On Monday I went with my husband to the local Chambre de Commerces for a half day introductory course on setting up in business in France. Having done a similar thing in the UK a number of year's ago with enterprise agencies, we were pretty familiar with a lot of what was presented. We were slightly shocked at the confusion as to which Chambre you need to register with, which depends on what you intend to do, and the fact that you could need to dual register, but that is a totally different story.
The session started with some statistics from INSEE on business survival rates - with the usual scare of perhaps half making it through to 3 years trading and only about 40% surviving to 5 years. The lady running the course did comment that it was widely recognised that survival rates were favourably influenced by start ups receiving help from their adviser at the relevant Chambre. Given that fact, another member of the course asked whether age affected survival rates, but that was not available.
Now that set me thinking - as you would expect. There must be information collected on the age and gender of business start ups, not least through HMRC and Companies House, but how to look at the factors that make a successful start up? If it is a one person business, that is relatively easy, provided the data is captured. If that person takes on an employee, then it is also possible to allocate success to the manager (it may not be fair, but it is possible).
The difficulty is where you start up with some one or some many. Can you allocate equal shares of someone's personal characteristics? How do you measure influence? This is what gets me to a certain extent about women's business support as you lose eligibility as soon as you work with a man, and yet men make up about half the population.
So, an interesting question, and one to which I don't have an answer, but if anyone has a nice big data set and a bit of money, I am more than happy to spend some time working up a few statistical models to see if I can sort out some determinants of business success based on age and on gender.
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