In his best selling book of the same name, Michael Gerber describes the E-Myth as the myth of the heroic entrepreneur:

…a man or woman standing alone, windblown against the elements, bravely defying insurmountable odds, climbing sheer faces of treacherous rock—all to realize the dream of creating a business of ones own.

Are entrepreneurs really like that? According to Gerber, most of the time they’re not. Much more common than the Promethean business owner forging success from ingenuity, inspiration and hard work is the burnt-out, bitter and in-debt business owner who wishes they’d never gone out on their own. How does this happen? What is the mistake that so many people make when they start their own business?

Their mistake is that they believe that business success comes exclusively from creativity and dedication. It doesn’t. Those qualities, as noble as they are, can’t do anything but postpone failure unless they’re combined with something a lot less romantic – systems.

To be successful, businesses have to be reliable, reproducible and measurable. You have to know what you did, what you’re doing and what the results are. Without that information any business becomes a chaotic mess. Too many people think that they can get by on guts and talent, when what they really need is a binder full of procedures.

What’s the magic of that binder? By writing down all of the things you do and breaking them up into pieces, you can take your business apart as if it were a vintage car. You can analyze it piece by piece and make sure that it’s working the way you need it too – or you can make it better. With those plans you can sell your business or expand it, based on a blueprint that you know works. With a binder full of logical, easy-to-follow procedures you have more than a great idea and a lot of hard work – when your procedures are completely recorded and optimized, you have a money making machine.

Most business owners recognize the advantages of having well documented business systems – the problem is actually doing the writing. Either they simply don’t have the time or they lack the perspective needed to make an objective assessment of all the components in their business.

That’s where technical writers can help. Technical writers specialize in describing complex procedures and systems. The same skills that describe how to maintain an engine or use a piece of software can turn your business into a logical system. Technical writers are experts at interviewing and clarifying specialized knowledge so that it can be leveraged throughout organizations.

The inspiration and hard work have to come from business owners, but technical writers add the organization and documentation that mean business success.

At some point or another, anyone who owns their own business will face some degree of burn out. Instead of learning to cope with such burn out it is better to learn how to avoid it in the first place.

Below are several ways you can avoid business burn out.

1. Organization
Staying organized is one of the first steps in avoiding burn out. Utilize all the resources at your disposal such as filing systems for tax information, payable, receivables, advertising, marketing, etc. This will help you keep your paperwork in order and easily accessible.

Additionally, make sure you have a work place that is also organized. This could be your home office, studio or any other type of work place depending on the type of business you have. Making sure everything is organized and can be easily located will help you tremendously.

2. Time Management
Time management is probably the biggest challenge for most people. When you work from home it can be especially easy to get distracted from your work. While working from home allows you a lot of flexibility which is a good thing, it can also present challenges in regards to remaining focused. To help you, consider setting up a daily schedule for your self. Utilize calendars and tasks list to keep yourself on track. At the beginning of each week write out what you need to accomplish for the week. Keep the list handy in case you need to add to it throughout the week. It is also important to allow for those unexpected interruptions such as last minute doctors appointments or a trip to the office supply store. Additionally, consider setting up your weekly schedule based on what tasks you need to do on particular days. For example, tuesday could be a day you set aside as a marketing day. Every tuesday your focus should be on tasks that have to do with marketing your business.

3. Hire Help
If you find that you are overwhelmed most of the time or getting close to being overwhelmed, it may be time to hire some help. Help can come in the form of a virtual assistant, marketing manager, mailing list manager or simply from setting up a auto responder. Anytime you can automate certain tasks, the better. But for those times you can’t, consider hiring someone to do those tasks for you. You may find that even the small, menial tasks like sending out an email to your mailing list, is a task that you could hire someone else to do. Even all the small tasks that seem relatively simple add up and before you know it, you are spending a great deal of time on these things.

4. Joint Ventures and Partnerships
If you have a large project or new business idea, consider looking into establishing a joint venture with another business owner in a similar niche. The benefits of sharing the work load can be enormous. Also consider partnerships with other similar businesses in the areas of cross promotion and marketing. This could be in the form of exchanging web site links, mailing list advertising or other types of partnerships where the results benefit both of you.

5. Work Ahead
It is so much better to be ahead then to be behind. The pressure you begin to feel when due dates for finished work is upon you can be stress inducers. Avoid this by working ahead if you can. One example of work that can be completed in advance is article writing. When you have completed your daily tasks, consider taking a few moments to work on an article your writing. Another one would be blog posts. The nice thing about blogs is you can write a post in advance and save it for later. This is very true for several of the blog programs out there today. If you host your own blog, you can always save the post as a word document and post it later when your ready. Think of some of the other things you could work on in advance.

6. Take a Break
One of the best things you can do to avoid burn out, is to take breaks. Don’t wait until your in desperate need of one either. Take breaks regularly. Each day you should take breaks throughout the day. Also you need to set aside breaks that consist of either an actual planned vacation, day trip or a certain day of the week that you set aside for some needed “me” time. During this time, work is not allowed. I know it can be difficult but you have to learn to allow yourself to take these breaks. You will find you are better focused and refreshed when you do return to your work.

Studies have shown that, on average, a company replacing monochrome laser printers with color laser multi-function printers (MFPs) that do not enforce printing policies and will use 10 times the projected toner in value.

There is, however, a way for an enterprise to provide its employees with higher quality print output and finishing capabilities without adding a large bill at the end of the year. If you read your pay per page contract carefully, strip out the paying for unused pages, at least the paper part, and consider making use of a document output management system, you can afford as many MFPs your company needs in the most cost effective way.

Before committing to any pay-per-page contract, assess what printing assets you have and what the cost of your current operation really is to discover what you need with an independent output management system. Keep in mind that part of a good output management system is that it can be used with any industry standard copy and printing device.

Enforcing policies that allow only certain users to make use of the color capabilities, for instance, are very effective and can be easily implemented using an output management system that requires user authentication. That way, the output management system knows who is requesting and can enforce the policies assigned to each user or user group.

Some organizations outsource their printing and some printer vendors such as Xerox have specialized in charging per printed page, implying to include all maintenance and support costs, with a caveat, of course.

The pay-per-print vendors do not like document output management systems as they significantly save toner and paper, the areas where the vendors make the most money. Often those contracts are based on an average number of prints a year and average toner coverage per page.

It is natural for people like color on pages, even if the information on the page is boring. So they will prefer printing them out in color as it is more pleasing to look at a colored page. A good document output management system will allow printing a color document in a scale of grays as well as reducing the toner coverage per page.

There are many other good reasons to deploy a printer vendor independent output management solution such as accountability, what you think you printed and what the vendor thinks you have printed, which printers are used efficiently and which ones are not. Compare toner use of policy enabled printers with those that have no control. And there is the convenience that your print can be collected at a printer near you and the security aspect that your print is not waiting in the output tray for others to see, accidentally take or throw away.

You can also use the best output management solutions to observe what printing assets you have and what their cost and utilization is to discover what type and capability printing systems you need where in your organization.

In a nutshell, owning your printers and having an output management system that integrates your whole fleet is the most cost effective way. However, if you do not have the internal resources to manage your printer fleet or other reasons to outsource the printing infrastructure, then you should make sure that your contracts have no penalty on using less paper and toner than predicted. A typical one is Xerox paper and color toner being dumped in your yard whether you need it or not followed by the second classic, a huge bill for overuse of toner due to higher coverage. So much for saving the rain forests and reducing the carbon footprint.

I am not saying there is no place for pay-per-page, merely that if pay-per-page printing is thought to be the easy option, it could also be an expensive option too, if selected for the wrong reasons. Also, that an independent output management system makes extreme sense no matter if you own your printers or contracted into a pay-per-page scheme.

Klaus Bollmann is a veteran in printer output management and has been in the forefront of innovative output management technology for more than 20 years. He was the original developer of many of the concepts used in today’s multi function printers including the FollowMe printing concept.

Some printer makes allow output management by independent vendors to run embedded on their printers as well as allowing independent manufacturer’s authentication readers to be plugged directly into the printers’ USB host ports, requiring no external authentication devices and making this a more cost effective solution rather than using external authentication hardware.

>Praveen Gupta is president of Accelper Consulting in Schaumburg, IL, and an adjunct professor of business innovation at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Center for Professional Development. He has written several books on Six Sigma, business innovation and corporate performance. In this interview, Gupta predicts the role that smaller firms will play in business innovation during the rest of this century.

How can small business owners and leaders keep their performance yield high while minimizing cost cutting? Smaller businesses can compete with larger businesses based on performance and speed. Small businesses normally do not have as much waste as large business do due to smaller infrastructure. Thus, there is a constant battle between lowering the cost of products or services and offering value to customers. This requires that small businesses build customer relationships based on value-to-price ratio rather than just the price.

We have learned that every business, including small businesses, must focus on profitable growth by developing innovative solutions to grow customer demand. If we offer our customers what they "love to" have rather than what they have just asked for, customers will be willing to pay a premium, and won't be rushing to find the cheapest solutions. So, we must learn to spoil customers with our care and creativity, instead of the low-cost solution.

In an article in Quality Digest, you say that companies in a decline should focus on growth. Why should they do this, and what are some ways they can go about it? Many businesses have been implementing Six Sigma, Lean, or similar improvement initiatives to cut costs. The end result that I have seen is layoffs, which are very disheartening to workers. I do not understand how one can grow a business by shrinking it. Cutting costs is a vicious spiral that can only hasten the demise of a business because businesses in the U.S cannot win over the competition merely on cost – the rest of the world is cheaper than us.

Thus, we must focus on creating new value, seek opportunities to be able to command premium prices for the value and grow the business. This requires involving employees and empowering them to have fun at work so their creative juices can flow freely. I have learned that having fun means freedom to think, and that is critical for growth.

On the other hand, cutting costs curtails thinking, and that is counterproductive to growth. Thus, there is a need for balancing growth with efficient use of resources to sustain profitable growth.

In writing about performance management, you say that often the strategy is short term – meeting month-to-month goals, for example. How can organizations move from this to the long-term solution of communicating the fundamental business strategy to their employees and clients? Leadership must establish a two-prong strategy – long term for growth and short term for profit – and then balance the execution of both strategies. While we are fine tuning our operations for short-term goals we must not forget our longer-term perspective.

To achieve such a balance in our approach we must keep employees informed, enlist their support and expect them to do their best. The good news is if employees know what they are supposed to do, and why, they deliver – sometimes beyond expectations. And you must be prepared for surprises once employee power is behind the leadership's vision.

In your book "Business Innovation in the 21st Century," one of your takeaways in the chapter on the Information Age is that both business and civic leaders recognize the link between innovation and economic prosperity. How can small businesses use this knowledge to their advantage? Someone said that the main purpose of a business is not to make money, but instead to provide a product or service that a customer needs and, if done well, the customer will pay well, and then the company will make money. Today, we forget about this basic understanding and believe that making money is the only purpose of a business.

If you look at anatomy of a small business, it gets started by a passionate entrepreneur to make something out of one's knowledge or expertise. Nobody starts a business because one wants to make money; instead, one starts the business because one loves to do something, and wants to put it to productive use and make money. Then, the entrepreneur envisions hiring people, growing the business and creating jobs. We must maintain that same entrepreneurial spirit to do something different for producing value, and creating jobs.

Similarly, all business owners and leaders do have a responsibility to create opportunities in the community [in which] they operate by focusing on sustained profitable growth, rather than simply making money, which sometimes leads to actions adverse to the community needs.

Where do you see business innovation headed? What role will smaller firms play? Business innovation will be the way to be in business. In the past someone would start a business thinking one could produce an item at a lower cost than the competition. That will be less important over time as customers want more custom services in fast-changing marketplaces.

Thus, small businesses must be geared more toward producing customized solutions very fast utilizing intellectual resources in the company. In other words, the leadership must believe that business innovation is as important to small businesses as to larger businesses. Thus, they must learn the innovation process, commit to benefit from it and plan to provide newer and higher-value services to customers on demand.

This is different from the current paradigm of providing higher quality, and lower-cost solutions to customers. Remember, we do not always buy lowest-price products or services for our personal use; instead, we buy value for the money we spend. The same principle applies to the business world, where customers buy innovative solutions with higher value, well delivered and when needed.