Tropical Farm Management Kenya Limited has been in the management of coffee Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) since 1972. Sasini Tea and coffee, Coffee management services, and sustainable management services are other management companies involved in the management of coffee SMEs since 2000.NKG is the Global Holding Company of TFMKL with substantial global interests in coffee milling, marketing, trading, warehousing, trading and coffee SMEs management. Over the last decade coffee SMEs performance has been declining from a high of 0.37tons/ha to 0.242 tons/ha. Kenya’s Sessional paper no 2 of 2005 indentified the SMEs sector in general as engine of economic growth. The coffee SMEs sector directly supports over 700000families in SMEs. In the last decade the sector earned the country over Ksh 100 billion. It is this immense contribution of the sector to the national economy and with the observed declining performance of the sector which acted as a catalyst to the researcher to explore what could be ailing the sector.
The general objective of the project was to explore entrepreneurial motivation factors affecting coffee SMEs performance at TFMKL. The SMEs transcend Kiambu, Murang’a and Nakuru counties. The target population was the 37 SMEs managed by TFMKL. An embedded case study was carried out on the 37 SMEs. A census was used to study all the SMEs .A questionnaire was used to gather primary data. The questionnaire had structured questions which allowed respondents to choose responses from alternatives while unstructured questions allowed respondents to state their views on entrepreneurial factors affecting coffee SMEs performance.
The research revealed that the SMEs performance had suffered highly due to lack of entrepreneurial motivation of employees. Frequent transfer of managers before they get acclimatized in their work stations affected performance highly. Wastage of resources, arguments over procedures and professional employment policy too affected performance. The research recommended that SMEs need to hire professionally competent managers, entrepreneurial motivation culture needed to be embraced in order to eliminate wastage of resources, arguments over procedure and chronic absenteeism at the work place which was affecting performance
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