There are four parts to the thesis: Part I presents a review of the literature, a discussion and finally proposes a definition of the main concepts studied: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, small business owner-manager and small-medium sized manufacturing enterprise. Part 2 presents an overview of organisation theory and explains our selection of content as well as of container approaches to study the phenomenon of the small business and its growth. It leads us to introduce the field of strategy, to go over a review of the essential literature on small business strategy and to discuss it. It also leads us to introduce systems approaches and to discuss the strategy behind the evolution of the systems approach we identify as best to study small business: soft systems methodology, as developed by Peter Checkland. Part 3 presents the way we have looked at the small business as well as at the entrepreneurs and/or small business owner-managers we have studied in four different countries. It explains the choice of the research methodology, a qualitative one: interviews. It also presents some findings, essentially that entrepreneurs project a vision, they build a relations system to realise it, and successful ones show a capacity to engage in anticipatory learning to make the projected vision become reality. Part 4 discusses these findings and their use in understanding what makes entrepreneurs successful. We propose a model that incorporates the research findings. It is based on the relationship between the vision, the relations with people who will help make it happen, and the anticipatory learning which the entrepreneur does to be prepared and able to realise the vision. Our main contribution seems to be the model. Many of the other findings relate to things which already exist in the literature. What is new is the way these concepts are linked and integrated in a model that could be called a "strategic entrepreneurial model".