Guidelines for developing mee korat business of small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima

Abstract

The purposes of this research were : 1) to study the business operations of Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, 2) to identify problems of Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, 3) to compare the business problems’ levels of Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province according to business operation problems, and 4) to propose guidelines for developing Mee Korat business of small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. The research population was 35 Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. The research instrument was a questionnaire. The statistical analyses used in this study were frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and one way analysis of variance. The research results can be summarized as follows: 1) For the business operations of Mee Korat, the business owners mainly produced Mee Korat products and sold them together with sauce. They have run the business for 16 years with at least 10 employees using personal selling strategies for the products. According to monthly sales reports, there were less than 10,000 packs of Mee Korat products, and the monthly income became less than 200,000 baht. 2) The small business owners faced up to medium level business problems. When considering each problem from the most to the least, the problems were products, sales, production, personnel, finance and management respectively. 3) The comparison of all the level of business problems of Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province showed that the problems included types of products for selling, length of business management, number of employees, business marketing strategies, amount of monthly production and monthly income of the business problems of Mee Korat small business owners in Nakhon Ratchasima Province had no statistically significant differences at the .05 level. And 4) the guidelines for developing Mee Korat business were as follows: The small business owners should improve vermicelli quality to prolong the shelf life of vermicelli and provide a variety of flavors of vermicelli. The small business owners should modernize the types of vermicelli and build an online distribution channel. They should also find lending sources with low interest rates to improve business so as to compete with competitors. There should be an implementation of job rotation for employees/members to increase production capacity. Moreover, the small business owners should offer more opportunities in administration for new visionary staff and the former administrators should give advice to new administrators to improve the business growth and compete with more competitors.