DISEÑO DEL CUESTIONARIO

Although each of the owners experienced great satisfaction in rapidly growing their businesses and enjoyed the experience of growth they also expressed the personal negative cost of that rapid growth. In experience the brisk growth of their businesses each of the entrepreneurs experienced major emotional pressure. Rapidly growing a business is not for the faint hearted. It puts strain on relationships, causes great stress and can lead to immense personal pressure. At certain points of the narratives each of the entrepreneurs expressed strong emotions about the experiences that they had gone through particularly about the impact on themselves and their families. This was evident not only in the narrative but also in their body language and their facial expressions

On the personal impact of rapidly growing the business:

“Yes, he was a crucial part of the business, he saw all that at first hand, he saw me with me illness sitting on my settee in my underpants shaking like a nutcase, you know what I mean, it’s like, things that will stick with him for all his life, but, you know, how much he understood about why it was happening I don’t know, ??? since it happened I gave him my explanation once everything had settled down and I told him my feelings of why that happened - which is very difficult to do, it’s like – I’ve got no fears about talking about it, it was an actual crucial part of my life when that happened because it could’ve went the other way and I could’ve went over the top basically. It also taught me to control how much I can take myself, it taught me how to control stress and – everybody suffers from stress, I don’t care how laid back you

are, you get stressed out at various things but it sort of taught me I’m never ever going to that horrible place again, I’m not going to let it affect me like that.

So these things which he sometimes took as massive downers, you know, things that could be so detrimental, they weren’t” (Case Study D)

“So certainly - even my process or things I do has changed considerably for the past few months, you know, I’ve got things like a PA now just to channel - the amount of emails I’ve got alone is torture! But myself, I come in, I mean I’m still quite hands-on, I’m trying to relinquish quite a few of the jobs I don’t need to do, so an example of that is the cash flow, so I come in like six o’clock in the morning every day and six till nine is just generally sorting cash flow out and debtors and creditors and that kind of stuff.” (Case Study E)

“so I was away doing a lot of consumer shows, so I’d be away Thursday to Sunday for example, at least a week a month and plus I was working really long hours – we were just trying to get the US company set up so S was helping with the US set-up on a night. So if we were both in the same country, he’d get in from work five or six o’clock and do a few hours on the US company, I’d get in from work nine/ten o’clock, so we wouldn’t really see each other and all of his holidays he was having to take from work to come to trade shows with me because I didn’t really have staff who could run trade show stands, I just had doers not thinkers, so we were just ships that passed in the – we never saw each other, you know, we didn’t have any quality of life like that, we just lived to work, both of us. So, I think that was also – you could tell something was brewing and there was going to have to be a big change in our life”

(Case Study C)

“I carried all of this, I was the only one carrying this on their shoulders because that’s the way that we were structured. Never again Roy, do you know what I mean?

And so as we came through this period, as we got ourselves out and recognised that, actually, I think we can move here, as I said, a bit of serendipity, a chap turns up – actually it was due to a government programme or something on training and they said ‘well you’ve got to take somebody for three days’ and I went ‘OK’ and actually what it gave – I said ‘Ok well come in and by my Chairman, I brought in a Chair, a Chair just to give me time to sit and ‘right, have you done, have you done, have you done?’ and have that – I think we talked about it last time – having those dark days where you get out and don’t worry about the shit that’s going on in there because there’s nothing – and you probably, I don’t know, it’s certainly happened for me and it may well have happened for you but that time when you’re sitting in the general office and you can hear the shit’s all over the fan with a client or whatever – it’s not your job to worry about that, that’s their job to worry about that.” (Case Study B) 4.8 Conclusion

The chapter covers the objective of identifying and analysing the actions and decisions taken post the growth events and analysing these through an appropriately developed framework (section 4.4). Attride-Stirling (2001) suggested “if qualitative research is to yield meaningful and useful results, it is imperative that the material under scrutiny is analysed in a methodical

manner” (Attride-Stirling, 2001, p. 386). Early commentators regarding qualitative research were eager to establish the credibility of the methodology (Gläser & Laudel, 2013). It has been argued that there is a need for greater disclosure when using a qualitative approach (Attride-Stirling, 2001). There has been more recent criticism of the defensiveness of practitioners of qualitative methods need to code text in order to establish its “scientific”

credibility (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). There is a temptation to use all data generated as opposed to looking for the quality of the data. The approach adopted also avoided theme fallacy, “if you think you have to find a theme, you probably will” (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, p. 716).

Within each of the growth narratives there was a clear recognition of unpredictable nature of the growth event triggers. These events could be categorised as BSTEs because they met the criteria as set down within the research; rarity, had relatively massive consequences, could be post-rationalised and triggered rapid growth. The entrepreneurs recognised that the major trigger events leading to the growth of their business were largely unpredictable and as such were BSTEs. They recognised the role that luck, randomness and serendipity played in their growth story as evidenced within the growth narratives. This did not take away their belief in their own capabilities but established a sense of the reality of their growth story. Phrases such as “right place right time” (Case Study D),” it was fortuitous” (Case Study B), “I was lucky”

(Case Study E) “I did not see it coming” (Case Study A) all play to the unpredictability of the events.

The scale of the events was evident in how many of them fell firmly into the category of BSTEs using Taleb’s sense of the momentous nature and impact of the Black Swan Trigger Event (Taleb, 2007). In terms of the three elements of the unpredictable event the participants all recognised “the business fact and believed that they needed to have an element of luck, chance, or fortune to be successful” (Mirvahedi, 2014, p. 110). In the context of the definitions of the three elements of an unpredictable event outlined within the research the various BSTEs were random, some were because of luck and some because of serendipity.

Several of the BSTEs were random, as in the meeting potential partners or suppliers or customers. Some of the BSTEs were as a consequence of luck; being offered a major intellectual property license or recognizing the opportunity to acquire a synergistic technology business. Refer to Appendix A for timeline and detail of BSTEs for each case.

The most important aspects of these HGSF stories was the desire that the founders had for starting their own business coupled with a growth mindset and self-belief in their own capabilities to grow a business (MacKenzie et al., 2016; Schofield et al., 2015). The combined different motives for starting the businesses may have been different but the main one of them “wanting to be in control of their own destiny” was the most important. Each founder brought the optimism, self-confidence, self-efficacy, experience, energy, enthusiasm and charisms to their businesses. Once they had set out on the path of starting their businesses and the consequence of the BSTEs kicked in, having validated their business model, they became more aspirational in their growth ambitions. The evidence from the various stages of analysis of the narrative growth stories showed that the BSTEs brought opportunities to the HGSFs and they had a major influence on their rapid growth. The mapping indicated the range and complexity of actions and consequences faced by the entrepreneurs resulting from the BSTEs, these actions and consequences falling within the scope of the developing absorptive capacity of each of the HGSFs. All the firms continued to plan, they continued to adopt a strategic entrepreneurial approach to their business (Klein et al., 2012).

The evidence from these five case study firms is that it was the BSTEs that stimulated rapid growth. Rapid growth is not random per se but is a consequence of BSTEs which are by their nature unpredictable events. BSTEs are occurrences that cannot be prepared for, although it is possible to have a culture of preparedness, expecting the unexpected (Bartram, 2015; Lindaas

& Pettersen, 2016). This is a divergence from certain extant literature that debates the nascent nature of growth being, stochastic, random or planned (Coad et al., 2013; Coad et al., 2015;

Derbyshire et al., 2015; Henderson et al., 2014). The debate around high growth firms views growth in its holistic anodyne sense it does not deal with it in its “lived” sense (Brannback et al., 2014; Gibb, 2000). The extant literature does not account for the “minutiae” of the actuality of growth (Kiviluoto, 2013; Stam, 2010). Although the BSTE is identified as important in the growth dynamic it may be that the ability of the entrepreneur to take appropriate actions post the BSTE is more important (Mirvahedi, 2014; Wolff, Pett, & Ring, 2015). In the view of the researchers this is like asking “which came first the chicken or the egg?” The whole point is that the learning framework for taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the BSTE develops over time (Frankish, Roberts, Coad, Spears, & Storey, 2013;

Zahra & George, 2002).

The BSTEs were most evident at the start of the growth process. BSTEs create opportunities that entrepreneurs act on. These BSTEs are not an “excuse” or a rational for growth, an entrepreneur cannot bypass endeavour, perseverance or hard work. The rules of engagement for the survival of any business still apply, remembering that the vast majority of small firms within the UK are “static” businesses. They will never experience rapid growth but may still experience steady growth (Gupta et al., 2013). This idea is based upon the evidence of the vast majority of surviving firms within the UK. What these static firms will not do is add substantially to the economic dynamism required to address the regional disparities of the North East of England (NELEP, 2017). The categorisation of BSTEs within an effective matrix provides an interesting multi-dimensional perspective on the nature of BSTEs and the potential policy framework for supporting HGSF. It uses the interconnected network of categorising, by the nature of the unpredictability, by the root foundation of the BSTE, Endogenous, Exogenous or Co-determined all within a framework of absorptive capacity.