Perceived Influence of Entrepreneurial Intention on Business Success of Start-ups in Food and Beverage Sector of Rivers State

Abstract

This study investigated the perceived influence of entrepreneurial intention on the business success of start-ups in the food and beverage sectors in Rivers State. Two specific objectives, two research questions and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. A descriptive survey using a quantitative approach was adopted for the study. The population of the study consists of 1,167 small scale businesses across 23 local government areas of Rivers State who are registered with the State Internal Revenue. A sample of 117 small scale business owners in the food and beverage sector of Rivers State was selected using the purposive quota sampling technique. The sample consists of 60 supermarkets and 57 neighbourhood market stores in the business of distributing food and beverages. A self-designed structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The instrument was face validated by the researcher’s peers within Federal College of Education (Tech.), Omoku, Rivers State. The instrument was further subjected to reliability using Cronbach alpha to obtain a reliability index of 0.74 and 0.82 for sections A and B, with an average index of 0.78 which shows that the instrument is reliable based on data collected from 15 food and beverage start-ups supermarkets and neighbourhood stores from Bayelsa State. Data collected for the study were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean, cluster means and standard deviation to answer research questions. An independent t-test was used to test the hypotheses raised at a 0.05 level of significance. The major findings of the study revealed that supermarket and neighbourhood market stores startups in the food and beverage sector of Rivers State are of the opinion that entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial experiences help to increase sales volume and enhance customers’ retention which was the proxies of business success in this study. The results also show that there is no significant difference in the opinion of the respondents on the perceived influence of entrepreneurial intention on the business success of startups in the food and beverage sector of Rivers State. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that entrepreneurs who want to succeed in the food and beverage sector of Rivers State should endeavour to render voluntary services in order to accumulate entrepreneurial experiences and develop the right entrepreneurial mindset for success.