Last Saturday, I was doing the company books and paying lots of bills. On the table before me were three or four loose-leaf binders filled with numbers and other instruments of accounting when a colleague poked his head in and said, "Y'know, I don't know how you do this. You need a bookkeeper. I just don't know how you keep up with this stuff week after week." Shaking his head, he went about his business.

I repositioned the pencil behind my ear, said, "Yeah, you're right," and continued to reconcile invoices. Then it suddenly struck me that I was wasting valuable time on Accounting 101 when I should have been busy planning for the next big client meeting or mapping out a marketing plan or maybe even kicking my feet up and killing the bad guys in Half-Life.

During these intense bouts of business chores, I almost expect the legendary Rod Serling to appear in the corner of my office, eyebrows raised and somberly announcing: "A case in point, I submit for your perusal one small-business man forever wrapped in his business cocoon of chores, never realizing that an entire world is passing before him. I present to you ladies and gentlemen, George Giokas, entrepreneur."

In The E-Myth Revisited, author Michael E. Gerber spends 288 pages trying to teach green entrepreneurs like me a valuable lesson: Spend time on the day-to-day stuff and you've lost another opportunity to grow your business. In other words, don't build a business that runs you. Build one that runs itself. This is a hard concept for me to grasp, so I reread E-Myth every eight months or so just to put away new nuggets of information that went over my head in previous readings.

Sometimes I think it's hereditary. My father owned his own business. He was a barber. I loved visiting his place on 8th Avenue and 51st Street in New York. In those days, Madison Square Garden was the next street over, and he used to get free passes to the circus every year. And his store was full of things that kids love to play with: shaving cream, hot towels, and those unbelievable old-style barber chairs. But as I look back now, I don't remember ever seeing anyone working at his shop except him -- and this was a five- or six-chair shop.

In a way, I'm repeating what my dad did in his shop -- cutting hair, adjusting chairs, sweeping floors, filling comb bottles with blue water, and counting money at the end of the week. Different business, different time -- but the same routines.

As much as I like to think of myself as an enlightened entrepreneur, I'm still stuck in the corporate mode, doing things that need to be done systematically and by rote. I can intellectually embrace, but not yet feel in my gut, that this is my business and that I have complete control over how it's shaped. This means that if I want to start a new policy or end an old one, I don't have to order flip charts and coffee and call a meeting. I just do it.

The next step in this entrepreneurial revelation is to shed the notion that this is one tough way to make a living. Actually, it's not. Successful businesspeople almost never mention how hard it is to run their companies. I'm pretty sure the reason for this is that to them, it isn't. Somehow, somewhere they discovered the portal to entrepreneurial freedom -- that secret other dimension that leads the way to a sharply focused and smooth-running venture.

I think I'm beginning to see the light. I just hope it's not the 5:45 out of Penn Station.

George Giokas is the president and CEO of StaffWriters Plus, a specialty agency that places writers in temporary and permanent positions with corporate and other employers. It also provides editorial consulting work. His database includes 2,500 writers and editors specializing in more than 60 categories. His Web site is located at www.staffwriters.com, and you can E-mail him at george@staffwriters.com.