The Great Recession spawned a new breed of "accidental entrepreneurs" more
driven by profits than passion, a new study finds. Unlike the majority of small
business founders who launched their companies before the economy tanked in
2008, these new-wave entrepreneurs started their businesses out of pure
necessity rather than a lifelong dream of "being their own boss." These agile,
highly educated, tech-savvy and battle-tested business professionals are like
circling "velociraptors" waiting to feast on the herd, one analyst said.
The companies formed by these
accidental entrepreneurs are poised for explosive growth, particularly companies
with 10 to 49 employees, and they are aggressively leveraging technologies such
as cloud computing to fast-track their success, according to a survey of 305 IT
business decision-makers at small to medium-size businesses (from three to 250
employees) conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Symantec.
"These companies are born of the
recession, are focused on the Internet and are finding addressable markets to
dominate," Brian Burch, VP of marketing communications for SMB and cloud, told
BusinessNewsDaily. "They are less siloed, very agile, make their own decisions
and are more independent than pre-recession founders. They are loaded to win in
the market."
They're also candid about their focus on profit, the study found. More than half (54 percent) of the founders of small businesses launched in the dark days of the recession consider their company a growth business with an exit strategy rather than a lifestyle business, which is 15 percent higher than pre-recession companies.
They're also candid about their focus on profit, the study found. More than half (54 percent) of the founders of small businesses launched in the dark days of the recession consider their company a growth business with an exit strategy rather than a lifestyle business, which is 15 percent higher than pre-recession companies.
And their road to entrepreneurship
is different, too. More than one-third of the founders of these companies came
from a position in a large company with more than 500 employees. They are
skilled professionals who are used to making a good living who need to reinvent
themselves to maintain their standard of living — 35 percent left their
employers due to the recession, while another 8 percent came from other
accidental entrepreneur backgrounds, such as the newly "unretired" or returning
military.
They're also more bullish than an
earlier generation of entrepreneurs. Almost half of the businesses spawned
during the recession expect to double their number of employees in the next two
years and three-quarters expect revenue to grow more than 10 percent. By
comparison, only 12 percent of companies founded before 2008 expect to double
employees. It's the same story with revenue predictions. Only 39 percent of the
companies founded pre-recession expect to grow revenues by more than 10 percent.
While the study found that all
small businesses are aggressively adopting cloud storage and backup, the
companies founded by accidental entrepreneurs are doing so at a faster pace.
They are also more likely to acquire consumer technology at retail and then
modify it as their needs become more complex.
The growth of these companies will
come at the expense of less technically confident, less agile and less-connected
small business owners, the survey predicts.
"They're like velociraptors,"
Burch said."Survival of the fittest is a proven paradigm."
Just as profit has replaced
passion in the hierarchy of needs for these accidental entrepreneurs, don't
expect them to innovate their way to success. As a group, they will be focused
more on optimization than trailblazing.
"They're going to execute the
playbook better and faster than anybody else," Burch said. "The definition of
entrepreneurship is going to change over the next 10 to 20 years."
This article was written by Ned Smith at CNBC, not an affiliate of The Marketing Professionals
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