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Seems like a pretty big sacrifice, but Skrivan knew what he was doing. Because he is a climber and a skier, the work he does at Black Diamond intersects neatly with his passions. When he was at Hasbro, Skrivan lived in Cincinnati, five hours away from any good climbing or skiing. Location was a huge factor in his decision to change jobs and move. "My family and I had been here a number of times, and we really liked the area a lot," he says. "We felt that one day we were going to move here anyway. And I don't know of any other company around Salt Lake City where I would want to work."

Besides, Skrivan says he and his family really enjoy being 10 minutes away from a good climbing site. "It's no longer a huge thing to go out and have fun," he says.

Rah, Rah for College Towns
Because they have sizable college communities, cities like Tempe or Austin tend to have a lot of young, educated people willing to try something new -- perfect recruits for a start-up. "A lot of people that don't know what they want to do when they grow up, like me, stay in their college town to figure it out," says Capital Savings' Ballenger, who recruited the first hires for his mortgage company among the postcollege crowd in Chapel Hill, N.C.

College towns have other benefits, as Ballenger learned when he was launching Capital Savings as a general financial-services company in 1991. (He recently sold it to Mortgage.com in a stock-swapping deal.) He didn't know much then about starting or running a business, but one of his old business professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sent him to the Small Business and Technology Development Center, a state program affiliated with UNC that fosters entrepreneurship. "They gave me tons of information," Ballenger recalls gratefully.

As he struggled to get his business off the ground, he found that living in a college town, surrounded by students who didn't have any money, was easy on the wallet. There were plenty of inexpensive eateries, like Pepper's Pizza, one of Ballenger's favorite old hangouts. A slice and a beer made for a cheap lunch or dinner -- just $2.50. "If you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to live on $1,000 a month, you act like a college student," he says.

While the college community helped Ballenger get started, it was the booming local economy that kept his company growing. Capital Savings took off in 1993, after Ballenger decided to expand into mortgage brokering. Fueled by low interest rates and a superheated housing market in the Chapel Hill­Durham-Raleigh area, the company's revenues doubled every year for the next five years, landing Capital Savings on the 1998 Inc. 500.

Yet even at this late stage, Ballenger says, he still turns to his alma mater for advice and support. "We had a near-death experience last year," he says, "and the first person I called was a professor" -- Rollie Tillman Jr., director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School.

CEOs of growth companies often call on Tillman for advice. There's a long-standing relationship between the university and local entrepreneurs that's worked well for businesses and the community as a whole. That collaborative environment helped create North Carolina's high-tech sector, known as the Research Triangle. "There's just great synergy between entrepreneurs and the university, and that's really transformed the region," says Tillman.

Colleges also tend to be excellent providers of employee training or retraining services. At its Salt Lake City headquarters, Black Diamond manufactures most of its products on-site, including some that require high-precision metal work. But qualified machinists and tool-and-die workers were scarce when the company first moved to the area. CEO Metcalf filled the gap by figuring out which of his current employees were most mechanically inclined and sending them to machinist training at Salt Lake Community College.

Some companies dip into the university pool so often, they find it worthwhile to form special relationships with particular colleges. Since moving to Atlanta, Manhattan Associates has gone out of its way to establish ties with Georgia Institute of Technology. The work done at the school's Logistics Institute, a think tank focusing on supply chains, dovetails neatly with the company's own specialty: software for warehouses and distribution. After the company's initial public offering, Dabbiere spent $1.5 million to endow a chair at the university. Manhattan Associates also sponsors faculty research, paying for sabbaticals for professors to run in-house research projects. All the interaction also helps attract Georgia Tech alums to Manhattan Associates: 23% of the company's employees are Tech graduates.

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