Exploring the characteristics of prosperous SMEs in the Caribbean

Abstract

Despite the extensive literature on small business growth and performance, relatively little is known on the features of firms that have been prosperous for a long period of time. Adopting Storey's determinants of growth framework, this study explores the characteristics of the entrepreneur, the firm, and the firm's strategy contributing to the prosperity of small firms in the Caribbean. Using multiple case studies from across the region, this study reveals that SME prosperity in the Caribbean seems to depend on combining certain characteristics namely, the entrepreneur's strategic leadership, networks, and intimate knowledge of products and business operations, and the firm's strategy of branding and market diversification.The findings show that unlike the results from previous studies in large and developed countries, it is a mix of these characteristics that determines SME prosperity. Research and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Identifying prosperity characteristics in small and medium-sized enterprises of Pakistan: firm, strategy and characteristics of entrepreneurs

“…In this study, due to the small size of firms, business opportunities are mostly obtained through referrals from large companies and through wordof-mouth marketing; therefore, building these relationships with stakeholders is only possible through the strong social networking skills of an entrepreneur. This finding of our study mirrors previous studies (Barringer et al, 2005;Williams and Ramdani, 2018), which found that companies with high-quality social networks between small and large companies were better placed to grow their business by collecting and sharing resources such as ideas and information, capital and trust. An unintended finding of the current study was that the prosperity of SMEs depends on shifting from traditional business styles to innovative business methods that required installing and using the latest technologies.…”

“…The limitations of quantitative studies in capturing various aspects of firms' characteristics contributing to performance have been well documented in the literature (Williams and Ramdani, 2018). For example, Hurley (2018) argues researchers using quantitative methods were unable to take fully into account the complexity and multifaceted nature of SME performance in different countries.…”

“…The first element of Storey's framework pertains to entrepreneurial characteristics. Research by Barringer et al (2005), Reddy (2007) and Williams and Ramdani (2018) has shown strong linkages between entrepreneurial personality characteristics (such as psychological, personal traits, education and entrepreneurship experience) with SMEs' performance. The interplay between these characteristics and performance has been the central subject of an investigation by different researchers.…”

“…As a result of a significant disparity between developing and developed countries context, businesses in developed economies are far better than those in developing economies, particularly in Asian markets (Kosgei, 2015). Prosperity characteristics that have been extensively explored in developed countries context are not equally applicable to or useful for SMEs in developing and underdeveloped economies due to various reasons (Barringer et al, 2005;Williams and Ramdani, 2018). First of all, the contextual differences, in terms of economic, social and institutional are quite large (Feldman, 2014) between developed and developing countries.…”

Strategies to Grow and Expand a Nonprofit Business

“…Researchers found that promotion-focused individuals tended to believe that small business growth led to more positive consequences while prevention-focused individuals tended to believe that small business growth led to less positive or more negative consequences (Prasastyoga, van Leeuwen, & Harinck, 2018). In another study, the researchers noted that the characteristics such as the strategic leadership of the entrepreneur, intimate knowledge of products and business operations, networks, and the firm's strategy of branding and market diversification contributed to the prosperity of small firms (Williams & Ramdani, 2018). Badger and Helfand (2017) found that health systems should develop a Medicare strategic planning process for the senior markets, engage in data-driven segmentation to properly profile their customer segments, address the economic value of the senior market segments at the patient-level, review the firm's mix of products and contracts to align with segments, and the deployment of consumer outreach and navigation strategies for the execution of the plan for them to transform their growth strategies.…”