The Lone Star state has experienced a great influx of new residents in the past several years. People have begun moving from areas that have really high costs of living, such as in Los Angeles and San Francisco, with high housing and gasoline costs as well as high costs of personal and corporate taxes and fees. They are moving to states such as Texas, Nevada, and Utah in order to start businesses and raise their families.
In order to understand why female entrepreneurs need to at least visit Texas as they work to grow their businesses, we spoke to Chrissy Weems. Weems is a successful female entrepreneur with an international business who created a sensation, first in her home state of Arizona and later throughout the nation and now in Canada, with her custom-designed jewelry business. Customers work with Weems’ independent designers to create their own keepsake jewelry that is customized to tell a story about their lives and aspirations.
Studies Encourage Female Business Owners
According to a MagnifyMoney/Lending Tree study, Austin, Texas comes in as the second-best metropolitan area in the country for women entrepreneurs to thrive. A FitSmallBusiness study echoed these findings and stated that Texas has moved from the eighth-best state for female entrepreneurs to the best. Reasons cited in the latter study included that Texas does not have corporate or income taxes to contend with. Also, Texas is experiencing a strong number of startups and has a lower cost of living and plentiful jobs.
Lower Cost of Living
One of the largest reasons for the huge influx of new residents to Texas is the low cost of living. This allows Texas residents to have more discretionary money to spend as they choose. In other states with major metropolitan areas, there are people who are forced out of the residences with the ridiculously high costs of both housing and gasoline. In Texas, residents have lower housing costs than other major metropolitan areas in the country and pay less for gasoline and utilities. They pay no corporate or personal income taxes. Not only does this lower cost of living help one’s customers, but it also helps female entrepreneurs more easily be able to pull together the financial resources to fund their startup.
Improved Diversity
With all of the new residents who have flocked from more expensive parts of the country, Texas has assimilated and retained a lot of the old but gained some of the new. As stated by the BBC, Austin, for example, has developed into an area that is known for its hip flow and great nightlife. It is the place people gravitate toward who might be turned off by the more conservative aspects of other places in Texas. This improved diversity helps women’s businesses that can provide a wide variety of types of products or services. Other states that have less diversity may prove less lucrative markets for certain businesses that depend upon unique client demographics.
Less Regulatory Hurdles
In other states, like California, business owners complain about all of the nit-picky regulatory hurdles for startups and for those staying in business. According to the BBC, this is not so in Texas. There is an attitude in Texas that they don’t want to get in the way of business growth so that businesses can flower and create more jobs.
More Jobs
As the FitSmallBusiness study found, since the women’s businesses in Texas and other places in the country do not tend to, on average, provide enough income to support a family, women entrepreneurs find the need to work another job and try to grow their business simultaneously. Texas has a great and thriving job market, so one does not have to try to make it on their business proceeds alone. This great job market also helps repeat customers, since one will less likely experience customer churn from Texans who have lost jobs.
For Chrissy Weems, it was a no-brainer to expand her Origami Owl custom-designed jewelry business to the Lone Star state because of the economic stability and lower cost of living its residents enjoy, the relaxed regulatory environment and improved diversity. Texans, long-term residents and newer transplants alike, are able to flower with so many available jobs. They have a lot of discretionary money to do with what they will