Article Published In Vol.8 (March-April-2020)

Birth-Effect and Performance of selected Small and Medium Scale Enterprises’ (SMEs) Owners in Ogun State, Nigeria

Author : Oduguwa, A.S. and Egwakhe, J. A.

Birth-effect (month of birth, gender and birth order) sounds strange, new, and multi-dimensional in assessing SMEs performance in Ogun State, Nigeria. Person-birth characteristics are too fragmented and paucity in literature have not associated or denote its influence on SMEs performance. The study examines birth-effect on performance of selected Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Ogun State. Respondents were 183 SME owners in Ogun state. Stratified Sampling technique was first used which helped to group SMEs owners and then simple random sampling was ultilised to arrive at the sampling size. A validated and reliable questionnaire instrument was employed to gather data. Three hypotheses were tested through simple linear regression analysis. The study found that owner’s month of birth has significance influence on SMEs’ monthly net-profit (P-value of 0.000<0.005); owner’s birth order has significance influence on SMEs startup capital (P-value of 0.002<0.005); and no significant influence was found between gender and number of SMEs employees (p-value of 0.070>0.005). Therefore, the study concludes that being born in early months of the year would increase net- profit of SMEs proportionally and being a first born or twins attracts parental favour which culminated into raising more start-up capital for SMEs when compared with siblings. Hence, the study recommends that birth factors should carefully be considered as quintessential factors of SMEs performance.

Keywords: Month of birth, Gender, Birth order, Entrepreneur, Birth effect, SMEs, Performance