The story behind SYSTEMology
The Three‑Month Phone Call
An email from a stranger. Two words long. It became the reason SYSTEMology exists, and the reason Michael E. Gerber told the world to read it second.
7am. Melbourne. An email from someone called Luz Delia Gerber.
I didn’t recognise the full name. I recognised half of it.
Michael E. Gerber wrote The E-Myth. One of the best-selling business books ever written. He’s the reason anyone says “work ON your business, not IN it.” He came up with it.
I’d never met him. I had no relationship with anyone who knew him. So I figured it was a coincidence.
The email said two words. Call me.
So I did.
Luz Delia: “Oh my God, is this the real David?”
David: “This is the real David. How are you?”
Luz Delia: “Oh, I am. I just want to cry. Just hold on one second… Oh my God. You have no idea what you picking up the phone and calling me is doing to life. Yours and mine.”
The Gerbers record their calls. So that’s not me remembering it generously. That’s the tape.
Listen to the call — 1 min 50
Michael was eighty. He was about to launch his twenty-ninth book, the last in the E-Myth series, and for the first time he wanted to self-publish. He needed someone to run it. Luz Delia had watched my videos that morning and decided it was me.
There was one condition.
Sixty hours a week. Twelve weeks. Starting now.
Unpaid.
Two years earlier, I would have said no.
Not because I didn’t want it. Because I couldn’t. I was buried in my own business, the bottleneck for every decision and every fire. Take me out for three months and there wouldn’t have been a business to come back to.
Which is the joke, isn’t it. I’d read Gerber. I’d underlined the good bits. And I was still working in my business instead of on it.
But it wasn’t two years earlier. By the time that email landed I’d built the thing I now call SYSTEMology, and I knew something most owners never get to find out.
My business would be fine without me.
So I said yes to a stranger, for no money, for three months, on a Tuesday morning, before breakfast.
Three months
I wrote thousands of emails. Made hundreds of calls. Lined up more interviews than you can poke a stick at.
It was hard work and it was somehow the easiest project I’ve ever run, because all I had to do was say his name and people fell over themselves to help.
Luz Delia put it more plainly than I would, standing in front of the room:
“He is responsible for the book launch. Tremendous success. Michael’s 29th book, and the first one that became an Amazon bestseller in about 24 hours. And we have spoken every single day. He has kept me online. He’s been telling me what to do.”
Luz Delia Gerber, Carlsbad, December 2016Then Michael took over, and said the part I didn’t know:
“I have never done a book launch before. It’s my 29th book and we’ve never launched one of them. Not any of them.”
Michael E. GerberTwenty-eight books with HarperCollins. He’d never launched one himself.
Book twenty-nine went to number one
It became an Amazon bestseller within twenty-four hours of launch. His first, after twenty-eight books.
Book in the E-Myth series
To Amazon bestseller
What I was paid
Then he flew me to Carlsbad
To celebrate, Michael invited me to one of his last Dreaming Room events. I flew from Melbourne. Then he asked me to stay on and facilitate a mastermind dedicated to the future of his work.
Somewhere in that room, Luz Delia stood up in front of everyone and said something I have never quite known what to do with.
Michael E. Gerber, in his own words
I’m still not sure I’ve earned it. I’ve just tried to keep being the person she was describing.
And then they offered me the company
Four months earlier I’d had no connection to the Gerbers at all. Now they were asking me to run their business.
I said no.
Not because it wasn’t extraordinary. Because I was already on my own path, and because there was no chance Carrolyn was moving to America and away from her family.
I don’t tell you that to be modest. I tell you because it’s the only reason the rest of this page is worth reading. I wasn’t auditioning for his job. I did the work because the work was worth doing, and everything that came after came from that.
What I told him I was going to do
November 2017. A year after the launch, still on the phone with Michael most weeks, working through what he wanted to build next. He asked what I was doing. This is what I said, on the recording, three years before the SYSTEMology book existed.
“I can see in the short term what I need to do with systemHUB, and part of that will be to be an excellent case study for Michael’s work. Applying it through from coming up with the dream, and then having that filter through all the parts of the business, and then all the way through to the sale as well.”
David Jenyns, call with Michael E. Gerber, 11 November 2017That was the plan, said out loud to the man himself. Then I went home and spent the next three years doing it.
It didn’t stop when the launch did
Through 2017 we kept working. Radical U, the strategy, the architecture of what he wanted to build next. Six recorded calls between September and November alone. This was not a photo opportunity. It was a working relationship, and it ran for years.
What he said when the book was finished
In 2020 I finished SYSTEMology. I asked Michael to write the foreword. He said all I had to do was ask.
“I invented ‘working ON your business, instead of IN it’ almost 43 years ago with my very first E-Myth Book. And here I am telling you that David Jenyns has not only DONE it, but he’s now written the brilliant book to teach you exactly how to do it, too. Read it. Relish it. But most important, DO it.”
Michael E. Gerber
Foreword to SYSTEMology
Then, sitting down together the same year, he drew the line himself:
“SYSTEMology becomes the heartfelt link to implementing the dream, the vision, the purpose, the mission. In the job, the practice, the business, the enterprise. I wrote the book on it. And now you’ve come with the absolutely essential book.”
Michael E. Gerber, 2020Michael E. Gerber reads the foreword
And a year after that, asked what a business owner should actually do, he gave the order of operations:
Step two: get SYSTEMology.”
+
“You walk them through the process that every single business owner must not only understand, but do. When someone begins to do that, you have altered the shape of business forever. Hear me, David. You’ve altered the shape of business forever.“
Michael E. Gerber, 2020He named the disease. This is the prescription.
I didn’t decide that. He did, in that order, out loud, more than once.
The E-Myth told millions of owners the truth: that being good at the work does not make you good at owning the business. It’s the most influential business book ever written and it changed the course of small business.
What it didn’t do, because it was never trying to, was hand you the steps.
Every owner I’ve ever met already agrees they need systems. I have never once had a conversation that ended with “actually, my business is fine without them.” The agreement isn’t the problem. The problem is Monday morning, and where you start.
That’s the gap SYSTEMology fills. Not a better idea than the E-Myth. The implementation of it.
The thing I’d want you to take from this
Luz Delia’s email arrived on a morning like any other. I had no warning. There was no way to prepare for it and no way to earn it in advance.
The only thing I controlled was whether I could say yes.
That’s it. That’s the whole lesson. Opportunity doesn’t arrive at the end of a tidy upward curve, it arrives when it arrives, and the only question that matters is whether your business can spare you when it does.
Most owners can’t answer that question. And they don’t find out until the phone rings.
E-Myth tells you why. SYSTEMology shows you how.
Could your business spare you for three months?
SYSTEMology is the step-by-step process for building a business that runs without you. It’s the book Michael E. Gerber wrote the foreword to, and told his readers to pick up second.