Training micro‐business owner‐managers: a challenge to current approaches

Abstract

Despite the importance of micro‐businesses to the UK economy, training has failed to recognise and take into account the way owner‐managers run such firms. These owner‐managers tend to combine informally absorbed information, heuristics and other short‐cut methods in a more intuitively‐based approach to decision making. Does not, however, advocate that more formalised and comprehensive forms of decision making should be adopted. Instead, suggests that intuitive methods of decision making may be the most appropriate for micro‐business owner‐managers. As such, training should attempt to reduce the types of bias that are inherent in more intuitive approaches to decision making.

Entrepreneurial behaviour, firm size and financial performance: the case of rural tourism family firms

“…The created dummy variable equalled 'one' if the firm size was ≤9 employees, therefore categorising all microsized firms, and 'zero' if the firm size was >9 employees (Greenbank, 2000). Descriptive statistics (see also applied.…”

“…When answering this question, it has to be considered that most enterprises in rural tourism are small or micro family firms possessing unique characteristics (Getz & Carlsen, 2000, 2005Peters & Buhalis, 2013), with micro firms being defined as firms with less than 10 employees (European Commission, 2009;Greenbank, 2000). Prior research has shown that firm size affects entrepreneurial behaviour in tourism (Pansiri, 2007) and that barriers resulting from sub-optimally sized configurations block organisational development in micro firms (Weiermair & Peters, 1998).…”

Influence of Managerial Accounting Skills on SME’s on the Success and Growth of Small and Medium Enterprises in Kenya.

“…There are two key factors that impact on the way most of these SMEs are managed. First, decision making is concentrated on one or two owner managers (Greenbank, 2000;Keasey and Watson, 1993). Second, owner/managers often work at both the management and operational levels and therefore acquire information about the market and the performance of their business through personal experience rather than relying on feedback mechanisms from other sources (Greenbank, 1999).…”

Managerial capability for innovation for microfirms: integrating theory with empirical evidence

“…While on the surface, a microfirm's structure is simple (Devins et al, 2005), there may be divergent owner and employee interests (Matlay, 1999); although it is also argued the simpler structure offers microfirms a greater ability to develop communication (Walsh et al, 2009). The informality discussed above is also manifest as a lack of formal planning structures (Greenbank, 2000) and by a lack of desire to engage with management development which may mask relatively sophisticated managerial capabilities which are context specific (Devins et al, 2005). In context this informality is often perfectly rational behaviour given that costs of developing new marketing and management systems are both risky and expensive (Cyr et al, 2011) and often unsuitable for the microfirm context (O'Dwyer and Ryan, 2000;Reinl and Kelliher, 2010).…”

“…Owner/managers day-to-day work in the firm enables the evolution of experientially based problem-solving capabilities (Greenbank, 2000). The nature of the problem solving comprises a market sensing capability emerging from the close proximity and deep level of owner/manager customer interaction (Grissemann et al, 2013;O'Dwyer and Ryan, 2000).…”