What Kind of Business Advice Improves Small Business

Following an approach used in psychology-based judge-advisor system models of advice giving1, the 7 likely impact of advice may depend on the characteristics of the advisor and the nature of the advice (Mole et al., 2016). [...] The process of translating the take-up of formal business advice into beneficial performance impact is likely to depend on levels of trust in the knowledge provider, the content of that knowledge provided (the relevance and salience of the topic area), and the ability of the SME to absorb the knowledge provided. [...] Finally, the high sample attrition rates in the LSBS, seen in the very small proportion of SMEs who appears in all waves, militates against a full exploitation of the longitudinal aspect of the data. [...] For the first research question, the contribution of the paper is to show that the take-up of business advice, on whatever subject, leads to a productivity improvement of 10 percent. [...] The model focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between the two parties, with implications for the nature and utilization of the advice and the extent to which the judge discounts that advice based on their level of trust.