Success Factors of Swedish Sequential Gazelle Companies : A study on differentiating firm attributes and the significance of using external professional business services

Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are big contributors to today’s business environment and the society as a whole, and their contributions are highly valued. Gazelle companies can be seen as the most successful SMEs and hence the interest to analyze them. Far from all companies succeed to maintain a profitable growth and recieve the Gazelle title sequential times. Due to this, this research aims to answer the question what differentiates sequential Gazelle companies from one time Gazelle companies. In Sweden, the Gazelle title is announced to companies who fulfill certain criteria, meaning that they are homogenous in many ways. However, there must be some differences since some succeed to maintain the title whereas others do not. By the following research question, this research intends to identify some of these differentiating attributes. Is there a difference between sequential Gazelle companies and one time Gazelle companies regarding the chosen firm attributes? Existing research show that one common factor behind maintained profitable growth is the ability to ask for help in fields where management competence is lacking. It is argued that this help can be in form of external professional business services and hence this research intends to answer this second research question: Do usage of external professional business services contribute to sequential Gazelle title? Since the ability to maintain profitable growth is discussed to depend on internal competence and knowledge, or lack thereof, Resource-Based Theory is found to be an appropriate explanation tool. This theory is supported by the Stages of Growth model to further explain the development of the firms. This research had a quantitative method where a survey was used to collect data. In order to accept/reject the formed hypotheses, the data was imported to SPSS where it was statistically tested in two separate logistic regressions. The results of this research statistically show that the mixture of the included firm attributes do differ between sequential Gazelle companies and one time Gazelle companies. However, the test proved nonsignificant when examining the usage of external professional services. This means that even though there were indications of high importance, one cannot statistically argue that usage of external professional business services leads to sequential Gazelle title.