This is our platform for small and medium size (SME) businesses.  It invites SME business owners and their partners to learn, share and exchange perspectives on SME growth and sustainability.  Please feel welcome to share your thoughts in the various discussions of interest here and let's make the journey together.  See you soon; and "let us never fear to think".

You need to be registered to interact with the community.
This is our platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are disruptive; they drive change and re-write the rules by which we do business. We hope to build a vibrant community of business owners and their partners, who are tirelessly working each day to establish, grow and sustain their small and medium-sized enterprises. SMEs are the biggest growth market, they are the biggest market themselves and the leading innovators.

Please feel welcome to share your thoughts in the various discussions of interest here and let's make the journey together.

See you soon; and "let us never fear to think".

Worldwide, there are about 300 million persons trying to start some 150 million businesses annually.

About 33% of these are launched, bringing 50 million new firm births each year; or about 137,000 per day.  Very nearly the same number of active firms, approximately 120,000, fold up each day across the world.

  • In the UK, for example, only 68% of registered businesses survive beyond three years; 53% beyond five years, and only 32% survive beyond ten years.​​
  • In Canada, about 145,000 businesses start up each year, and about 137,000 declare bankruptcy over the same period.
  • In Kenya, 60% of businesses fail within their first two years of operation.
  • 53% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) fail within the first three years in New Zealand.
  • In Brazil, out of the 1.6 million new businesses that open every two years, 652,186 (41%) close down within three years, with 51% closing before they are two years old.

Why this undesirable trend?  When you think of the amount of money lost, the number of livelihoods affected and hopes destroyed, we certainly should be doing something to stem this.

This is the stuff we hope to engage about here.

Before you ask a question or begin a discussion however - please make sure to search for a similar question or discussion. You can search these by their title or tags.  It is also okay to answer your own question, and it is, obviously, also expected you will participate in discussions that you start, without necessarily taking a leadership or moderator role.

Please avoid asking questions or raising discussions that are not relevant to this community.

Try to ask questions, give answers, or make discussion contributions in a way that you are sure will make us all better people.  We depend on each other for this.  

To prevent your questions and other contributions from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking questions or making contributions that are uniquely subjective, emotive, or otherwise offensive.

As much as possible, answers should not comment on other answers. Instead, add your own comment or answer to the on-going discussion.

If you wish to include a link to external content, don't just paste the link.  Instead, give context and overview to what the link is about even if it's just a copy/paste.  Links are welcome, but should be complementary to answers, comments and discussions; they should be references for further or additional reading.

When a question or answer is upvoted, the user who posted them will gain some points, which are called "karma points". These points serve as a rough measure of the community trust to him/her. Various moderation tasks are gradually assigned to users based on those points.

For example, if you ask an interesting question or give a helpful answer, your input will be upvoted. On the other hand if the answer is misleading - it will be downvoted. Each vote in favor will generate 10 points, each vote against will subtract 10 points. There is a limit of 200 points that can be accumulated for a question or answer per day. The table given at the end explains reputation point requirements for each type of moderation task.

Not just anyone can do this.  The goal of forum is create a relevant knowledge perspectives around what is important for users.

Therefore, questions and answers can be edited like wiki pages by experienced users of this forum in order to improve the overall quality of the forum's content.  Such privileges are granted based on user karma level: you will be able to do the same once your karma gets high enough.

Here a table with the privileges and the karma level