The Problems Experienced by Young Firms
综述小企业失败文献，访谈34名男性和34名女性企业主，发现年轻企业主要面临财务、营销和人力资源管理问题，女性在创办初期有特定性别问题，但之后与男性面临相同问题。
PROFESSOR STANLEY CROMIE IS director of the Centre for Management Education at Ulster Business School, Northern Ireland. In this paper he surveys the literature on the failure of small firms and argues that there is a need to focus attention on those factors which contribute to the demise of male and female owned firms in the 'demarrage' phase of the development. To add to knowledge of this topic he interviewed 34 male and 34 female proprietors of four year old firms and questioned them on the problems they encountered in their early years. Results indicate that problems occur principally in the areas of finance, marketing and the management of human resources. In addition, entrepreneurs experience some difficult personal problems. Women incur a few gender specific problems during the launch of their firms but thereafter gender ceases to be a specific issue; both sexes face the same kind of problems. The paper concludes by noting that while training interventions, which focus on finance, marketing and the management of people, may well improve the chances of survival of young organisations, attention must focus on organisational diagnosis to determine where interventions are likely to succeed and on the process by which trainers assist entrepreneurs.