The aim of this paper is to describe the mortality factors and the change in the importance of these factors throughout the life cycle stages of small businesses. Research on mortality of small businesses ignores the characteristics of small businesses and the life cycle stage they are at the time of closure. A systematic mapping study was conducted to explore the literature on mortality factors in small businesses and understand the state of the art of the theme. The relevance of mortality factors distributed among three categories: owner-manager, business and environment have changed throughout businesses life cycle stages. Such variation states one of the main life cycle theory assumptions that a factor can have a beneficial influence during one specific stage and a negative influence during another stage. The attention given to the variation of importance of mortality factors during businesses life cycles results in implications for all those concerned in strengthening small businesses.

Although importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) is relatively well established in the literature, little research exists on life cycle stage at the time of SME failure or closure. This exploratory research builds a comprehensive description of SME mortality factors related to the external environment to analyse the changing importance of these factors throughout the SME’s organization life cycle stages (OLC). Seven case studies are used to develop a more complete understanding of the relationship between external environment and mortality factors. Data were collected through interviews and analysed based on inductive content analysis technique. The results indicate that failure SME did not adequately assimilate nine main factors: non-payment of the clients, competition with big business, seasonality of sells during the year, minimum amount of purchase required by suppliers, tributary load, government economic plans, national economy crisis, and headquarter/office robbery and asymmetric relationship with the franchisor. Regarding SME’s OLC, environmental factors’ relevance changed throughout the SME life cycle. Additional result suggests that exists more stages than discussed in the literature, reported by sample SME owner-managers studied.

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Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are an important part of worldwide economy, frequently, researches on SME mortality factors ignores their characteristics. This paper discusses the relation between the SME mortality factors and the small business owner-manager, based on the life cycle stage as an essential part for a better understanding of their closure moment. The research paper was designed in two main complementary phases: (i.) a systematic review focused on failure subject, in order to capture the state of the art of the theme added by the conceptual background of classical SME studies and (ii.) a multiple case study of seven Brazilian SME with a qualitative, descriptive and empirical approach. The results show that small business owner-managers failure business did not use correctly or gave required attention to the mortality factors such as full time dedication, exercising operational activities and managerial roles, discipline, purchase abilities, negotiation, finance and family motivation in keeping up the business. The main contribution for entrepreneurship studies is the indication of an existing relation between mortality factors and the life cycle stages of SME, which evidences the changing importance of the mortality factors throughout the life cycle stages, including closure. The practical results of this paper offers new insights into the relevant SME mortality factors, opening a number of potential avenues for future studies focused on SME, mortality factors and the small business owner-manager.