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Small and emerging business failure rates are high for numerous reasons. Government regulation has been cited as a contributing factor, yet literature documenting the actual effects of government regulation on small business is limited. The purpose of this paper is to clearly outline the regulatory compliance costs and effects on small businesses in the California dairy industry.

This paper applies a public choice framework to the history of dairy regulation and performs a case study on a small business, The White Moustache (TWM). The case study traces the burdens and costs of state dairy regulations placed on TWM as they sought the necessary permits to sell their artisan yogurt.

Strict and unresponsive regulation restricted TWM from selling their product. To comply with state dairy regulations, the direct costs to TWM would have increased by 70 percent. In addition, regulation caused two and a half years of delay before the company decided to leave the state. California’s dairy regulations place burdens on small dairy businesses that work as a strategic barrier to entry in the marketplace.

This case study highlights the direct effects that strict and unresponsive regulation can have on entrepreneurs and emerging businesses through a case study. Improving the understanding of how regulation affects small business can highlight new paths forward and help improve the small business failure rate in the USA.

We explore the current landscape of business ethics and entrepreneurship within the undergraduate business school curricula and programmatic structure. We then present a couple of approaches we have used to advance the understanding and teaching of business ethics and entrepreneurship as a set of foundational principles.

As contextual framing for our analysis we convened eight colloquia/workshops over the past three years that bring a wide-ranging group of business school faculty, scholars in complementary disciplines, and business practitioners into a small-group setting to have in-depth conversations about the role of business ethics and entrepreneurship within the business school. Data used in our analysis catalog the ways and the degree to which AACSB-accredited business schools focus their undergraduate curricula and degree program structure on ethics and entrepreneurship. Working through publically available data, primarily from business school websites, we use content analysis as a framework for statistical analysis of the alignment between how a business school articulates strategic focus (mission, vision, and purpose statements) and how it structures its curricular offerings and degree programs. Most business schools continue to operationalize their approach to business ethics and entrepreneurship as programmatic appendages rather than a foundational set of knowledge and skills that are central to the school’s teaching mission. In general, business schools are missing an opportunity to teach practical business ethics and principled entrepreneurship as the central driving force in value-creating activities within all organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the validity of the service-profit chain (SPC) in a restaurant company context to comprehensively explicate the relationship between organizational practices, employee attitudes with customer and financial outcomes.

The method used both questionnaire and company proprietary data to measure the predicted SPC outcomes through structural equation modeling. The research data were obtained from employees, customers and management at five restaurants in one casual theme restaurant chain in Australia.

The findings indicate that revenue may be a more appropriate outcome than profit in the SPC, that context and individual unit circumstances matter and that there may be a time lag between organizational actions, employee behavior, customer satisfaction and financial outcomes.

Because of the nature of field research, there are limitations. As restaurants were added during the study, data per unit were impacted. Moreover, budgetary constraints limited the number of customer surveys. Nonetheless, the data set includes management, customer, employee and proprietary financial measures which are rarely available in the research literature. These data allow a thorough study of the SPC that provides both important findings and a model for future investigations into the SPC.

As the SPC is a widely cited model used to explain the linkages between managerial and organizational actions and financial outcomes as they work through employee interactions with customers, the findings suggest that the chain may have a more direct impact on revenue than profit. Moreover, the data strongly suggest that context matters as the unique context of the restaurants had important influences on financial outcomes. The findings also indicate that a time lag exists between managerial and organizational actions and financial outcomes, suggesting that it can take time for such actions to ripple through the SPC.

Structural equation modeling and standardized measures allowed the authors to overcome prior limitations in SPC research. Moreover, SPC researchers seldom have access to the proprietary data that enabled a test of the entire SPC. Consequently, this study contributes new insights into this classic model’s value in predicting and explaining financial outcomes resulting from the actions of an organization’s leadership influencing employee behavior toward customers in the restaurant industry.