【正文】 nal of Applied Business Research, Winter, 1995, pp. 8198. [6].Gaskill, L.,Van Auken,H and Manning,R. A factor analytic study of the perceived causes of small business failure,Journal of Small Business Management, 1993, 31, pp. 1831. [7].Gill, James O. Financial Basics of Small Business Success, Crisp Publications, 1994. [8].Gitman, Lawrence J. Principles of Financial Management, 8th Edition, Addison Wesley Publishers, 2020. [9].Harrison, Diana and Wilson, Brent. Corporate Financial Analysis, Business Publications, Inc. 1986. [10].Hawawini, G. and Viallet. Finance for Executives, SouthWestern College Publishing, 1999. [11].Lauzen, L. Small business failures are controllable, Corporate Accounting, Summer, 1985, pp. 3438. [12].Osteryoung, Jerome and Constand, Richard. Financial ratios in large public and small private firms, Journal of Small Business Management, July, 1992, pp. 3547. [13].Slater, Stanley, and Olson, Eric. A valuebased management system, Business Horizons, September/October, 1996, pp. 4852. [14].Wood, D. L. Why new businesses fail and how to avoid disaster, Corporate Cashflow, August 1989, pp. 2627. 。 Seaton (1995), or Burson (1998) The concepts of Return on Assets (ROA hereafter) and Return on Equity (ROE hereafter) are important for understanding the profitability of a business enterprise. Specifically, a “return on” ratio illustrates the relationship between profits and the investment needed to generate those profits. However, these conceptsare often “too far removed from normal activities” to be easily understood and useful to many managers or small business owners. (Slater and Olson, 1996) In 1918, four years after he was hired by the Du Pont Corporation to work in its treasury department, electrical engineer F. Donaldson Brown was given the task of untangling the finances of a pany of which Du Pont had just purchased 23 percent of its stock. (This pany was General Motors!) Brown recognized a mathematical relationship that existed between two monly puted ratios, namely profit margin (obviously a profitability measure) and total asset turnover (an efficiency measure), and product of the profit margin and total asset turnover equals ROA. Eq. 1: ( ine / sales) x (sales / total assets) = ( ine / total assets) . ROA At this point in time maximizing ROA was a mon corporate goal and the realization that ROA was impacted by both profitability and efficiency led to the development of a system of planning and control for all operating decisions within a firm. This became the dominant form of financial analysis. (Blumenthal, 1998) In the 1970s the generally accepted goal of financial management became “maximizing the wealth of the firm’s owners” (Gitman, 1998) and focus shifted from ROA to ROE. This led to the first major modification of the original Du Pont model. In addition to profitability and efficiency, the way in which a firm financed its activities, . its use of “l(fā)everage” became a third area of attention for financial managers. The new ratio of interest was called the equity multiplier, which is (total assets / equity). The modified Du Pont model is shown in Equations 1