Abstract
The study aims to identify the root problems facing by the small firm that further can guide the university to implement the most appropriate treatments to enhance the partnering small firm's business performance. A qualitative approach was employed, primarily conducting in-depth interviews and brainstorming with business owners, employees, store managers, and consumers of "Wajik Tapai" in Riau Province, in the framework of root cause analysis. The result reveals that the distinct causes identified as the driver of the small firm's income stagnation can be rooted in four perspectives, i.e., product durability, non-ergonomic working layout with a traditional process, conventional/offline marketing, and variability of product.
Highlights
What is your real problem? Ideally, such a question should be deeply explored - in the first place - from the micro and small businesses while conducting a situation analysis for the community service program
Higher Education Institution (HEI) and SME's alliance allows the transfer of knowledge, technology, and innovation (Forsman, 2011; Boldrini et al, 2017) to provide appropriate business supports (Wade & Demb, 2009)
Those multi-aspect drivers are obviously too wide to observe by a single study; to identify the root problems of the observed small firm's income stagnation, the authors limited the perspective sources from the business owner, distributors/resellers, and the consumers
Summary
What is your real problem? Ideally, such a question should be deeply explored - in the first place - from the micro and small businesses while conducting a situation analysis for the community service program. Farther barriers observed with a small business are the lack of skills and mastery of the quality of marketing, production, and business management (Fausiah, 2016) These barriers lead to the need for external assistance, from government and corporation and from HEI. Typical barriers encountering SMEs are mostly about capital, technology, marketing, production quality, and human resources (Daengs GS et al, 2019) These problems are still normative, whereas the rooting problem stage demands precise identification of the real root causes to offer relevant treatment solutions. Based on the initial observation of the firm, the study found that the company owner's main obstacle was the slow growth in revenue over the last few years (Figure 1) In business terminology, this phenomenon is called income stagnation. Both perspectives will further influence the SMEs' performance (Lopes, Hamdok, & Elhiraika, 2017; Lin & Magnago, 2017; Rusu & Roman, 2016)
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