Challenges and Opportunities of Small Business Management and Start-Ups in India

The core objective of this research article is to investigate different challenges and opportunities in management as well as start-ups of small businesses in India. After thorough revision of relevant literature on small businesses and its management, the researchers used a well structured questionnaire and in-depth personal interviews with 586 small business operators selected from manufacturing, trading (retailing and wholesaling), finance, servicing/repair businesses which are located in the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh in India. The researchers have used convenience sampling and collected data was analyzed with the support of Microsoft Excel and frequency distribution. Noticeably, majority of the small businessmen in India are facing multitude of challenges both in management and start-up of their business operations. In particular, 72.47 percent of small businesses operators’ have substantiated their strong opinion towards the challenges they are facing particularly finance, marketing and other problems while managing their businesses. The researchers also attempted to procure the opinions and problems of the Indian small business entrepreneur community while starting their operations. A staggering 68 percent of respondents identified the problems related to preparation of business plan, location selection, marketing and other problems like lack of proper credit facilities, skilled manpower, and other infra related problems while start-ups of their businesses. The present research limited with the opinions of only four categories of small business operators particularly from the manufacturing, finance, trading (retailing & wholesaling), and servicing/repair which are continuing their business operations from the nine coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh in India. The present study emphatically provides concrete information required to the business community for identifying an assortment of challenges faced by different small business operators in man