Abstract
Successful SMEs in KwaZulu-Natal do not all follow formal or ‘classical’ strategic planning methodologies taught by most business schools. While many SMEs collapse within the first year of operation, others become successful in their endeavours to firstly make a living for themselves and secondly to employ others in order to improve and uplift the economy of South Africa. In this qualitative study, four business models were selected which are taught at most business schools. All SMEs engaged in this study acknowledged the value of using business models to support strategic planning. The medium size enterprises did prepare formal strategic plans and monitored all their activities on a regular basis. Small size SMEs use a mixture of business ‘creativity’ to accommodate uncertain economic conditions and make quick decisions and have been able to succeed even during poor economic times. A new concept called ‘extremely flexibile’ strategic planning was introduced to enable small size SMEs to consider an alternate method of making strategic plans in a less-structured manner.
Highlights
As far back as the year 2000, a variety of research studies indicate that there are benefits to strategic planning (Desai, 2000; Fraser & Stupak, 2002, Goncalves, 2009). These studies revealed that strategic planning enabled businesses to identify causes and solutions to problems, to understand the operating environment, business purpose and values, as well as available resources
The 8 questions of the questionnaire were a mixture of closed and open-ended questions and the same questions were presented to all six interview participants as well as to the two email participants
The goal of thematic analysis is to analyse themes, i.e. patterns in the data that are important or interesting and to identify emerging themes using codes to describe the rich deposits of detail about the topic (Braun & Clarke, 2006:79; Tummons, 2014:155, Macguire & Delahunt, 2017)
Summary
As far back as the year 2000, a variety of research studies indicate that there are benefits to strategic planning (Desai, 2000; Fraser & Stupak, 2002, Goncalves, 2009). Large corporate enterprises seem to be slow to change their business practices, smaller companies like SMEs are quick to make any changes necessary to remain competitive (Burshan, Gibbs & Strovink, 2014). The function of strategic management is to formulate and put into practice the major company initiatives, provides general direction, maximizing use of available resources and setting objectives and plans to achieve the objectives (Torzhevskaia & Porasmaa, 2017). With this in mind, and for the purposes of this study, the researcher advanced with the notion that perceived success in business is achieved if an SME has been in business for three years or more in any area of business
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