International Journal of Business and Management; Vol. 11, No. 8; 2016 ISSN 1833-3850 E-ISSN 1833-8119 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 1 “Getting Big by Thinking Small”: An Empirical Analysis from Trading SME’s Ardita Todri 1 & Francesco Scalera 2 1 Faculty of Economics, Finance and Accounting Department, University of Elbasan,”A. Xhuvani”, Elbasan, Albania 2 Department of Economics and Mathematics, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italy Correspondence: Francesco Scalera, Department of Economics and Mathematics, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Principe Amedeo Street 160, 70122, Bari, Italy. E-mail: roby_sca@virgilio.it Received: April 3, 2016 Accepted: May 18, 2016 Online Published: July 18, 2016 doi:10.5539/ijbm.v11n8p1 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v11n8p1 Abstract The necessity to manage the debts capacity within Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) remains pivotal to their solvency and growth potentiality, especially in trading sector. Therefore through a ROC Curve analysis there were identified the discriminative variables (organized in four indicators groups such as: liquidity, turnover, structure and return) pertaining to a panel of 62 SME’s with performing and not status (default ratio of 50%) by referring to the 2013-2014 period. The latest, excluding the others indicators confirms that total debt to equity, total assets to shareholder’s equity and long term assets to shareholder’s equity can better do it. In addition, a regression analysis is used to estimate the impact of the above mentioned discriminative variables on SME’s debts management capacity in the quality of a performance measure (pertaining to liquidity indicators group). Under these circumstances it was evidenced that the variables that positively impact SME’s performance are: equity to total debts, long term assets to shareholder’s equity as well as return on equity. Referring to the Albanian economical structure, undoubtedly these results give some hope signals regarding SME’s development strategy being that they can contemporary contribute in the country’s GDP growth by good performing in micro level. Keywords: financial management, SMEs growth potentially, trade development, employment opportunities, managerial capacity, business perspective 1. Introduction The Small and Medium (SME) business represent the most dynamic force of a developing economy like the Albanian one. Correspondently as also analyzed from Small Business Act for Europe (European Commission, 2015), over 80% of all employment is in SMEs, compared to the EU average of around 67% being that the Albanian SMEs provide about 68% of the country’s total value added (when the EU average is about 58%). In 2013, the above mentioned value added dropped by 3.6% compared to 2012. From the other side, the employment in the same sector increased by close to 10%, and the number of businesses grew by 1.7% during 2014. In addition to the later, the real GDP is expected to grow by 3.3% in 2015 and by 4.2% in 2016. The above mentioned growth is almost forecasted to be solely driven by internal demand by predicting in the same time the fall of unemployment rates due to the fact that the Albanian economy is led by SMEs. But statistically based, in the past several SMEs failed in a short time after the establishment, mostly due to poor financial management especially related to liquidity issues. Thus, the leading question is: which were the strengths in SME’s financial performance during 2013-2014 period (by also considering the fiscal amendments undertaken starting from September 2013)? Consequently, this paper focuses on the identification of factors that can discriminate the SME’s good performance (short/long run liquidity management) from the default status by referring to: Turnover, Structure, Return and Liquidity variables/indicators. For this purpose it was analyzed a panel of 62 SME’s which represent