Small Business (EB) play an important role for social promotion, ballast political stability and driving force of development, and stand out in job generation and income distribution of a country, therefore, should be encouraged to continue these companies. In this context, appears to be important to know the aspects that would assist in such continuity. The existence of behavioral traits in entrepreneurial business owners would be a facilitator of the same longevity. However, they are incipient works that reveal the presence of these characteristics in a MSE owners. From this, this paper had the main objective to identify the presence of behavioral characteristics attributed to successful entrepreneurs in the MSE owners do Vale do Mucuri and Jequitinhonha/MG. The study is empirical-descriptive, which used a structured questionnaire to collect data, obtaining the return of 283 respondents and analyzed using descriptive statistics and discriminant analysis. The sample was divided into three groups of entrepreneurs categorized by the longevity of companies, to assess a possible difference in the presence of the characteristics, according to the same age. We found that the unique characteristics that differed in the discrimination of the three groups were longevity "Being independent / self" and "Personal relationship and leadership." We conclude that, from the perception of entrepreneurs, the presence of most of CCE’s would not be directly associated with longevity of the businesses, however, can contribute to the longevity thereof, if reflected in the actions of their owners. Therefore, this research has strengthened the results of Petry and Nascimento (2009), since both those findings as relevant to enterprises of Mesoregion findings, lined in portraying that even the CCE’s being suggested by the theory as elements rather associated with longevity, this effect was not confirmed by empirical tests. Still, managers should cultivate them, because the literature suggests that they can contribute to the improvement of enterprises.
Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial characteristics; Business longevity; Small business; Discriminant analysis
