Starting Up Small

Though typically centered in bigger cities, this piece from Business Week looks at the best small cities to locate startup businesses in every state.

1 minute read

March 28, 2009, 9:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg

"Bigger isn't always better when it comes to selecting a place to start a company. Where is the best location for your startup? While the answer obviously depends on the type of venture you're starting, a few universal qualities apply: affordability, availability of a talented labor pool, existence of a thriving business community, and quality of life.

With these factors in mind, BusinessWeek set out to find the best small cities for startups in each state, aiming primarily to profile places where high-growth companies could thrive. We asked San Francisco-based GIS Planning, a geographic data provider that helps companies select optimal sites through its ZoomProspector Web site (a 2009 Planetizen top 10 website), to identify the best small city to start a business in every state across the country, examining cities with populations between 20,000 and 200,000. The choices took into account 11 factors that shape a city's entrepreneurial climate, from the education level of the workforce to the amount of venture-capital investment to the number of startups.

We then asked entrepreneurs in each place to tell us about doing business there, to match an on-the-ground perspective to the data. "

Thanks to Eric Simundza

FULL STORY: The Pros of Planting Startups in Smaller Cities

Friday, March 27, 2009 in BusinessWeek

Community / Economic Development United States Economic Development Best Cities Incentives Quality of Life ZoomProspector GIS Planning BusinessWeek site selection Small Cities start-up start-ups entrepreneurs ZoomProspector.com incubators business relocation View More

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