• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.113-122
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• 2012

A success of opening a business should be supported with complete preparations and implementation. While there have been various educational programs for opening a business to support its success, there have not been a lot of studies on the relationships between educational programs and operational performance in small businesses, due to the difficulties of empirical survey. In this point, this study attempts to understand the relationships between preparation of opening a business and operational performance, while dividing samples into two groups (1. a group completing educational programs for opening a business, 2. a group non-completing). For the perspectives of the preparation of opening a business, various success factors have been suggested through various studies, but the perspectives and approaches of balanced business operation have been required. Therefore, using BSC, it developed a framework with the four perspectives of preparation for opening a business, and empirically reviewed the relationships between the four perspectives and operational performances in small businesses. It conducted a survey on the total 252 samples, whose business periods are less than 5 years. As the results, the preparations of financial and customer/marketing perspectives have significant relationships between operational performances in total samples, preparations of financial, customer/marketing, and growth-strategies perspectives in the educational program completing group and only preparation of financial perspectives in the non-completing group have significant relationship with operational performances. The differences between the two groups may imply that educational programs for opening a business may be helpful for preparation of opening a business and have some possibility of direct and indirect effects for the success of opening a business. Also, the developed BSC based-preparation framework for opening a business is meaningful for the view of balanced business operations, and can contribute to develop the educational programs for opening a business.