Understanding Decision-Making to Better Assist Small Business Financing

This article examines financing decisions in small businesses by looking at managerial behavior. The challenge is to understand decision-making in order to better help out managers, which can only be achieved through a behavioral approach. To this end, a theoretical framework combining the theory of managerial choice and financial proxemics has been devised. Qualitative methodology based on the study of five cases has been used for this purpose. The results illustrate, on the one hand, a behavioral typology among managers in matters of financing and, on the other hand, the existence of a clearly identifiable decision process that can be broken up into sequences. These results, expressed in terms of proposals, attest to the richness of the theoretical model developed and to the relevance of using qualitative approaches for the study of financial decisions in SMEs.