The objective of this paper is to analyze the perception and sensitivity to risk of Portuguese ?Excellence SME? and underline the benefits from risk management. It also investigates whether companies understand risk management as something positive and show maturity in the identification and treatment of risk. The used method is quantitative and exploratory. A survey to Portuguese companies with the classification of excellence is made and a descriptive statistics analysis is initially carried out. At a later stage a factorial analysis of the principal components is performed. The results show four factors that are relev ant in the business risk factor analysis, namely those related with operational, competitiveness, market and adaptation risks. Firms associate operational risk to internal features, whereas competitiveness risk is associated with differentiation conditions and competition, adaptation risk to their environment and market risk is associated with financial variables.