I worked for many years for Allens Sweets then Rothmans as a sales rep, back in the days when such a job existed, and my customer base was a mixture of hotels, garages, corner stores, cafes, newsagents, IGAs etc etc.
Many hundreds and hundreds over the years and I developed a fair knowledge of the different flavours of small business operators.
One pattern that I'm sure many sales reps would confirm is that the majority of small businesses are started by somebody who is passionate about their offering then, when the time comes to sell the business and move on it tends to be picked up by someone who is buying themselves a job. More often than not, the new owner had been made redundant and is using the payout to fund their semi retirement in their own business. At the risk of sounding nasty, a fair subset of these people buy into their own business because, basically, they are unemployable, egotistical arseholes and wouldn't hold a job in the real world of employment. Now it could be argued that's a good quality for a small businessman. I'd agree, but it would need to be tempered with a strong desire to adapt, learn and learn more. Often these owners have locked up the learning centre and thrown the key away.
Great example was Hervey Bay, one of my areas in the 1990s. At a shopping centre if you ducked behind to the small business owners' parking area it would be a collection of Saab, Mercedes, the odd Porsche, all leased for tax minimisation and to demonstrate to family and neighbours that they were now important people. The owner would likely be on the beach or at golf, enjoying the seaside lifestyle they had bought themselves, leaving an assistant, or the Mrs, in charge of the shop. Or in the case of one snack bar owner at Pialba standing behind the counter ranting to anyone who would listed how the Slopes and Japs were ruining Australia. Their only trade knowledge was often just a quick intro by the previous owner on his way out. When the business failed after about 18 months loud would be the wailing and the blaming of Woolies, McDonalds whoever.
Probably changed a bit since then but as far as I'm aware the current successful home brew businesses were started and are run by passionate operators, or were transferred to equally passionate buyers as in the case of Brewman.
edit: to be fair: one thing that has changed since the 90s is that many people going into small business now do so via a franchise. Great examples are Country Brewer, Cartridge World and even good old McDonalds.
If you walk into one of these stores they operate along pretty reliable "corporate" lines and to retain the franchise they have to offer set levels of service and quality. This I'm sure has weeded out a lot of slack operators, as we are seeing in LHBS (Brewers Choice stores in Brisbane are another fair example, all their stores I visited seemed to have an enthusiastic manager or owner).
