What CEO characteristics and strategic choices impact company growth and success in the IT consultant industry in Sweden?

Abstract: Background. Sweden is one the countries that have the highest survival rate amongst new companies in all of Europe but still it is only about 60 percent out of start-ups that survive the first five years [51]. The data from looking over longer time periods also shows a 60 percent survival rate for a five-year period [51]. CEO characteristics and strategic choices impact the success and growth of the company and therefore impact whether the company survives or not. Objectives. The purpose of this master thesis is to see how CEO characteristics and strategic choices impact or/and increase company success and growth for small business (SB) in the IT consultant industry in Sweden. The CEO characteristics that will be researched is age, tenure, education, prior work experience and if the current CEO is the founder or not. The strategic choices that will be research is investing resources, cash holdings, different types of mergers and acquisitions and if the expertise within in the business are broad or specialized. Methods. The collected primary and secondary data are retrieved from companies that was defined small in the year 2012 to see their performance until 2019. The primary data was gathered by sending out a survey to CEO in the company. Multiple regression will be used on the data to see what CEO characteristics and strategy choices impact company growth. What CEO characteristics influence the choice of strategy will be research with correlation. Results. The result indicated that CEO education, prior work experience and the CEO being founder had the most impact on company growth out of the CEO characteristics. From the strategic choices the result indicated that investing resources and having a broad expertise had the most impact on company growth. Conclusions. The conclusion indicated that CEO characteristics and strategic choices impact company growth but there was no evidence in this research that the CEO characteristics influenced the choice of strategy.