ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the way in which the choice of business strategy can influence the rate of growth within the small firm. Certain business strategies will impact on growth regardless of the type of owner-manager that is running the firm and, in the same way, certain owner-managers will do better than others irrespective of the business strategy they pursue. It is also quite likely that some strategies are more suited to some types of owner-manager than to others. A complicating factor in this analysis, as discussed in Chapter 5, is that there are several inter-relationships between the owner-manager variables and the business strategy variables. The inclusion of owner-manager and strategy variables in the same model was meant to isolate the impact of business strategies per se. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the model is complex and the aim in this chapter is to explore in more detail the impact of business strategy on growth and the inter-relationships with the characteristics of the owner-manager.
