Home › Blog › how to work on your business not in it

Work on your business, not in it: what it actually means

By Rees Haynes · 11 July 2026

The short answer: working in your business is doing the work — serving clients, making the thing, putting out fires. Working on your business is building the systems, standards and structure so the work happens well without you doing all of it. Michael Gerber named this in The E-Myth; here’s what it looks like in practice.

In it vs on it

Almost every self-employed owner is buried in the business. That’s natural — the work is what pays this week’s bills, and you’re good at it. But if all your time goes into doing the work, no time goes into improving how the work gets done. The business can never outgrow your personal capacity, because you are the business.

Working on it means stepping up a level: deciding how a job should be done, writing it down so someone else could do it to your standard, and building the parts that run without your constant attention.

What ‘on it’ actually looks like

• Turning the way you do a task into a simple, repeatable checklist.
• Deciding what “good” looks like so quality doesn’t depend on your mood that day.
• Building a way for leads, sales and delivery to happen without every step waiting on you.
• Spending a fixed slot each week working on the business, protected from the work in it.

The catch nobody mentions

Here’s what the E-Myth advice usually skips: you can’t work “on” the business if your life is in crisis. Exhausted, over-committed people don’t build systems — they firefight. That’s why OnTrack puts life first: get your time and energy back, then you have the headspace to work on the business instead of just in it. See the life programme and the business programme — they’re built to run in that order.

Your first step

Find out which part of your business depends on you most — that’s where working “on it” pays off first. The free Scorecard points you straight to it.

← More from the blog