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Altman's next gig, a stint as a product manager for Black & Decker's lighting group, brought him to Connecticut. That's when he decided to go into business for himself, making specialty lighting products. And while he was at it, he'd ditch the cold New England weather. Altman launched a short-lived illuminated-slipper business in San Diego (#17 among the large metro areas). Nice and warm, San Diego. A fun town. Still, his wife, who had grown up in El Paso, wanted to move back to Texas.

So Austin was the birthplace of Altman's next venture: Lumatec, a flashlight company. Things really clicked for him in Austin. "I met the right people and made the right connections," he says. Selling book lights, credit-card-sized flashlights, and other novelty lights, Lumatec grew to $7 million in sales last year. And Austin has turned out to be just as sweet a place to live as Altman remembered: traffic is light and housing is cheap, at least by Southern California standards. (On the American Chambers of Commerce Research Association Cost of Living Index for the first quarter of this year, Austin's composite score is 98.4, and San Diego's is 125.6. The average score is 100. According to a 1996 study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M, San Diego ranks 9th in the nation in roadway congestion, Austin 32nd.)

All that was nice for Altman, but did the new location really make any difference as far as the business was concerned? Well, odds are that if Altman liked Austin, so would potential employees. Good living draws good workers, says entrepreneurship professor Alex De Noble of San Diego State University, who has researched relocation patterns for high-tech businesses. As a result "you see companies gravitating to areas that offer an ambience that would attract skilled, educated workforces," De Noble says.

Take David Ball. A graphic designer who had worked with Altman in San Diego, he packed up and joined Lumatec four years ago -- largely because he was so attracted to Austin. "It's a big city with a small-town feel," he says. "The music scene makes for a great nightlife. I like the lush green trees and the river running through the middle of the city."

More practically, there's that lower cost of living. Ball also had heard that Austin had good schools -- no small consideration when, like him, you have four kids.

Altman is depending on the appeal of the city to help take Lumatec to a higher level. "It was easy to get to $6 million or $7 million. We're trying to break through to $15 million," he says. For that Altman needs topflight management talent with experience with retailers -- talent that's not so easy to find in his immediate neighborhood. "I've got to bring them to Austin," he says. "There are relatively few retail operations in the Southwest."

Altman has already recruited a head of promotions -- Joseph Holland, who was working for a company called Axius, a maker of auto shades and other products in Los Angeles (#32 among the large metro areas). The first thing the new guy did was to purchase a house in Austin that was three times the size of his old one in L.A. "We were able to buy a 3,000-square-foot house for not exactly the same price as our old one but close enough to it to be pretty impressive," Holland says.

Black Diamond's Metcalf has similar stories to tell. Before the company's move from Ventura to Utah's Wasatch Mountains, he says, his climber recruits used to ask for more money (one asked for a $10,000 premium) for having to live in Ventura; now, he says, they're just as likely to take a pay cut to live in Utah.

Joe Skrivan did. Now in charge of product design and development at Black Diamond, Skrivan left his post as director of engineering of boys' toys at Hasbro to join Metcalf's company earlier this year. Skrivan took a pay cut serious enough to "change our lifestyle a little, but not a lot," he says.

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