When Aubrey and Amy Stowell were looking for where to start their new, family business, they had the whole country to choose from. They ended up in DC after an extensive, computer analysis of census and demographic data showed the Metro DC area is the best place. Here's how they did it...
We're in the "portable storage" or "mobile storage" business, and while it's not exactly high-tech stuff, we think this an interesting story of how a father - a retired investment banker with an entrepreneurial itch (Aubrey) - and daughter - a CPA from PricewaterhouseCoopers (Amy) - meticulously conducted an exhaustive 18-month search to pick our business and where in America to locate it.
We were as careful at picking what business we'd be in as we were in selecting a location.
To find where to locate, we reviewed many demographic statistics and settled our final seach criteria on three. Each county in the United States had to meet the following criteria:
1) Minimum households in county of 75,000
2) Minimum compounded annual growth rate of 10% from 1990 to 2000
3) Median household income of $50,000 and above
In our 1st pass, we spotted 53 counties across America. Too many. We then raised the median income level to $60,000 and narrowed it down to 22 counties. We continued scaling up the median income to $75,000 which resulted in a total of five counties. Of the five, two were in the Washington DC Metro area: Fairfax County, VA and Montgomery County, MD.
The choice was clear: DC Metro was the only metropolitan area in the nation that had 2 counties that exceeded our original criteria.
After another year of site selection and start-up preparation, we finally opened for business on Feb. 1, 2005, in Chantilly, Virginia.
Obviously, our formula doesn't apply to all businesses, but we think it says something interesting about the potential for DC Metro. Basically, we had no other reason to locate here. The business potential is what did it.
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