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This case is intended to introduce undergraduate entrepreneurship students to business models via an entrepreneur who has two businesses: a used-car dealership, which he owns with his father, and a used-sport-bike dealership, which he solely owns. Although these businesses seem similar, there are subtle differences in business model that make the sport-bike business much more attractive. Case analysis involves a step-by-step comparison of the two firms' revenue models, cost structures, and investment needs and leaves students with two decision: first, how to best grow the sport-bike business, and second, whether to continue operating the used-car business once his father retires.

Primary interviews, company document review, secondary market research.

Undergraduate introduction to entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate relationships between financial condition and the use of bootstrapping in small firms.

A total of 901 manufacturing firms were selected from a comprehensive financial database containing income statement and balance sheet records. Surveys were sent to each of these firms and 186 firms returned usable surveys. Survey responses on bootstrapping techniques were compared with financial data for these 186 firms. Both the initial financial status and the financial status of these firms two years later were analyzed.

The results indicate that highly levered, illiquid, and underperforming firms were more likely to use certain bootstrapping methods than other firms, and that the methods they used may have been detrimental to future firm performance.

The findings support a resource dependence model and raise questions as to why financially constrained firms chose to use particular bootstrapping methods. Generalizability of the study is limited due to the homogeneous sample of manufacturing firms and due to the sample and recall biases associated with surveys.

Small business owners should understand the options available for bootstrapping as well as the importance of proactive as opposed to reactive financial strategy.

This is one of the first empirical studies that investigates the relationship between financial condition and bootstrapping, and it provides insight into how and when small firms bootstrap as well as some potential implications of bootstrapping on firm outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to return to Stinchcombe’s original emphasis on emerging vs existing organizations by examining the cognitive legitimacy challenges aspiring entrepreneurs face vis-à-vis entrepreneurs with existing businesses.

The data collection included content analysis of profiles of an online crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending market leading to a sample of 507 business loan requests, 123 of which were requests to support new business ideas rather than existing businesses. Negative binomial regression was used to test hypotheses regarding whether aspiring entrepreneurs seeking convenience-based support for their new business ideas would be less successful than their counterpart entrepreneurs seeking support for their existing businesses.

The findings show that aspiring entrepreneurs received less convenience-based support for their new business ideas from key resource providers than their peer entrepreneurs asking for support for existing businesses. The findings also suggest that this liability of newer than newness may be able to be mitigated by reputational signals such as the creditworthiness of the entrepreneur making the request.

This study focuses on the original insights Stinchcombe introduced when he described the social conditions that produce the liability of newness. Moreover, this study offers explicit theory as to the key mechanisms that cause the liability of newness by focusing on an aspiring entrepreneur’s ability to secure convenience-based support and potential ways an aspiring entrepreneur may offset that liability.

Previous approaches have employed the SCOR model for evaluating supply chain management, and in particular, have focused on cash-to-cash cycle time (C2C). This paper reviews the Supply Chain Index (SCI) developed by Supply Chain Insight LLC, which evaluates supply chain performance based on balance, strength, and resiliency. The main aim of this study is to review SCI as a new methodology to measure performance management, as well as to apply C2C for a case study of Korean firms, to compare and present differences for further complementary application.