Lately, there has been some question about how small business friendly San Diego actually is. Despite the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce claiming that it’s fighting to make the city the most business-friendly place in California, and the city’s administration outlining what makes it a great place to do business, the city has routinely landed on lists of the most business-unfriendly places in the country.
The Bad
For the past three years, San Diego has received poor grades on small business friendliness in an annual survey of small business owners done by San Francisco-based online hiring service Thumbtack. California as a state routinely does poorly in this survey and last year ended up with an F grade. San Diego’s grade last year was a D, although it scored an F in the category of “Ease of Starting a Business.”
The national survey draws data from the responses of nearly 18,000 small business owners across the country.
The Good
But, while San Diego routinely scores badly in the Thumbtack survey, it has done well on other surveys, being named the least expensive major city in which to do business, in the 2012 edition of the annual Cost of Doing Business survey from the Kosmont Rose Institute at Claremont-McKenna College. That survey looked at 421 cities in the United States.
That same year, in a survey done for Forbes magazine, San Diego ranked No. 3 among the best cities in the nation for tech jobs.
Our View
So, the reactions to how small business-friendly San Diego is have been mixed. We certainly hear our fair share of stories about small businesses struggling in San Diego, but that’s normal when you run a business where you’re helping to fund small businesses on a regular basis. We’ve also heard a lot of success stories from our clients and, we’re proud to say, we’ve helped many of those small businesses become success stories in San Diego by helping them with their funding through lean times.
We, of course, had no problem starting our own small business in San Diego and we’ve seen nothing but success since we started doing business in this great city. So, with hearing about some of our clients’ hardships starting their businesses and our own success at starting ours, plus the numerous success stories we’ve heard and been a part of, you could say that our own experience has been mixed, as well.
Our civic pride makes us want to declare San Diego as the best place to set up a small business, but we can’t ignore the findings of the Thumbtack survey.
Your View
Do you find San Diego to be a small business friendly city? What has been your experience with setting up and running a small business in the city?
