The article explores how certain factors before a small or medium-sized business starts exporting can affect its performance. The researchers looked at how well the business was doing and how old it was when it started exporting. They studied 522 French SMEs that began exporting in 2014. The results showed that SMEs that started exporting early with lower performance compared to others tended to do better after exporting. On the other hand, SMEs that started exporting later with higher performance than expected tended to do worse after exporting.