Answering those questions and putting the answers in to action is “working on the business”.
Michael Gerber’s book is founded on The Turn-Key Revolution and The Business Format Franchise. The turn key is that traditionally most business founders believe that the success of a business is down to the success of the product it sells. Under a Business Format Franchise the success is built on the belief that the true product of a business is not what it sells but how it sells it. The true product of a business is the business itself. The Business Format Franchise provides a franchisee with an entire system of doing business.
The best example of this, which Michael Gerber draws on extensively in his book, is McDonalds. Love them or loathe them, McDonald’s in its 2019 accounts showed that franchised sales had grown to a staggering $90.8 billion a year business, with over 38,000 restaurants worldwide in well over 100 countries and growing in number every 8 minutes. And all of this in the space of just 65 years! When Ray Kroc first came across the MacDonald’s brothers’ hamburger joint in California in 1952, he was amazed at how efficiently it worked and what a money machine it was. As a milkshake machine seller Ray Kroc had no money and he therefore persuaded the MacDonald’s brothers to let him franchise their business. Ray Kroc never cooked a hamburger in his life but 12 years and several million hamburgers later, he bought the MacDonald’s brothers out and went on to create the largest retail prepared food distribution system in the world. Michael Gerber describes the way he did this as a business development process, which is in effect systemisation.