By Mario Toneguzzi

He has been described as “the World’s #1 Small Business Guru” and best-selling author Michael Gerber has a mission to transform the state of entrepreneurship worldwide, particularly at this time when so many entrepreneurs have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gerber, who is the author of the NY Times mega-bestseller, for two consecutive decades, "The E-Myth Revisited" and nine other worldwide best-selling E-Myth books concerning small business entrepreneurship, leadership, and management, is offering small business owners and retailers an opportunity to sign up for a year’s worth of education on his Radical U initiative for $10 (US) - 52 weeks of training, week after week - to discover the mindset of being a successful entrepreneur.

Radical U is an online trade school for individuals who wish to become true entrepreneurs.

“If you look at statistics, you’ll see that last year close to 550,000 companies closed their doors. That’s not because of the virus. That’s because of the other virus. That other virus is called stupid,” said Gerber, the author of 29 books and more coming. “That’s because everybody who goes into business does it in exactly the opposite of the way they ought to have done it and as a result they fail, they fail, they fail, they fail. And it’s simply a condition that’s true on every place on the planet.

“The E-Myth addresses that problem and it successfully addressed it so much so that we have created literally an infinite number of successful small companies that have grown from small to tall to beyond belief following a process. I’ve said in E-Myth and every one of my books, the system is the solution. And effectively the E-Myth is the entrepreneurial myth. It essentially says that people who go into business aren’t the entrepreneurs everybody says they are but what I’ve come to call technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. So they create a job for themselves and now they’re working for a lunatic.”

Gerber, who is based in Carlsbad, California, said 90 per cent of those businesses will be out of business within 10 years. It’s so pervasive because the people who start companies aren’t really the people they need to be. They need to truly be entrepreneurs.

“In my books, I take the entrepreneur personality apart and identify four distinct personalities that are critical for any company to grow to scale,” he said. “And those four personalities I call the dreamer, the thinker, the storyteller and the leader.

“The dreamer has a dream. The thinker has a vision. The storyteller has a purpose. And the leader has a mission. And those aren’t just empty words. They literally mean something and it’s the understanding of what they mean the definition of a dream, of a vision, of a purpose and a mission and the part they play in the creation of a company to grow that is so critically misunderstood. That’s been our work for the past 43 years.”

Radical U is intended to help people learn how to awaken the spirit of entrepreneurship within them in order for them to design, build, launch and grow a company of one and turn it into a company of 1,000. The way to do that is through what Gerber has developed in an eight-fold path, the process that awakens the entrepreneur within.

“In the process of doing that, we believe we will transform economic development worldwide and we’ll transform economic development worldwide because we’ll transform entrepreneurial development worldwide and in the process of transforming entrepreneurial development worldwide we’ll transform the state of small business worldwide, which is our intention and has been our intention since the very beginning.”

The normal cost for a year of training at Radical U is $479.40 (US) and it’s a five-year curriculum.

Gerber said his message particularly in these days of COVID is not only important but life dependent for entrepreneurs.

“What’s very critical for everyone to understand is this is not simply a scheme. This is a system. This system has validated itself now over 43 years of application. We’ve created some of the greatest companies on the planet. A great company as an example is 1 800 Got Junk. A Canadian company which was founded based upon the E-Myth,” said Gerber.

“Entrepreneurs aren’t special folks. Entrepreneurship is not some mystical capability. You can learn how to do it.”

Mario Toneguzzi, based in Calgary has 37 years of experience as a daily newspaper writer, columnist and editor. He worked for 35 years at the Calgary Herald covering sports, crime, politics, health, city and breaking news, and business. For 12 years as a business writer, his main beats were commercial and residential real estate, retail, small business and general economic news. He nows works on his own as a freelance writer and consultant in communications and media relations/training. Email: mdtoneguzzi@gmail.com

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