Downtown Fort Worth
Hold on to your wallet — especially if you are a business owner or planning to be one. Personal finance website WalletHub compared 100 U.S. cities across 19 key indicators of startup viability to come up with a list of the best places to start a business. And, guess who ranked No. 11 on the list?
That’s Fort Worth, based on WalletHub’s 2019 Best Large Cities to Start Business report, released on National Small Business Week.
Half of Americans work for small businesses, and likewise, about 10 percent of the American labor force is self-employed. So, in order to help aspiring entrepreneurs maximize their chances for long-term prosperity, WalletHub produced a wide-ranging data set covering everything from five-year business-survival rate to office-space affordability in the nation's largest cities.
WalletHub compared 100 cities across three key dimensions: business environment, access to resources and business costs. The website’s sample considered only the city proper in each case, excluding cities in the surrounding metro area.
On these criteria alone Fort Worth ranked No. 11 overall:• No. 3 − Business Environment• No. 24 − Access to Resources• No. 74 − Business Costs
Fort Worth ranked ahead of Dallas, which sat at No. 15 overall. Both cities tied for No. 5 among large cities in the highest average growth of small businesses.
Starting a Business in Fort Worth (1=Best, 50=Average)
• No. 23 – Financing Accessibility• No. 49 – Office-Space Affordability• No. 47 – Cost of Living• No. 12 – Length of Average Workweek (in Hours)• No. 43 – Availability of Human Capital• No. 15 – Industry Variety
Among the other 19 indicators for startup success that the WalletHub study explored, Fort Worth has some notable benefits as well as room for improvement. For instance, city leaders and Visit Fort Worth staff have increased focus on making the city a magnet to attract a more highly trained workforce. Fort Worth’s cost of living, which has long been a draw, has now slipped into the average category, with cost of housing creeping upward at a faster rate.
