Small Business Survey: Licensing and Regulations Trump Local Tax Rates

I recently got some interesting information about a small business survey from Sander Daniels:

I'm Sander Daniels, co-founder of Thumbtack.com - we're a site where you can easily hire local help (photographers, tutors, carpenters, etc.). We've partnered with the Kauffman Foundation to conduct a survey of 6,000 of the small businesses on our site. We've ranked the friendliness of states and cities towards small business, and we're releasing the results this Tuesday, 5/8.

You can see the beta preview of the results here and a methodology and analysis paper here.

Here are some of the survey's most interesting findings:

• Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.
• An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether small business owners are aware of their state or local government offering training programs for small businesses.
• Small business owners ranked Idaho and Texas as the most business-friendly states, with Oklahoma City and Dallas-Ft. Worth taking top honors among cities across the nation. Vermont and Rhode Island found themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum, joined in the bottom-five by New York and California.

Every city and state has its own page with a visualization of that location's full results - you should check out some of the links above to see what I mean.

The rankings are based on a survey of real small business owners, like wedding photographers, auto mechanics, and yoga instructors.