What is Business Narratives

One of the biggest challenges faced by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) concerns the capacity of the entrepreneur to formulate strategies within a formal organizational structure. Very often, important knowledge about the business remains solely in the deeper levels of the entrepreneur's mind and cannot be accessed by any stakeholder. As a result, many of the good ideas that entrepreneurs have end up dying with them. This hinders business growth, business model replication, and successful succession in family businesses and SME's in general. Therefore, it is important to investigate ways to structure within the firm the strategies generated in the entrepreneur's mind, in order to prepare SMEs for growth and long-term sustainability, above and beyond the minds, hands, and lives of their founders. Our chapter explores this general theme by offering methodological insights on how to extract and formalize the tacit knowledge coming from SME founders. We focus on the formulation of strategies based on the marketing knowledge and life experience of the entrepreneur.