Best Cities to Start a Business in Arkansas

Arkansas boasts a number of advantages over other states for those hoping to start a new business. The state ranks in the top ten in both cost of living and cost of doing business, according to a 2016 CNBC ranking.

Furthermore, six Fortune 500 companies, including J.B. Hunt, Tyson Foods, and retail mega-giant Walmart, indicate that access to investment is not difficult to come by. Owing to Arkansas’s focus on the food, retail, and logistics sectors of the economy, a majority of startups in the state are active in these fields.

In contrast to Silicon Valley and other densely concentrated hubs of startup activity, a spirit of cooperation and mutual support is evident within Arkansas’ community of entrepreneurs. Companies like Agricultural Food Systems, a company established to boost food quality, and Btiques, an app allowing users to shop fancy boutiques from their phones, coexist peacefully, and access the same financial resources.

Arkansas’s spirit of hospitality and affordable cost of living and doing business renders it a unique and welcoming environment for the budding entrepreneur.

Only cities with over 50,000 inhabitants are reported in the results. Some data had to be interpolated to the county level and extrapolated to all the cities in the county. We concentrated on the following metrics to obtain our ranking: Cost of living, Best state for business, Unemployment, Kauffman index, and Universities.