In this article the aunthors further develop a theory of guided preparation and new venture performance and test its fundamental relationships on a sample of 159 new ventures that had received outsider assistance 5 to 9 years earlier and had been in business for 3 to 8 years. The results suggest that the long-term growth of the ventures since start-up is significantry related to guided preparation. However a curvilinear model, rather than a linear model, was found to best capture the relationships of interest.