International Experience of Entrepreneurs as a Factor in Their Managerial Development

The management development in the entrepreneurial firms is a subject of numerous surveys with a relatively long tradition. In most cases it is associated with the need the entrepreneur to develop him/herself as a manager in the process of growth of the business. This development is most often understood as the acquisition of certain managerial knowledge and its practical application in the form of approaches, methods and techniques for making and implementing management decisions in one complicated (both in external and in internal aspects) environment. A significant part of the previous studies emphasizes not only on the scope and the essence of this knowledge, but also on the mechanisms of its acquisition and improvement. For understandable reasons, these mechanisms cannot be investigated detached from the context in which they occur. As the subjects of research in the present paper are the entrepreneurs in Bulgaria, an essential feature of the context is the registered backwardness, not only at macro level, but also at enterprise level. The latter is most visible when comparing the levels of productivity and value added, revenue growth rates and profit levels. At the same time, the openness of the economy which creates opportunities for significant international exchange and gaining experience in doing business in an international environment, provides the Bulgarian entrepreneurs with the advantage of absorbing and transferring managerial knowledge from more advanced in their economic development countries, and, in particular, from significantly more successful enterprises in these countries. The aim of the paper is to present an overview of the previous theoretical understandings of the role of the entrepreneurs’ international experience in their development as managers, and to check the existence of empirical evidence to confirm these understandings based on two studies: a study of internationalisation of Bulgarian family SMEs and a pilot study of the professionalization of management in Bulgarian SMEs. The international experience in this research covers not only the work in an international environment, but also the entrepreneur’s experience that precedes the start of an own business in the form of education and work abroad.