Abstract
750 000 employments to keep. This number, highlight by the former deputy of Herault, Fanny Dombre-Coste, underline influence of SME takeovers on development of local economy. However, buyer, an entrepreneur, is understudied. We then engaged an academic research in order to fill in this gap and, using an entrepreneurial perspective, we try to better understand buyer profile. To confine profile question, we use a central concept in entrepreneurship: opportunity. Then, leaning on Kirzner logic, buyer function become clearly: he has to identify opportunity. How can he do it? He is going to use his alertness. So, we ask the following problematic: how does buyer entrepreneurial alertness influence takeover financial performance? To answer, we use an hypothetico-deductive reasoning and realise a quantitative research. This lead us to formulate hypotheses and build a research model. We put a link between entrepreneurial alertness (Tang et al., 2012) and two mediator's variables: opportunity identification (Ozgen et Baron, 2007) and entrepreneurial orientation (Covin et Slevin, 1989). Then, this two variables are linked to takeover financial performance – which is a subjective measure of the evolution of height indicators. After used MICOM procedure, we test our model on all buyers (n = 278) and make a comparison – qualitative and using a multi-group analysis – between buyers supported by a mentor (n = 199) and non-supported (n = 79), and between buyers supported before (n = 79) and after takeover (n = 120). Firstly, results show that entrepreneurial alertness is an antecedent of financial performance. On the other hand, our research underline that mentorship has the potential to add substantially to our understanding of how buyer succeed – at least on an financial plan – SME takeover. Consequently, it seems relevant to develop a cognitive part in buyer support program and to work on mentorship in this singular context.