Determinants of the Success of Small & Medium Scale Enterprise in Gurage Zone: The Case of Wolkite Town

Abstract

This research aims to investigate Determinates of entrepreneurial success of small and medium enterprises emphasizes on construction, manufacture, service, trade and agriculture sectors in Wolkite. For the sake of achieving the objectives of this study the information were collected through questionnaire from a sample of 92 operators and face-to-face interviews were conducted with 20 operators of SMSEs. The respondent operators were selected using stratified sampling technique. Besides the questionnaires, the interview questions were analyzed using descriptive narrations through concurrent triangulation strategy. The findings further indicate that, the major determinants for entrepreneurial success for operating small and medium scale enterprises, the major internal factors that affects the success of entrepreneurs small and medium scale in Wolkite, Are Moreover, the selected independent variables politico- legal, working premises, technological marketing and dependent variable financial managerial and entrepreneurship may significantly explain the variations in the dependent variable. The major finding of the study has further identified that the different influences in which each of the factors under study have in different categories of the business the research clearly illustrates that, even if the degree of those critical factors in construction, manufacture, services, trade and agriculture sector slightly differ from the factors that are critical to work sectors, most of the factors are considerably common for five sectors. It has been noted that the contextual factors are prevalent to the business such as politico-legal, financial, working premises, marketing and infrastructure had very high effects on the success of SMSES compared to other factors in the research area. Furthermore, based on the major findings and conclusions, the following recommendations were made: Government offices have to organize and facilitate marketing and promotional programs to address the issue of business development service and convince and aid enterprise to prepare business plan. An endeavor should be made to increase education level of operators or employees because it will improve entrepreneurial trait of owners/managers of SMSEs and leads to increase the use of ICT.

Keywords: SME, Entrepreneurial, Performance.