Small Business/Family Business Management

Course Description

Small Business/Family Business Management introduces the student to the world of small business and family business management. UWF states it explores the managerial processes related to these areas and differentiates them from those found in corporations and large organizations, and provides the student with an opportunity to analyze the mind of the small business manager, brainstorm potential business options, and consider various contemporary issues facing the small business manager. Group projects will be utilized and oral and written reports will be required.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MAN is the Management prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Business Administration, College of Business. It is offered at approximately 5 Florida institutions.

⚠ The statewide inventory calls this number "Principles of Entrepreneurship"; UWF publishes it as small business and family business management — and the difference is real. Entrepreneurship courses typically centre on new venture creation, opportunity recognition and growth financing. UWF's course centres on managing an established small or family firm, which is a different and less glamorous subject. See the note below.

The family business half deserves the billing UWF gives it. Family firms are the majority of businesses worldwide and a very large share of employment, and they face a category of problem that no corporate management course addresses: overlapping family, ownership and management roles; succession that is simultaneously a business decision and a family one; compensating relatives; and the fact that most family firms do not survive into the third generation.

⚠ UWF also publishes no prerequisite for this course at all, which is unusual in the MAN prefix — most courses require 45 or 60 completed hours. That makes it unusually accessible.

Florida is a genuinely good place to study this. The state has a very high rate of small business formation, a large tourism and service sector built on small operators, substantial family-owned agriculture and construction, and an ageing owner population facing succession decisions now.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the small business sector and its economic role.
• Distinguish small business management from corporate management.
• Distinguish small business ownership from entrepreneurship.
• Describe the characteristics and motivations of small business owners.
• Evaluate business ideas and assess their feasibility.
• Describe forms of business organisation and their consequences.
• Describe the components and purpose of a business plan.
• Describe sources of small business financing and their trade-offs.
• Describe bootstrapping, debt, and equity and when each is appropriate.
• Read and interpret basic financial statements for a small firm.
• Describe cash flow management and why profitable firms fail.
• Describe pricing decisions in a small firm context.
• Describe marketing on a constrained budget.
• Describe operations and supplier relationships at small scale.
• Describe hiring, retention, and the HR constraints of a small employer.
• Describe legal and regulatory obligations facing small businesses.
• Describe risk management and insurance for a small firm.
• Describe the distinctive features of family business systems.
• Describe overlapping family, ownership, and management roles.
• Describe succession planning and its failure modes in family firms.
• Describe conflict and governance in family businesses.
• Describe exit strategies including sale, transfer, and closure.
• Analyse a small or family business and present recommendations.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a real organisation or case study.
• Work effectively in a team with defined roles and deadlines.
• Present and defend a recommendation to a business audience.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify their output.
• Build a portfolio artefact suitable for showing an employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The small business sector
• Small business versus corporate management
• Ownership versus entrepreneurship
• Owner characteristics and motivation
• Idea evaluation and feasibility
• Forms of business organisation
• The business plan
• Sources of financing
• Bootstrapping, debt, and equity
• Financial statements for small firms
• Cash flow management
• Pricing in small firms
• Marketing on a constrained budget
• Small-scale operations and suppliers
• Hiring and HR constraints
• Legal and regulatory obligations
• Risk management and insurance
• Family business systems
• Overlapping family, ownership, management roles
• Succession planning and its failures
• Family conflict and governance
• Exit strategies
• Small business case analysis

Optional Topics

• Applied case studies and live organisations
• Team practice and role definition
• Presenting to a business audience
• AI-assisted tooling and its governance
• Portfolio development

Resources & Tools

• The text the instructor assigns — Longenecker's Small Business Management and Scarborough's Essentials of Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management are the two standards.
• ⚠ The Florida SBDC at UWF (sbdc.uwf.edu) — free consulting to Florida small businesses, hosted at UWF itself. It is a genuine resource, an excellent source of local case material, and a place students have found internships. Most students never learn it is there.
• SBA (sba.gov) — free; loan programmes, planning templates and SCORE mentoring, which is free and staffed by retired executives.
• Florida Division of Corporations (sunbiz.org) — free; registration, entity formation, and public records for any Florida business you want to research.
• Florida Department of Revenue and county tax collector sites — free; sales tax registration and local business tax receipts, which are the obligations new owners most often miss.
• Family Firm Institute and the Family Business Review — some free material; the succession and governance research, which is a genuine literature rather than folklore.
• The UWF library's business databases — included in enrolment; industry reports and practitioner sources sit behind paywalls a student already has access to, and most never find out.
• LinkedIn Learning — frequently free through UWF or a Florida public library card; strong on specific tools, weak on judgement.

Career Pathways

• General and operations manager (SOC 11-1021) — the broadest destination, and the one most graduates reach through a functional role first.
• Human resources specialist (SOC 13-1071) and human resources manager (SOC 11-3121) — the specialist role is the normal entry point; the manager role follows experience.
• Training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151) and compensation and benefits analyst (SOC 13-1141).
• Project management specialist (SOC 13-1082) — and note that project work is entered from every discipline, not only from business.
• Logistician and supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081), purchasing agent (SOC 13-1023), operations analyst (SOC 13-1111, management analyst).
• Management trainee and rotational programmes — ⚠ these recruit on a fixed annual cycle, often a year ahead. Students who wait until spring of their final year have already missed most of them.
• ⚠ Florida employer landscape: healthcare systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola) are among the state's largest employers and run substantial HR and operations functions; hospitality and theme parks (Disney, Universal, and the cruise lines out of Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa) are operations-intensive at enormous scale; defence and aerospace (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and the Navy presence around Pensacola); logistics and distribution around Jacksonville and Central Florida; agriculture and food processing; and state, county and municipal government.
• Small and family business is a genuine Florida destination, not a fallback — the state has a very high rate of small business formation, and the SBDC network at Florida universities, including UWF, provides free consulting.

AI Integration

Management is being changed by AI in two distinct ways, and they need separating. The first is AI as a tool a manager uses. The second is AI as something a manager must govern — deployed in hiring, scheduling, performance evaluation and forecasting, where the consequences fall on people.

• Where AI tools genuinely help managers: drafting documents and correspondence, summarising long material, preparing meeting notes and first-draft plans, analysing survey and operational data, and rehearsing a difficult conversation before having it.
• ⚠ Where they fail: they fabricate confidently — including citations, statutes and figures; they do not know your organisation, your people, or your context; and they produce fluent text that reads as considered when nothing was considered.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Employment decisions are the highest-risk application, and this is not hypothetical. AI screening tools have been shown to reproduce and amplify bias present in historical hiring data. Under United States law the employer is liable for discriminatory outcomes regardless of whether a vendor's tool produced them, and disparate impact does not require intent. The EEOC has issued guidance specifically on this.
• ⚠⚠ Regulation is arriving and it is not uniform. Several jurisdictions now require bias auditing or candidate notification for automated employment decision tools. Where your employees and applicants are located determines what applies — not where your office is.
• Never put employee or applicant personal data into a public AI tool. Personnel records, medical information, disciplinary matters and compensation data must stay in controlled systems. This is a common and serious early-career mistake.
• ⚠ A human must own every consequential decision. "The system flagged it" is not an explanation you can give an employee, a regulator, or a court. Keep a person accountable, and be able to state the reason in plain language.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, and disclose what you used when asked. In a course teaching judgement, outsourcing the judgement defeats the purpose — which is a practical point, not a moral one.

Special Information

⚠ This course publishes no prerequisite at all

• UWF names neither a course nor a standing requirement for this course, which is unusual in this prefix — most MAN courses require either 45 or 60 completed hours, and the human resources courses require MAN3301.
• ⚠ An open catalog entry is not the same as an open door. Business programmes commonly add an admission-to-the-major step and a minimum grade point average that the course entry does not mention. Check your programme, not just the course.
• The 3000-level number still signals upper division, and the material assumes some business vocabulary even where no course is formally required.

⚠⚠ The statewide title and the UWF title differ — read the description, not the name

• Statewide inventory title: Principles of Entrepreneurship. UWF publishes it as: Small Business/Family Business Management.
• ⚠⚠ These are related but distinguishable subjects. Entrepreneurship courses centre on new venture creation, opportunity recognition, and growth and financing of new firms. UWF's course centres on managing established small and family businesses, explicitly differentiating them from corporations. There is real overlap — feasibility, planning, financing — but a student needing a venture-creation course should confirm this satisfies the requirement.
• ⚠ The practical advice is the same in every case of title drift: carry a syllabus, and search on the number rather than the name when looking for equivalents at other institutions. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content.

⚠⚠ What makes family business different, and why it is worth a course

• Three systems overlap: family, ownership and management. A person can occupy all three roles at once, and a decision that is correct in one system can be destructive in another. The three-circle model is the standard tool for seeing this and it is genuinely useful.
• ⚠ Succession is where most family firms fail. A minority survive to the second generation and a smaller minority to the third. The causes are consistent: succession discussed too late, no development plan for the successor, unclear ownership transfer, and unresolved conflict deferred until it cannot be.
• Non-family employees face a real ceiling, and pretending otherwise damages retention. Being explicit about which roles are open to whom is better practice than leaving it unsaid.
• ⚠ Compensating family members is a recurring flashpoint — market rate, need, or equality among siblings are three defensible answers that conflict.
• Governance structures help: a family council separate from a board, written employment policies for relatives, and a shareholder agreement made before it is needed.

⚠ Practical realities for a small business owner

• Profitable businesses fail from cash flow. Profit is an accounting result; cash is whether you can pay people on Friday. Growth consumes cash, which is why fast-growing small firms fail in a way that surprises their owners.
• ⚠ The owner is the constraint in most small firms. A business that cannot run without the owner present is difficult to grow and very difficult to sell — which matters enormously at exit.
• Personal guarantees are normal in small business lending, and they mean the owner's personal assets are exposed regardless of the entity form. Incorporating does not, by itself, protect you from a debt you personally guaranteed.
• Florida-specific obligations that new owners miss: sales tax registration with the Department of Revenue, a county local business tax receipt, workers' compensation coverage above employee thresholds (with a lower threshold in construction), and any professional or contractor licensing.

Certifications and credentials worth knowing about

• Human resources: SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management) and PHR (HRCI) are the two entry-level credentials. ⚠ SHRM-CP can be sat by students in their final year at SHRM-aligned programmes, and student membership is inexpensive — ask the College of Business whether UWF's HR curriculum is SHRM-aligned, because it changes your eligibility timing.
• Project management: CAPM is designed for people without project experience and is the realistic student credential; PMP requires documented leading experience and comes later. PMI student membership substantially reduces the exam cost.
• Operations and supply chain: APICS/ASCM CPIM and CSCP, and ISM's CPSM for purchasing. Six Sigma Green Belt is widely recognised in manufacturing and healthcare operations.
• ⚠ A degree and a certification do different jobs. The degree is durable; certifications are current, specific, and expire. Employers ask for both and neither substitutes for the other.
• Experience beats both for most of these roles. An internship, a student organisation officer post, or a real project you can describe outperforms a certification with no practice behind it — and SHRM and PMI both run student chapters worth joining.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — which matters in this prefix, where MAN2021 and MAN3025 both introduce management and only the second is upper division.

⚠⚠ Business programmes add a layer SCNS does not. Many Florida business colleges are AACSB accredited, and AACSB programmes commonly limit how much upper-division business coursework may transfer in — frequently requiring a substantial share to be taken in residence. A course can articulate under SCNS and still not count toward the major. Check the receiving programme's residency rule before relying on a transfer.

⚠ UWF states of its BSBA capstone that it "must be taken at UWF." Residency rules of that kind are common in business programmes and are worth checking early, because they cannot be worked around late.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with case analysis, team project work, and written and oral reporting. ⚠ Management courses are graded substantially on communication, which surprises students who expected a quantitative business course.
• ⚠ No fee notices appear anywhere in the MAN prefix, and no "permission is required" marking except on the BSBA capstone. Enrolment is gated by standing and by MAN3301.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision in the College of Business, and an online section of a team-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. A course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed — confirm with the department.

MAN3802 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.