Strategic Mapping of the Rural Firm: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

The present paper aims to propose an analysis and relation methodology of financial perspective, the customer perspective, the internal process perspective and the learning and growth perspective, in the same way as treated for Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The innovation, in this sense, is the treatment of all these factors together, searching to identify the cause-effect relations. Such instrument provides the understanding of all factors together that affect in the company result. Thus, the rural managers have a map to make their business decisions. Moreover, another factor that must be detached is the idiosyncrasies of rural firms, and specifically from smallholder farms. These factors are among others, the presence of family works, small scale, and family necessities versus business targets. The intention here is to provide for rural managers a efficient tool to concentrated and control the financial and non-financial aspects from a rural firm.