Denver Small Businesses Deserve a Rating of A

Colorado is a great place to do business. Ask anyone.

Toward the end of 2009, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, which rates the states on how friendly their legislative policies are to small business, gave Colorado a rating of 8th. That means that out of the 50 states, Colorado was the 8th most friendly to small businesses — up from 10th in 2008 and 11th in 2007.

In September, the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based group, called Colorado’s tax system the 13th most friendly to business in general. Our sales tax runs a little high but our property taxes tend to be low. The same month, Forbes ranked Colorado as the 4th best state for business in America. In fact, Forbes rates us number 1 when it came to labor supply — I knew Coloradans were the best workers in the country!

And Denver is even better than the rest of Colorado — we’re the third best city for business, according to studies done by Market Watch (a division of Dow Jones) in 2008 and 2009.

So why are we so down on ourselves? The Denver Business Journal says that its readers, rating their OWN businesses, gave themselves low grades. Twenty-six percent of DBJ readers gave themselves a C grade, 20 percent gave themselves a D, and 14 percent gave themselves an F. Only 14 percent gave themselves an A.

Business owners of Denver, please. Give yourselves the credit you deserve. You work hard every day. I know self-storage operators work hard — and we do a good job, too. This is no time for false modesty–I think we deserve an A. And you do, too.

Tags: business climate, DBJ, Denver, Denver Business Journal, grade, legislative policies, self storage, small business, taxes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.