World Business

Choosing the right place can mean the difference between success and failure for entrepreneurs

By John Tozzi

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Adam Rousselle needed to move. His firm, then based in Doylestown, Pa., uses sophisticated technology to take for identical trees that threaten to sketch down power lines, and demand from power companies was surging. By last summer, he expected to increase Utility Risk Management’sitting eight-person staff with dozens of new engineers, programmers, and mathematicians. But 25 miles outside Philadelphia, his 3-year-old, $10 the multitude company was too small a player to attract that much talent that without delay.

So in July, Rousselle relocated to the ski city of Stowe, in Vermont, a state with roughly the same population as Bucks County, Pa. He since has the attention of Vermont Governor Jim Douglas and other leaders in direction, industry, and academia, all impatient to gain technology jobs to a state heavily reliant on tourism. It’s notice his small firm didn’t get in Pennsylvania. "The governor came to welcome 18 people who came to my job fair," Rousselle says. He now plans to hire 26 people before the end of February.

Each year, entrepreneurs start or expand some 650,000 small companies, according to facts from the Small Business Administration. Choosing the right place can mean the difference betwixt profitability and failure. But few small business owners put the same care into locating their companies that Rousselle did, consultants who specialize in site selection say.

Large corporations typically pay professionals southerly fees to find the best location for new plants, offices, or stores. But the cost be able to be prohibiting for small companies, ranging from $50,000 to $125,000 or again. Small firms may remuneration consultants for key projects, moreover they more often work with local economic developers, says Mark Arend, editor of Site Selection, a interchange promulgation covering the diligence."

Rousselle considered three states besides Vermont to relocate Utility Risk Management: Michigan, Florida, and in many in Pennsylvania. In the end, he says, the labor force, monetary incentives, and defend from state officials made Vermont the good in the highest degree fit. In addition to mobilizing state leaders to recruit for the company, Utility Risk Management will benefit from an estimated $380,000 in specie incentives through the Vermont Employment Growth Incentive program. Rousselle says he can get up to $5,000 per employee each year to train them in specific skills his customers be deficient. And, he says, he be able to offer lower salaries than he needed to in Bucks County and still be competitive in the delivery market.

The exquisite won’t be in the same proportion that clear cut for most small business owners. Many factors affect whether a place is a richness location for a particular business, including the travail force, tax rates, degree of remoteness from suppliers and distributors, access to transportation, and the local market for the company’s products or services. "Is there a perfect location? There is no such thing," says Anatalio Ubalde, co-founder of GIS Planning, a San Francisco society that analyzes geographic data for economic developers. "Is there a better location than another single in kind? The answer is yes."

GIS Planning launched a place three months ago called ZoomProspector.com, designed to better entrepreneurs find and evaluate potential sites based on what attributes of a place matter most to their business. Other Web sites like City-data.com procure topical information, but Ubalde says ZoomProspector’session proprietary data, much of it collected from the company’s economic development clients, offers small business owners passage to the similar information spacious companies use when they determine where to site new locations. ZoomProspector is liberate with a view to users and makes money by selling geographically targeted advertising, Ubalde says.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2008/sb20081229_004920.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz