Small businesses rank Dallas-Fort Worth #2 best city in nation
There are opportunities here for everyone with the drive to accomplish something on their own.
- Photographer, Dallas
Today Thumbtack.com, in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, has released new data showing that the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area was ranked highly by small businesses across several categories, including its tax code and zoning and environmental regulations. However, the area wasn’t perfect, earning a ‘D’ from small business owners for its training programs.
There are a lot of “business climate rankings”, but there aren’t any that draw upon considerable data from small business owners themselves. The Thumbtack.com Small Business Survey is the only survey to draw data from an extensive, nationwide universe of job creators and entrepreneurs themselves in order to investigate the best places in the country to do business.
After a two-month survey of over 6,000 small business owners nationwide, Dallas-Fort Worth comes out on top as one of the nation’s friendliest cities for small business,” said Sander Daniels, co-founder of Thumbtack.com. “For small businesses looking for a place to hang a shingle or to plant a flag _ they canêt do much better than Dallas-Fort Worth.”
Some of the key findings for Dallas-Fort Worth – and Texas generally – include:
- Dallas-Fort Worth was ranked the second-easiest city nationwide in which to start a business.
- North Texas is the state’s stand-out region, receiving #1 rankings for 6 of the 17 categories rated by small businesses. In contrast, East Texas fails along multiple dimensions, receiving the lowest ranking for a variety of categories – the region is the state’s most difficult for starting a new business and has the state’s second-least healthy small businesses. Small businesses rated South Texas as being the state’s #1 most-costly region for hiring a new employee, but also as having the state’s healthiest businesses economically.
- Here’s how Texas’s regions ranked, from friendliest to least friendly for small business: 1. North Texas, 2. South Texas, 3. West Texas, and 4. East Texas.
- Surprisingly, male-owned small businesses in Texas felt much more comfortable economically than did their female counterparts. Male entrepreneurs were 16% more likely than female entrepreneurs to rate their company’s current financial situation as “good” or “very good”.
- Small businesses run by conservatives seem to be doing significantly better than small businesses run by liberals. Conservative entrepreneurs in Texas were 29% more likely than the state’s liberal entrepreneurs to rate their business’s financial situation as “good” or “very good”.
The full survey results can be seen here and include full sets of rankings, dozens of easily searchable quotes from Dallas-Fort Worth small businesses, regional comparisons within states, and Census data comparing Dallas-Fort Worth’s key demographics against those of other cities.
I think the state and city are friendly towards small businesses, but I would like to see some improvement in the support of small business. I appreciate that it’s easy to start a small business, but I could use all the help I can get with increasing my work to be able to create more jobs and opportunties for my employees. Currently I am unaware of any programs that my state offers to small business owners to thrive and have success in business.”
- Cleaning service owner, Dallas
Survey methodology
Thumbtack.com surveyed 6,022 small businesses across the United States. The survey asked questions about the friendliness of states towards small business and about small business finances, such as:
• “In general, how would you rate your state’s support of small business owners?”
• “Would you discourage or encourage someone from starting a new business in your state?” and
• “How would you rate your company’s financial situation today?”
Thumbtack.com and Kauffman ranked states and cities against one another along 15 metrics. The full methodology paper can be downloaded here.
