Is Minnesota A Good Place To Start A Business?

There are a lot of people out there who have the dream of starting their own business. After working for other people for years, they want to be their own boss. Maybe they see a hole in the marketplace they can fill with their idea or concept. 

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Starting your own business is a bold move that has lots of pitfalls along the way. When you are putting your own money on the line, or in many cases using your personal items as collateral, a failed endeavor then could affect your family's situation.  

There is assistance out there that could help soften the blow or make getting off the ground easier. With that said, where does Minnesota rank among the 50 states in businesses being launched? 

The business valuation firm Eton Venture Services collected data from each county in the United States to figure out the answer to that question. And it’s not good according to the folks at Eton. 

They used the number of business applications from each county in the country and determined that Minnesota is 10th in states for launching the fewest businesses. The Journalist’s Research Group released the findings earlier this week.  

So how did Eton Venture Services come up with these numbers? They say they created a fair ranking system by taking the number of business applications and weighing those figures per 100,000 residents. 

With that method in use, they say that in Minnesota, there were 1,065 businesses started per 100,000 residents. When you look at the state with the best numbers, Wyoming, they had 7,149 businesses starter for the same number of residents.  

That’s a pretty glaring difference, or is it? The total population of Wyoming is said to be at just over 581,000 people. The number of residents in Minnesota? Over 5 million. Now that’s a glaring difference.  

West Virginia was worst in the country in businesses launched with 776 per 100,000 residents. The population in West Virginia is just over 1.1 million people. Again, a big difference in that total and Minnesota’s total number of residents.  

But the West Virginia total is not far from the total or residents in the state that is 2nd best in businesses launched, Delaware with 1.018 million. Of course, there are tax advantages for businesses in Delaware which include privacy laws that other states don’t offer. So, the Delaware number could be a little misleading as well.  

There are businesses incorporated in Delaware that do not operate in the state.  

But getting back to the focus of this article, is Minnesota lagging in new businesses? Maybe it’s a regional discrepancy because Iowa was second worst, North Dakota tied for sixth, and South Dakota came in 15th worst.  

It appears as least that the objection is to starting a business in the region and maybe not specifically the state of Minnesota.