believe, you cannot organize people - you can only organize the work that people do.

Strategic Work is all about the big questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Tactical Work is all about answers: This is the system we use to do each task. This is how we do it, how we measure it, how we monitor it.

The more Strategic Work you do, the more effective, productive, and joyful the Tactical Work becomes.

Your first job, as an owner and an entrepreneur, has to be to understand how the business is going to actually work.

Steve Jobs didn't seek solace among minimum wage workers. He sought it from highly educated men and women who understood and shared his focus on growth, technology, and company-building.

I'm not here to tell you what your average needs to be, but it would seem to me that one way to protect yourself, as an entrepreneur, from the dreaded average is to understand what that looks like in your industry, your business, and your personal life and take the steps to be above average.

Ray Kroc called his first McDonald's restaurant, which he opened in Illinois, 'a little money machine.' That's why thousands of franchisees bought it.