The purpose of this paper is to explore the business assistance realities of New Zealand small and medium enterprise (SME) owner‐managers in order to better understand those experiences in terms of their ability to identify and use what is provided.
Site visits were made to 51 small firms that had been recruited from a random sample of 500 New Zealand firms that employed up to 50 full‐time equivalent staff and were in the “manufacturing” or “service” sector. An interview was then carried out with the owner‐manager of the firm.
The owner‐managers of some SMEs interact with the support infrastructure regularly, while others do not. The sources of business assistance most frequently accessed where not necessarily those that were subsequently perceived as being the most useful or significant.
The findings are limited in their generalisability due to the research methodology and research context. However, the conclusions will be of interest to researchers, policy‐makers and business assistance providers.
The paper addresses a gap in the knowledge base surrounding business assistance and SMEs. Typically investigations on this topic focus on supply‐side issues (i.e. how service provision can be improved) rather than those that relate to demand (i.e. investigating the needs of owner‐managers). The project was unique in the New Zealand context (both in terms of scale and research approach).
