Survey says: St. Louis good city to start new business
Posted by St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 30, 2018:
So you woke up on a gorgeous Monday morning and thought to yourself, "Hey, what a great day to start my own business."
Well, St. Louis is not a bad place to do just that.
In a list from personal finance website WalletHub, our fair burg came in at No. 23 out for "Best Large Cities to Start a Business."
One of the experts used to compile the list was Jintong Tang, a management professorat St. Louis University.
Of the three main factors used to determine the rankings, St. Louis had its best showing in the area of "business costs," where we were No. 10 out of the entire field of the nation's 180 largest cities.
That category looked at office-space affordability, labor costs, corporate taxes and cost of living.
We clocked in at No. 39 in the "access to business resources" category, which weighed eight different factors. Among those were venture investment amount per capita, prevalence of investors, higher-education assets and share of college-educated population.
Our worst showing came in the area of 'business resources, No. 99, which included length of average work week, startups per capita, five-year business survival rate and job growth.
The only nearby city to finish higher than St. Louis was Springfield, Mo., which came in at No. 16.
The only other cities close to us to crack the top 100 were: Kansas City (30); Nashville (50); Indianapolis (89) and Louisville (100).
The best three cities: Oklahoma City; Austin, Texas; and Sioux Falls, S.D.
All this good start-up news coincides with a study done by GOBankingRates, also a personal-finance website, which notched St. Louis as No. 19 in the U.S. out of the "30 Hottest Cities for New Businesses."
In their study, the listers said "St. Louis has one of the highest startup densities on our list ... (with the) fast-growing startup scene ... helped by venture funds, state and local partnerships, and co-working spaces and incubators."