Business Stay-Up is a research-led campaign to raise awareness of the pressures and challenges business owners face as they seek to survive and scale, and understand what can be done to increase the probability of success.

Business failure and resulting creative destruction drives forward a market economy. However, not all business failure is necessary and unavoidable. For example, a lack of management or employee skills, poor financial management and operational mismanagement can destroy what would be an otherwise successful business. More can and should be done to raise the probability of firm survival – or Business Stay-up. Future entrepreneurship policy must identify and stimulate factors that help firms survive and thrive.

Latest Report

Too often viable companies fail due to bad management even when the fundamental idea behind the business is sound. A body of academic research that finds good management is a better predictor of a firm’s success than R&D spending, IT spending or how skilled their workforce is.

Whether or not firms consistently monitor and improve their processes, set and revise targets, and incentivise employees through merit-based hiring, firing and promotion procedures explains almost a third of the differences in productivity between and within countries.

Better management training could close the gap but less than half of British Business owners are engaged in job-related adult education and training.

Report author Sam Dumitriu recommends practical reforms including tax breaks for self-funded work-related training to encourage greater investment in management capability to reduce the rate of unnecessary business failure. Put simply, when businesses are well-managed they create more jobs, pay higher wages, and sell better (and cheaper) products. Better managed workers aren’t just more productive and better paid, they’re happier too.

Read the report

In the News

Start-ups across the UK are going bust – they need more careful management for our economy to boom, 24 January 2019, The Telegraph
If UK PLC is to thrive, it badly needs better management, 23 January 2019, CapX
Heed the celebrity gurus and teach Britain how to manage, 23 January 2019, CityA.M.
ABE Spearheading Business Stay-Up Campaign to Promote Sustainable Entrepreneurship, 12 February 2018, ABE
Management Matters For Increasing Firm Productivity, 29 May 2018, Forbes
High-Impact Entrepreneurship Can Transform Lives, so How do we Ensure it’s Sustainable?, 29 May 2018, LinkedIn
Ground-Breaking Analysis of 10,500 Companies Reveals Training Programmes that Helps Firms Grow, 12 September 2018, FE News
Forget Embracing Failure, Startups Deserve the Best Possible Shot at Success,12 February 2018, City A.M.

Campaign Partner

As the pioneer in global business education, the Association of Business Executives (ABE) was founded more than 40 years ago with a clear social purpose to improve business education for aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries, many of which are now high-growth economies. That pioneering spirit remains as we seize new challenges to engage millennials with flexible and relevant learning content and credentials.

Today, ABE works all over the world and 1.5 million people have mastered essential modern business concepts and gained the skills and confidence to apply them through ABE’s active-learning courses. ABE continues to play a vital role in helping to diversify and grow economies, reducing inequality within and among countries, and is at the forefront of the entrepreneurial skills agenda.