One of the most important decisions about starting a business is deciding where to set up shop. Although many businesses, including my own, have taken to the web to forgo this decision, many businesses still need to resolve this critical issue. For black entrepreneurs, it is equally important to ensure that their business location is also amenable to their lifestyle as African Americans. By this, I mean that the concerns of racial prejudice and discrimination often loom large in the minds of black entrepreneurs. These issues can not only affect their businesses, but their entire way of life.
Given this dilemma, where is the best place for black entrepreneurs to start a business?
If you type that question into google, 10+ pages of results emerge, each with different results. As a scholar, I’ve been trained to seek out several sources to build an argument, so I looked at many of the search results to see where the similarities and differences arose.
Three of the most prominent and cited databases were from of Thumbtack, Nerd Wallet, and Good Call. Maybe unsurprisingly, there was little agreement on the top 10 cities for black entrepreneurs in 2015 among these outlets. Only one metropolitan area made the top 10 list on each database: Raleigh-Durham, NC.
Without a doubt, the differences in the methods used to calculate the top 10 lists is what created the incongruity among the databases. One major difference in the methods is the reliance on primary vs. secondary data. Primary data is usually collected by the researcher for a specific purpose; examples include surveys, interviews, and behavioral experiments if you really want to get fancy. Although more specific than secondary data, primary data is relatively more expensive to collect. Secondary data, on the other hand, is usually collected by a third party and tends to be more general. Big data usually falls under the category of secondary data.
My personal research tends to use primary research because I like to hear from and observe actual people and draw my inferences from their stories/behaviors. It was interesting that of the three major databases, only Thumbtack used primary data to generate their list. They surveyed over 1,600 actual black entrepreneurs across the U.S. and used their insights to create their top 10 cities.
Yes, big data similar to the data used by Nerd Wallet and Good Call can give us access to larger pools of information that are extremely useful, but sometimes I wonder if we might lose some of the insight that we can learn from talking to people at the heart of the issues we study. Really expert researchers bring together a mix of primary and secondary data to generate impactful insights with wide applicability. Maybe someone will read this post and be inspired to use mixed methods to make the 2016 list of the best cities for black entrepreneurs.
Did your city make the list on either database? Click the links below to find out!