Frank Sinatra never wrote a song about Newark or Green Bay, nor has Madonna ever bought a house in either city. But these are among the unexpected places where businesses are adding jobs most rapidly and many people are moving in search of new lives, creating tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs.
The Top Cities in America for doing business are not at all where most people think, and there's good data to back that up. This year Inc. publishes an exclusive Top Cities list, using a brand-new methodology that we believe to be the most objective, reliable system used anywhere for ranking fertile ground for companies.
For the most part, the top cities aren't found on the fashionable coasts, nor in the biggest, most famous metro areas, but in more prosaic places, including many in the Midwest, that found a way to grow in a tough economy and now seem poised for rapid expansion as the recovery comes in. Especially notable are cities--large, medium, and small--spread throughout the still booming Southeast, including No. 1 ranked Atlanta and a score of Florida cities of various sizes.
"Atlanta is amazing," notes Ray Wallace, president of W. Ray Wallace & Associates, an Inc. 500 firm that does financial consulting from suburban Alpharetta, Ga. "The opportunities are here and small businesses are here. People from all over the South come to Atlanta like to Mecca."
If the late 1990s were all about a gold rush--quick success, stock market fireworks, sex and the city--the prevailing trends almost midway through the more somber 2000s suggest a whole other dimension to what makes the entrepreneurial economy hum in such underhyped business havens as No. 5 (small city) Sioux Falls, S.D., No. 4 (medium) Fresno, Calif., and No. 11 (small) Bismarck, N.D.