Verizon recently produced a report on the best small cities in which to start a small business and it appears Utah faired very well; more specifically northern Utah performed very well.

There was a total of 4 cities in the top 10 list.

1st – Logan
4th – South Jordan
7th – Lehi
8th – Taylorsville

This without question is a very impressive stat and explains why Utah is so popular with both new and established businesses flocking to the area.

In order to come up with the final list of cities, Verizon used a number of criteria including:

Population: In order to be considered for a place in the report it must be a small city. A small city is defined as having a population between 50,000 and 75,000 people.

Education: A business is only as good as its employees and because of this businesses, must have access to high quality educated employees. To cater for this Verizon examined the percentage of people over 25 who had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Tax: Higher business taxes mean less money available to invest in a new business (or indeed any business), lower taxes mean more money can be invested.

Travel Time to Work: People just do not like to spend lots of time stuck in traffic. Verizon looked at the average time taken to get to work. While the traffic in Utah may appear bad, and certainly will not get better there are worse places in the U.S.

Broadband Access: More and more people are now working from home, but in order to do this they must have access to high-speed internet.

Income per Capita: You might think that the higher the income the better, but it’s not as simple as that. If people earn too much then that means their salaries will be high and therefore it is expensive to employ people. There is a fine balance between people have a good income, but not so good as to make it too expensive to hire people.

Loans: You can’t start a new business without some kind of cash injection, so they looked at how easy it is for a small business to get a loan.

Non-farm Businesses: A good indicator of the local business climate is the number of businesses currently operating in the area. Verizon took this into account by looking at the total number of non-farm businesses per capita.

For more information about the Verizon report and a list of the chosen cities please visit here.