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Over twenty years of my experience as a business consultant, I observed that many small businesses found international markets and later they expanded their SBs to other countries through personal relationships as a way of overcoming many constraints due to their smallness. It was my enthusiasm to learn through this research that how international business relationships were initiated, built, and maintained and what values and competencies were practiced by successful and award-winning small business owner-managers in Sri Lanka. Acquiring and using appropriate knowledge, friendly personalities that made them like families, skills, behaviors, and mutually beneficial relational strategies in international business were the relational competencies. The research participants value establishing and continuing mutually beneficial relationships as an essential part of their businesses to avoid conflicts on issues in internationalization of their SBs. This research witnessed that SB managers have the capability to be sustained in international markets. In this book I argue that relationships in business bring many benefits.

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Gertrude I. Hewapathirana is a Professor of Human Resources at the Suffolk University. She has been a researcher, a lecturer, and a fulbright scholar at the University of Minnesota. She is a Hubert Humphrey Fellow and a member of International Council of Small Business and the Academy of Human Resources in the USA.

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