Multi-Generation Small Business Response to the Recent Financial Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionSmall business represents a major sector of the Canadian economy. In 2008, this sector, which employs 48% (5 million employees) of the total work force, contributed 30% of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP) (Industry Canada, 2008). Further, this report showed that during an exceptionally good economic period from 1997 to 2003, an average of 125,000 businesses failed annually. From a long term perspective, the same report determined that only 25% of businesses remain in operation after 9 years. This finding is similar to that reported by Zontanos and Anderson (2004) who found that over two thirds of businesses close within the decade they open. From an even longer perspective, very few businesses continue on to subsequent generations of ownership. Cater et al (2006) determined that 30% of businesses are passed to the second generation; 12% to the third generation; and 4% to the fourth generation.This investigation represents a follow-up to an earlier research project which identified aspects of multi-generation businesses (Hunter and Kazakoff, 2008). The earlier investigation delved into detail regarding the factors that have allowed some businesses to continue for more than one generation. It documented the comments of family representatives regarding their interpretation of the experiences of their intergenerational Relative to businesses in general, multi-generation businesses here are considered to be because of their longevity. Further, due to the very nature that they are successful from a multigeneration perspective, they are also a family While some family businesses may be quite large, the focus for this research is on the business.The recent financial crisis spanned the period of mid-2008 to late-2009, and was characterized by a sharp economic downturn, world-wide financial markets collapse, and significant job losses. The goal of this project was to identify the aspects related to how multigeneration businesses reacted to the recent financial crisis. Multi-generation businesses are considered successful mainly because of their long term survival beyond the normal tenure of a The project thus provides lessons for all businesses regarding responses to the recent financial crisis. The lessons learned will serve to contribute to reducing the large number of business failures as shown in the above statistics.The next section provides the context for this investigation via a review of the existing literature, focusing mainly on multi-generation Then the details of the specific project are presented. Findings are reported based upon the identified major themes. The subsequent discussion is organized by theme categories and incorporates further comments made by the research participants. In the Conclusion section responses to the research questions are offered.Literature ReviewA review of the available literature fails to reveal significant investigations into multigeneration De Geus (2002) has investigated long lived large businesses. Interestingly, among other findings, he determined that the average life span for firms of any size is 12.5 years.Small businesses are different from big businesses, according to Stevenson (1999) who suggests that in a business there is a focus on the near term, with an emphasis on allocating relatively scarce resources only to what are considered top priority activities. The scarce resources concept is elaborated by Thong et al (1994) via the term resource poverty. This term suggests that business, relative to large business, lacks both financial and human resources, which in turn affects how business is conducted.There exist many definitions for a small business. Because a business is a privately held entity, and thus is not required to publically report performance information, annual revenue or size of investment may not be used as a definition. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".