UK Business Link provides bespoke advice to small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) through business advisers. The Small Business Service’s consultation paper, “Integrating the business support infrastructure for SMEs”, advocated “customer‐driven, not supply‐led” publicly funded...

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...

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the factors that influence small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) performance and particularly, growth. Design/methodology/approach – This paper utilises an original data set of 360 SMEs employing 5‐249 people to run logit...

Recent research has demonstrated that small firm performance in Northern Ireland has benefited from the availability of a comprehensive and well‐funded programme of selective financial assistance provided by the Local Enterprise Development Unit (LEDU), the small business agency for the...