Significant Business Change

New Year and after a month’s hiatus we return, with gusto (apologies for the delay it has been a month of challenges and systematic literature reviews!)!

This month will refocus on what we know about exit, but this could also relate to any significant business change, and further, we will go on to look at the theory of planned behaviour and how that compares to actual behaviour. Fail to plan and plan to fail are all very well until something changes, we don’t operate in a binary world. In this dynamic environment where we all try and survive and thrive (more the former after the last three years) we look at how can you plan for environments where the landscape continually shifts through external, rather than internal, factors. Equally how do scholars continue to get access to business, which is currently a struggle, to understand the challenges that owners face when trying to both plan and exit their businesses?

Entrepreneurial exit has been the subject of academic research for many years. Widely accepted by scholars as “the process by which the founders of the privately held firms leave the firm they helped to create; thereby removing themselves; in varying degree, from the primary ownership and decision-making structure of the firm” (DeTienne, 2010, p203) understanding the process by which entrepreneurs exit is reasonably set in stone. This phenomenon of research continues today with recent literature reviews (Cefis et al., 2021) researching literature that seeks to understand “The phenomenon of firm exit is explored from a variety of perspectives: business exit; exit at the individual entrepreneur level; exit from specific markets; exit from foreign markets; and the role of exit for industrial dynamics conceived more broadly. Special attention is given to the various exit routes, including voluntary liquidation, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), initial public offerings (IPO), and of course bankruptcy.” (Cefis et al., 2021)

What we still don’t know much about are those influences on entrepreneurial decisions, those external factors that hijack a plan, those theories of planned behaviour and how they manifest into actual and lastly, the Stoic’s, Aurelius et al, view on exit (I’ve thrown that in there to see if you are paying attention)

Next week we will start back on the theory of planned behaviour.

Thanks for reading, thanks for joining me on this journey and thanks as always for your feedback and questions!