Symantec Finds Accidental Entrepreneurs Leverage Scalable Technology to Fast-Track Growth

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Jun 13 (Marketwire) --
Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced the findings of a landmark
study it commissioned from Forrester Consulting, which reveals that the
leaders of small businesses launched during the Great Recession are
dramatically different than those who launched their company prior to
2008. The recent recession put millions of people out of work or
threatened their employment. It also ravaged the home equity and
retirement accounts of countless recently retired professionals, leaving
them to wonder whether they walked out of their previous employer through
a one-way door to financial ruin. These unprecedented economic shockwaves
spawned a new breed of entrepreneur: the accidental entrepreneur --
defined as a company founder who started his or her small businesses out
of pure necessity rather than a lifelong dream of "being their own boss."
These accidental entrepreneurs are agile, highly educated, tech-savvy and
battle-tested business professionals and the companies they founded and
will found are born to grow.

While the recent recession has extinguished the torch of an unprecedented
number of small businesses, the number of new companies born during the
last three and a half years is equally unmatched. In the U.S. alone,
there were 60,000 more businesses started per month in 2009 than in 2007,
according to the Kaufmann Foundation's Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
The Forrester Consulting research indicates that the companies founded as
the world economy struggled are poised for explosive growth, particularly
companies with 10-49 employees, and that they aggressively leverage
technology such as cloud computing to fast-track their success.

Click to Tweet Forrester Consulting research finds recession-born
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Key Findings (10-49 employees)

-- Profits not passion drive small businesses started post 2008.
Fifty-four percent of small businesses founded in the dark days of the
recession consider their company a growth business (having an exit
strategy) rather than lifestyle business which is 15 percent higher
than pre-recession companies. More than one-third of the founders of
post-recession companies came from a position with a large (500+
employee) company. These skilled professionals are used to making a
good living and need to re-invent themselves to maintain their
standard of living -- 35 percent left their large employers due to the
recession, while another 8 percent came from other accidental
entrepreneur backgrounds, such as the newly "unretired" or returning
military.

-- Accidental entrepreneurs are bullish about growth. Of the small
businesses founded post 2008, 46 percent expect to double their number
of employees in the next two years and 75 percent expect revenue to
grow more than 10 percent. Fewer small businesses founded prior to
2008 are as optimistic, with only 12 percent expecting to double
employees and 39 percent expecting to grow revenues by more than 10
percent.

-- Recession-born small businesses take dramatic and immediate advantage
of the cloud. Twenty-one percent of accidental entrepreneurs have zero
servers versus 5 percent of those founded before 2008. These small
businesses trust more applications to the cloud, with 51 percent
deploying cloud software and 26 percent having implemented cloud
security, compared to just 39 percent and 16 percent of pre-2008 small
businesses, respectively. Interestingly, the research found that all
small businesses are aggressively adopting cloud storage and backup.

-- Accidental entrepreneurs are better prepared to scale security.
Accidental entrepreneurs are also 27 percent more confident that their
current security solution will scale with their company's growth over
the next two years.

-- More self-sufficient in making software decisions. Whether
financial/accounting/ERP, collaboration or security software,
accidental entrepreneurs base their decision on what software the
founder used in their previous job or that they used as a consumer.
They also strongly prefer known brands. On the other hand, the
majority of pre-recession small businesses base their software
decision on the recommendation of a value-added reseller (VAR). For
collaboration software, the difference is especially striking, with 50
percent of pre-recession small businesses acting on the recommendation
of a VAR, while 36 percent of post-recession small businesses chose
software that the founder used in his former job or as a consumer.

Quotes

-- "Small businesses are the driving force of our economic recovery, but
unlike other recessionary times it's not the butcher, the baker and
the candlestick maker starting new businesses," said Brian Burch, vice
president of marketing communications for SMB and .Cloud at Symantec.
"Accidental entrepreneurs are reshaping the SMB market. They're
growing significantly faster than the less technically-confident, less
agile, less 'connected' small business owner and they need simple,
easy-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solutions that can keep pace as they
quickly scale their company. Symantec is committed to providing this
new class of entrepreneur with information protection solutions built
for SMBs from the ground up."

-- "Three years ago, I wrote a report on a then-forthcoming SMB market
phenomenon, characterized as the SMB phoenix or accidental
entrepreneur. Gleaned from interviews with new (at the time) small
business founders, our research indicated that these new businesses
'rising from the ashes' of the 2008-09 recession were poised to mark a
significant departure from the SMB market of yore," wrote Tim Harmon,
principal analyst with Forrester Research. "This new breed of
entrepreneurs were characterized by their optimistic growth
projections, their bigger investment in and broader utilization of
technology, their marketing prowess, and their relative
self-sufficiency. In many ways, they act more like an enterprise
business than a classical SMB." (1)

-- "Too often, start ups buy technology for their immediate need, which
is short-sighted for a growth business because you can't scale
quickly," said, Josh Long, CEO, NRG Vision, an energy services
company. "As a small firm, NRG Vision doesn't have capital to throw
around like larger players do, but our on-the-go workforce needs to be
up-and-running without technology disruptions in order to compete.
Cloud technologies give us global availability, scalability and
affordability, which is essential to quickly grow a start-up founded
during tough economic times."

Forrester Consulting on The Accidental Entrepreneur
The study of
305 IT business decision makers at small- to medium-sized businesses
(3-250 employees), split equally amongst respondents at companies founded
pre- and post-2008, was administered by Forrester Consulting in North
America from April 20 to May 10, 2012.

Related

-- Forrester Blog Post: The SMB Phoenix Three Years Later
-- Blog Post: Born from the Flames: A New Breed of SMBs
-- SlideShare: Accidental Entrepreneurs

Connect with Symantec

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About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security,
storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and
organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our
software and services protect against more risks at more points, more
completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is
used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com or by
connecting with Symantec at: go.symantec.com/socialmedia.

(1) Forrester Research, Inc., Blog Post: The SMB Phoenix Three Years
Later, June 13, 2012

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products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and
are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned
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subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be
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should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

CONTACT:
Chris Halcon
Symantec Corp.
(650) 224-8941
chris_halcon@symantec.com

Emily Butler
Connect Marketing
(801) 373-7888
emilyb@connectpr.com

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