Hooville the Best Small City in Virginia to Start a Business?

Source: WalletHub

From the data geeks at WalletHub comes a new list of the best small cities in the country to start a business based on 15 metrics encompassing business environment, access to resources, and business costs. Here are the Virginia cities listed:

best_small_cities

The Virginia results are, shall we say politely, counter-intuitive. Northern Virginia’s “small cities” (in reality suburban communities) fare poorly while depressed cities such as Petersburg and Danville score near the top. The methodology gives brownie points to cities with low business costs, which could in theory should be helpful to any small business but in reality mostly reflects a lack of demand for real estate, labor and other business inputs.

Another issue I have is the need to distinguish between types of small business. A new Subway franchise and a cyber-security start-up are both small businesses. But the employment of the former will top out at about 15 or so low-wage employees, while the latter has the potential to grow to an enterprise with hundreds of highly compensated employees. Which one would you rather have in your community?

I see this list as being useful mainly for stimulating a discussion about the kinds of things we should measure to identify the important drivers of entrepreneurialism and economic growth.

— JAB