SMALL SCALE BUSINESS FINANCING AND CORPORATE PERFORMANCE IN DELTA STATE NIGERIA

The financing of business operations through personal savings, money lenders, corporate society, family and friends, and microfinance banks, remains an integral part of Nigeria 's small scale businesses financing decision, making it expedient for research to be carried out by small enterprises in the Delta State to ascertain its performance by small enterprises. The performance was represented by the level of sales and profitability. A stratified random sampling technique was used to identify the target population of 148. Primary data was collected from the respondents through a structured questionnaire of the Likert-type four-point type. Simple percentages, tables, and charts have been used to analyze the data. The Pearson product moment correlation coefficient was used to test the hypothesis 1-5 while the sixth hypothesis was tested using multiple regression because it had more than one exogenous variable and was designed to measure the predictive power of the independent variable over the dependent variable. It was found that all sources of funding have a positive and significant relationship with the performance of the SSBs, except for personal savings, which is positive but not significant in relation to the performance of the SSBs. It was also found that all sources of finance combined (overall model) can predict the performance of small business enterprises, and the overall reduction in the coefficient shows that personal savings have a more predictive capability compared to other sources of finance. The study recommends that government agencies inform and encourage infant industries to use other sources of funding for business operations.