For anyone starting a business, these 10 metros are standouts

This past February, Hannah Vick took the plunge. After a decade of working in corporate roles focused on operations and customer success, she formed her own full-time consulting business in Alpharetta, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. Ask her how it’s going, and she’s delighted to share.

Clients love her work. She’s got more time for her family – and she’s earning at least as much as in her corporate days. What’s more, Vick has tapped into a booming local community of like-minded entrepreneurs, who cluster in local coffee shops and cheer each other along.

Need an example? A little while ago, Vick was trying to conduct a customer call outside a Valor cafe. It started raining. She couldn’t hold her phone and stay dry, but no worries. A fellow coffee-shop entrepreneur dashed outside, umbrella in hand, protecting her from the rain until she could wrap up the call.

“There’s incredible energy here for what we’re doing,” Vick says. And the data backs her up: a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic graph team identifies greater Atlanta as the leading U.S. metro, in terms of recent business-formation growth.

As the chart above shows, entrepreneurial energy spans all four of the major time zones in the United States. The East Coast is led by Atlanta (No. 1), Boston (No. 6), Miami-Fort Lauderdale (No. 7) and New York City (No. 8).

Austin, Texas (No. 2) and Chicago (No. 5) are standouts in the central U.S., while Denver (No. 10) is the Mountain time zone’s presence. On the West Coast, Seattle (No. 3), San Francisco (No. 4) and Los Angeles (No. 9) are leaders.

Just a few years ago, it seemed as if the legendary American desire to start a business was waning. From 2007 through 2018, only 1.1 of every 1,000 U.S. residents founded a business each year, down from a more robust 1.6 in 2005, according to the Kauffman Foundation.

But 2020’s breakdown of normal work arrangements during the early stages of the COVID pandemic may have rekindled people’s desire to run their own show. Kauffman data shows that by 2021 (the most recent year available), the U.S. rate for starting one’s own business had rebounded to 1.5 per 1,000.

Among the people going solo is brand designer Joel Easley. After corporate stints with the likes of Facebook and Intuit in Silicon Valley, he’s resettled in Decatur, Ga., and now runs Easley Design LLC. The new location is a good fit for his family, he says; his West Coast expertise is a unique strength – and living costs are more reasonable.?

Greater acceptance of “work from anywhere” may make it easier for entrepreneurs to find traction. In addition, the rise of virtual meetings and the ever-improving capabilities of tools such as Slack, Teams and Zoom help new businesses win quick credibility with clients.

“People want to hear my voice,” says Austin, Texas, human-resources expert Laura Woolford. She recently stepped back from a 25-year career in corporate HR, working for the likes of Tesla, General Electric and GoDaddy. Now she has set up her own thriving consulting practice: Wisdom HR Group.

Austin’s entrepreneur-friendly environment creates a lot of opportunities for experienced specialists to provide a burst of strategic or tactical services at crucial times, Woolford notes. Even if it would be difficult for smaller companies to match her traditional annual pay, they can engage her on a shorter time scale as a consultant or as a “fractional chief people officer,” she says.

Methodology

Metros are ranked by the largest growth in their Company Formation Index (CFI) from June to August 2023, compared with the same period in 2022. This index is the three-month average count of unique companies on LinkedIn, measured by the number of LinkedIn members who added a new founder position to their profile, indexed to the corresponding count in 2016. We include only LinkedIn members who added a founder position in the same month that the new job began.

LinkedIn data scientist Danielle Kavanagh-Smith contributed to this article.