ABSTRACT
In a small business the threat of failure is always close at hand. It may manifest itself in the form of an interview with the bank manager, a final invoice from a major creditor or a letter from a solicitor acting on behalf of one director. At a more aggregate level our comparisons between the performances of small and large firms, within the first half of this book, have always had to take account of the massive differences in the failure rates of the two types of businesses as shown in Chapter 1. We have also recognised the presence of different motivations and aspirations amongst small business entrepreneurs in Chapter 3. Finally, we also highlighted in Chapter 5 the highly variable performance, even of surviving small businesses.
