Richmond Earns Top Ranking for Small Business Friendliness

The City of Richmond recently received recognition for being a national leader in overall small business friendliness. Finishing as the 10th best city, Richmond earned an A grade for its small business friendly policies and earned an A+ for the friendliness of its licensing rules.

“Receiving this honor acknowledges the City’s continued efforts to provide quality resources to our local businesses,” said Mayor Dwight C. Jones. “Helping entrepreneurs and local businesses grow and thrive is central to the City’s anti-poverty strategy. By being a ‘business-friendly’ city, we are also creating local jobs and advancing our neighborhood revitalization efforts.” 

Thumbtack, a consumer service headquartered in San Francisco, partnered with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to conduct a survey of more than 12,000 small businesses nationwide. The Thumbtack.com Small Business Friendliness Survey is the largest survey of its kind and is the only survey to obtain data from an extensive, nationwide sample of small business owners to determine the most business-friendly locations.

Some of the key findings for Richmond include:

Richmond earned an A+ for the ease of starting a business, and was the easiest place in the southern United States to start one, improving from a B+ last year.

Richmond excelled in the friendliness of its licensing and its environmental regulations, earning A+ in both categories.

Richmond was the 6th best city in the nation for starting a small business.

The full survey results are available at http://www.thumbtack.com/va/richmond. Thumbtack.com and the Kauffman Foundation evaluated most states and 82 cities against one another along more than a dozen metrics that business owners say are critical to a friendly business environment. The full methodology paper can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b8u0zjwcc99oews/thumbtack%202014%20final%20methodology%20paper.pdf.