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How much of a difference? To explore that question, we took a hard look at six companies in five of the top-ranked metro areas for starting and growing a business, as well as two companies in areas that are -- according to Birch -- not as fertile ground for growth businesses: New York (#47 among the large metro areas) and Detroit (#34).

The truth is, successful businesses are founded in all kinds of locations, including communities that seem to provide little support for entrepreneurs. It's often a real advantage to be located in an environment that encourages growth. Yet the choice of place for a new business is often casual and usually starts out as a personal decision. "If you're an entrepreneur and you can live anywhere you want to live, you don't pick a place that's horrible," says Todd Ballenger of $5-million Capital Savings, based in Durham, N.C. (Raleigh-Durham is #4 among the large metro areas.)

But there may eventually come a time when business considerations overtake personal ones. It may be when growth slows; when the company can't quite get to the next level; when the business, or part of it, needs to be somewhere else.

Take, for example, a computer reseller, the kind of business that does everything over the phone and the Internet. Could be anywhere, right? Well, yes and no. When CEO Eric Crown founded computer reseller Insight Enterprises (now a $1-billion public company), in 1986, he started out in Tempe, near Phoenix (the #1 large metro area). Why Tempe? Because he lived there, because he'd gone to college at Arizona State University, because he liked it. And because he didn't think location mattered much. "Our business is telesales," he notes. "We could exist anywhere."

So he says. Yet he and his brother, Tim, who is the company's president, have moved big chunks of the company to distant cities. Distribution went to Indianapolis (the #5 large metro area), a huge shipping hub from which Insight can truck shipments to 60% of the United States in less than a day. And some of Insight's telesales operations have been moved to Montreal in order to reach customers in eastern time zones.

Eric Crown lucked out with his choice to put Insight's headquarters in his hometown of Phoenix. It's turned out to be an excellent environment for his company, being flush with business resources, including cheap real estate and a deep pool of sales talent. But as the company grew, it made sense to establish some operations in locations thousands of miles from company headquarters. Crown wouldn't accept the inconvenience of running remote operations if location didn't matter to his company or its future.

In Search of Brains
At Insight Enterprises' headquarters, in Tempe, the telesales force works the phones in giant rooms called "stadiums," although they're more like high school gyms. Salespeople's cubicles are banked up against the walls like bleachers. The air hums with the sound of pitches being made to the tens of thousands of companies that buy computers from Insight. There's even a basketball hoop, so that the salespeople can let off steam or celebrate. There are no windows, just posters urging on the troops, pushing them to reach the company's newest sales goals. These are rooms totally engineered to incubate the hard-driving offense that generates huge numbers of sales.

Insight used to have a different approach to sales. It spent $1 million a month on advertising to consumers. The company's telemarketers simply took orders over the phone. In 1994, Insight weaned itself away from the consumer market, refocusing on business-to-business selling and switching to an outbound-sales model. The switch worked, but it has given the company a ravenous appetite for high-caliber sales talent -- smart, gregarious, articulate people who can master Insight's line of more than 100,000 products. The company has had as many as 200 new sales hires stuffed into its three-week-training pipeline at a time.

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