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The paper questions aspects of the UK government’s policy to target small firm support on fast‐growing firms – to maximise its employment impact. The paper explores the tension between advice likely to increase growth and risk‐taking and advice likely to ensure firm survival in the turbulent small and medium‐sized enterprises sector. The research data derive from 24 semi‐structured interviews and a group interview of ten business advisers in the West Midlands region collected between autumn 1996 and spring 1997, and a national survey of 175 Business Link personal business advisers (PBAs) conducted in April 1998. Interviewees responded to a prompt asking for advice to a fast‐growing firm. The paper compares qualitative interview responses from a wide variety of West Midlands business advisers with questionnaire responses from PBAs. The paper suggests that the advice given by accountants and bank managers differs little from that given by Business Link’s PBAs. The paper will argue that advisers including PBAs, offer risk‐averse advice and support to small firms. Present business advice might reduce insolvency rather than increase the number of fast‐growth firms. The risk‐averse nature of advice, reflecting the adviser’s clientele, undermines policies designed to increase the number of fast‐growth companies. It concludes that advice will often be inconsistent with the growth‐oriented aim of government policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine small business owners’ informal advice-seeking from peers, with a focus on the opportunities afforded by the internet for owners to acquire assistance from other owner-managers outside their local community.

Over 600 owner-managers in a rural US state were surveyed about their advice-seeking during the previous year from peers in the same community, from non-local peers they had met in person, and from peers known only online. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis was used to test both main effects of business and owner characteristics on advice-seeking and interactions with type/location of peer advisors.

Most owners had received advice from peers, and one-third had received advice online from a peer whom they had never met in person. Business performance was not associated with overall use of peer advice, but did interact significantly with source; the use of online-only advisors was associated with business growth, suggesting the possible benefit of weak ties. Over two-thirds of respondents reported having used social media and/or online forums to access advice or support from other owners (both those met in person and those not), with women and younger owners more likely to rely on such tools.

This study shows that entrepreneurial research needs to consider peer advisors beyond local networks as potential resources for small business owners. While previous research has examined entrepreneurs’ use of social media for marketing, this study shows its utility for accessing advice.

Taking the entrepreneur’s perspective and a broad view of business advisory services, the purpose of this paper is to examine to what degree the need of business advisory services among Swedish start-ups, first-generation immigrants compared to non-immigrants, is fulfilled.

The sample data consist of a unique and comprehensive firm-level database and contain telephone interviews with 2,800 Swedish start-up entrepreneurs. The study examines 20 different kinds of business advice services, in terms of both need and use. Statistical methods such as Mann-Whitney test and regression analysis are used while controlling for entrepreneurial characteristics.

The findings suggest that immigrants’ compared to non-immigrants’ need for business advisory service was not fulfilled. Of the 20 different business advices, ten were fulfilled and ten were not fulfilled. Both strategic advice and operational advice were fulfilled as well as unfulfilled. Apart from ethnicity, other variables did influence the need of business advisory services.

The author was not able to make comparisons between different immigrant groups.

This study offers an explorative approach that contributes on how business advisory services are differentially tailored between start-ups by immigrants and those by non-immigrants. It illustrates to what extent public- and/or private-funded organizations contribute to fulfilment of the needs of immigrant and non-immigrant start-ups.

Few studies take the entrepreneur’s perspective and from such a perspective examine the fulfilment of needs of advice regarding both private and public organizations role in the area. Both the need and the use of business advisory services are studied as well as the kind of business advice that is needed.

The purpose of this paper is to test a conceptual framework explaining the role of relationships and trust in enabling the purchase of business advice by small business owner–managers from their external accountants.

The study uses a semi-structured interview approach with 20 small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners and accountants in London and Melbourne.

The interview data support the conceptual framework’s central proposition that relationships and trust, rather than being antecedents of demand for advice, are necessary conditions for enabling latent demand. SMEs with greater propensity to trust are more open to buying business advice but not necessarily from their accountant.

A limitation of the fieldwork is that it is based on a non-random and limited sample of accountants and SMEs.

Accountants in public practice can no longer assume that the already established relationships with their clients, developed while providing compliance services, will automatically lead SME clients to purchase business advice.

The paper contributes to the accounting literature by developing a conceptual model of relationships and trust that will assist the profession in better understanding the complex dynamics of the accountant–client relationship. The conceptual model distinguishes, for the first time, the antecedent factors of demand for business advice from the enabling roles of relationships and trust. Fieldwork interviews also yielded new insights into how SMEs’ decisions to purchase business advice are influenced by specific personality traits of SME owner–managers and additional antecedent demand factors not identified in the extant literature – economic conditions, environmental turbulence and business life-cycle.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there are any significant differences between native Swedish and immigrant entrepreneurs in business advice sought at start-up.

The study, based on a unique and large database consisting of 304 immigrant and 2,512 native-owned firms, applies several univariate and multivariate statistical methods including ANOVA and regression analysis.

According to the results there are certain similarities and differences between Swedish native- and immigrant-owned firms concerning the type of external business advice they seek. The results suggest there are significant differences between native and immigrant-owned firms for four of 20 types of advice received. Native-owned firms, on average, tend to seek more advice on accounting and on the choice of business form as well as the help of a knowledgeable person. On the other hand, immigrants seek, on average, more advice on export questions than their native counterparts.

This research contributes to policy-making by helping authorities gain a better understanding of the impact of immigrant background on business network decisions at the nascent stage of development. Immigrant access to good advice in the nascent stage should increase new firm survival. This study does not, however, measure performance. As this research is based on aggregate level secondary data, more specific analysis has been impossible. This is an important limitation of this paper. In addition, immigrants are not homogenous groups and they differ in age, education, work experiences, etc. The results should therefore be interpreted carefully.

This paper is one of the first and few empirical studies investigating the issue of immigrant business advice strategies in the Swedish context. The study provides a detailed overview of how ethnicity influences entrepreneurs’ use of external business advice in the firm formation stage for micro and small firms.

Although strategy development in large corporations has been well documented, the process of formulating strategy in small firms has not been extensively investigated by researchers. The process in small firms does not reflect exhaustive strategic analysis, but rather, a personality driven, opportunistic or instinctive approach, channelled through an emergent planning process. This study builds on recent work examining the planning patterns and approaches of small firms by integrating an understanding of the nature and extent of information and advice sought and received by the firm, and how that interaction influences the formation of competitive strategy. Results of this qualitative study point to more formal sources of advice such as providers of professional advisory services being bypassed due to a perceived lack of relevance of their information and planning advice to the SME's specific industry context.

The aim of this study is to examine whether there are significant differences between female and male entrepreneurs’ use of consultation during business start-ups.

Using several statistical tools, including ANOVA and seemingly unrelated regressions, empirical analyses are conducted on a unique and firm-level panel database of 837 female- and 1926 male-owned active small firms.

The results indicate that gender may be an important variable in the use of advice among small business owners in Sweden. Female owners in this study are shown to be more eager than male owners to use external business advice, and do so to a higher extent.

One implication of this study is that firms may not be able to use all business advice types simultaneously during their start-up stage, so an ordered list of consultancy services would help them prioritize and adjust their needs accordingly. Because the use of business advice is context-based, the findings of this study may not be generalized to firms in other countries. This paper shows some gender-based attributes/features relating to the use of business advice, which need to be better integrated into policymaking for the future assistance of small businesses.

This article focuses on an important issue and is unique partly because few studies have examined the relationship between gender and external business advice. By explicitly and empirically examining this issue, this article makes a contribution to the small- and medium-sized enterprises’ literature.

Business advisory services are an emerging service category for external accountants in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) environment. The purpose of this study is to investigate determinants of SME demand for business advice, drawing on the agency theory, relational marketing and resource-based literatures.

The study empirically tested theoretical predictions based on an Australia-wide survey of SMEs, in which 485 firms responded to a questionnaire.

The results show that the purchase of business advice is significantly and positively associated with the perceived competence of the external accountant, but significantly and negatively associated with length of the relationship. However, the authors observe a significant positive interaction between tenure of the relationship and competence. A unique contribution of this study is the development of the understanding of the combined role of the external accountant’s competence and the tenure of the relationship. The findings indicate that SMEs require time to verify whether accountants have the competence to provide business advice, suggesting that information asymmetry and uncertainty is minimised only after SMEs have nurtured relationships with their external accountants, and after they have developed some confidence in the competence of their external accountants. At the same time, the negative association with tenure suggests that when accountants are not perceived as competent advisors, SMEs purchase less advice over time.

The paper has important theoretical implications by augmenting agency theory, the relational marketing and the resource-based literature, and it clarifies which antecedent factors are important in explaining demand for business advisory services provided by accountants to their SME clients. In particular, the paper highlights the importance of the combined roles that the external accountant’s competence and tenure play in the SME–accountant relationship, highlighting how these two factors can overcome credence issues and ex ante information problems.

The findings have practical implications for government initiatives targeting support to SMEs, as the findings identify small firms and firms planning to grow as likely to gain the greatest benefit from external advice and support.

This study adds to the limited literature and scant theoretical discussions on the emergence of business advisory services that accountants provide to their SME clients by drawing on several theories to explain the determinants of business advice.

Following on studies of the reported importance of a range of external advice and a study of the impact of marketing advice on small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) performance, this study seeks to examine the relationship between business performance (growth) and the nature and degree of a wide range of business advice used by a sample of owner/managers of SMEs in the Manchester City‐region of the UK.

The study was conducted with 140 SMEs in the Manchester City region using an administered survey instrument.

The degree of use of a range of external advice was positively related to the growth rate of the SME. In common with most previous research, the most sought‐after advisers were external accountants and network contacts. Academic advice was sought very rarely. This study extends previous research and examine the nature of the advice provided by external accountants, which was found to include business, emergency, and financial management support in addition to statutory advice. The degree of provision of this additional assistance was associated with higher growth.

The relationship of advice and growth has been examined using a survey instrument. Further research is needed to understand how advice is sought, provided and used.

Accountants, network contacts and others were significant providers of advice and, where this advice was used, then SMEs reported higher growth rates. The direction of effect is probably in favour of the value of advice, but there could be virtuous cycles of advice and growth. However, the nature and quality of advice sought, offered, understood and embedded in business practice networks and contributing to social capital require further study.

The research extends previous studies by the range of advice and the nature of advice provided by external accountants, considered in relation to firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest two main objectives: to analyze if the size of the company is determined by the use of external legal and human resources (HR) advice; and to analyze if the size of the family business is determined by the use of these two same types of external advice.

The assessment is developed (2,013 firms, the Spanish industrial sector) by using descriptive statistics to compare the features of the different types of firms in the sample: family and non-family ones. This is completed with a test of equality of means and using econometric models.

Regarding legal advice, results show that as far as legal matters are concerned, when family businesses make greater use of this type of advice, they are smaller. This is a remarkable and interesting result because it differs from non-family firms, in which the use of this type of advice is positively related with size. Regarding the use of HR advice, while it remains significant in general cases with a positive result, this is not the same for family firms.

The use of advising in family firms is seldom dealt with in the literature, despite its helpfulness for family firm managers. There is gap in this field and a great deal of interesting research remains to be developed, because the authors consider that factors determining the use of advice in family and non-family firms are different.

El presente documento propone dos objetivos principales: (1) analizar si el tamaño de la empresa está relacionado con el uso de asesoramiento externo tanto jurídico como de recursos humanos. (2) examinar si para el caso de la empresa familiar su tamaño está relacionado por el uso de estos dos mismos tipos de asesoramiento externo.

El análisis se desarrolló (2.013 empresas, el sector industrial español) utilizando técnicas de la estadística descriptiva para comparar las características de los diferentes tipos de empresas de la muestra: familiares y no familiares queridos. Esto se completa con una prueba de la igualdad de medios y el uso de modelos econométricos.

En cuanto a asesoramiento jurídico, los resultados muestran que, en lo que se refiere a asuntos legales, las empresas familiares hacen un mayor uso de este tipo de consejos a medida que son más pequeñas. Este es un resultado notable e interesante, ya que se diferencia de las no familiares, en las que el uso de este tipo de asesoramiento se relaciona positivamente con el tamaño. Respecto al uso de asesoramiento de recursos humanos, mientras que sigue siendo significativa en los casos generales con un resultado positivo, este no es el mismo para las empresas familiares.

El uso de asesoramiento en las empresas familiares rara vez se aborda en la literatura, a pesar de su utilidad para los directivos de este tipo de empresas. Hay un vacío en este campo y una gran cantidad de investigación interesante que queda por desarrollar, teniendo en cuenta sobre todo, que los factores que determinan el uso de asesoramiento en las empresas familiares y no familiares no son los mismos.