Hot Cities

Perhaps we can't convince you to uproot yourself--your home, your business, your life--and trek to an unfamiliar locale based solely on the potential for success in one of our hot cities. But if you are interested in such a dramatic change, you might be curious to know just how we weeded out our nation's top entrepreneurial spots.

This year, we used four basic criteria in ranking our top cities: entrepreneurial activity (based on the number of businesses that are 5 years old or less within metropolitan statistical areas), small-business growth (those businesses with fewer than 20 employees that had significant employment growth from January 1998 to January 1999), economic growth (which measures the change in job growth over a three-year period through January 1999) and risk (cities with the lowest business failure rates). We then used a point system to determine each city's overall ranking as well as its ranking within a specific region.

Still need convincing? Read on. The next nine pages give a much more complete picture of what it's like to be an entrepreneur in one of these cities. Who knows? You might just start collecting moving boxes.

This article was originally published in the October 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Hot Cities.