IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijbglo/v11y2013i1p86-100.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Key success factors of small businesses

Author

Listed:
  • George Ritchie
  • Lilian W. Komo
  • Isaac K. Ngugi

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the success factors of small businesses. The study employed a multiple case-study research strategy involving in-depth interviews with owners of small businesses, a trade organisation and a government agency. The findings suggest that majority of small business owners place more emphasis on getting the job done and focusing on the customers. They pay little attention to developing formal business plans and strategies. Formal business plans and strategies were viewed as a necessity for financing purposes rather than as essentials for success of a business. The owners' definitions of success were found to be biased towards the more intrinsic factors such as self-satisfaction and independence. The choice of business form was influenced by cost factors and ease of business management, as well as aspirational factors such as possibilities of changing from one business form to the other as business growth dictated.

Suggested Citation

  • George Ritchie & Lilian W. Komo & Isaac K. Ngugi, 2013. "Key success factors of small businesses," International Journal of Business and Globalisation, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 11(1), pages 86-100.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijbglo:v:11:y:2013:i:1:p:86-100
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=55317
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Charles Adusei & Isaac Tweneboah-Koduah, 2020. "Small enterprises and banking in rural Ghana: Evidence from owners," International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science (2147-4478), Center for the Strategic Studies in Business and Finance, vol. 9(3), pages 175-181, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijbglo:v:11:y:2013:i:1:p:86-100. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=245 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.