Аннотация:The paper addresses the issues of small business development, with an analytical overview of the Russian and foreign expert publications concerning small entrepreneurship and its sustainable growth. We introduce a notion of sustainability in its application to small businesses and provide its mathematical development; we specify the methods of modelling sustainable growth strategies for small companies and provide a rationale for the choice of a
strategy. Unlike the common approaches to performance sustainability, our methods take into account the specific features of small enterprises — their limited size and lifecycle span, their mobility and flexibility in decision making. The methods are easily implemented in the form of an express analysis relying on a large-scale statistical study of small business in Russia.