Bug Light with the Portland skyline in the background (Photo/Tim Greenway)
Maine was ranked as the 11th most entrepreneurial state in the country, according to data compiled by personal-finance website NerdWallet.
Using data on U.S. Small Business Administration loans, venture capital funding and Census Bureau statistics, NerdWallet ranked each U.S. state on the finacing options for small businesses.
Seventy-five percent of a state’s score came from data associated with its small business loan environment, while 25 percent came from local business economy stats.
Maine didn’t make it in the overall top 10, but it did rank quite well in a few metrics, including the growth of SBA loans per 100,000 people from 2012 to 2015 (Maine ranked no. 3 with 67 percent increase) and the number of small businesses per 100 residents (Maine ranked no. 7 with 2.91).
In other metrics, Maine lagged most of the rest of the nation, including in the average SBA guaranteed loan size in dollars (Maine ranked 45th with $182,232), its small-business growth rate from 2010 to 2013 (Maine tied for 36th with New Hampshire and Kansas with a negative growth rate of 0.9 percent) and the venture capital funding per 100,000 people between the third quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2015 (Maine ranked 35th with roughly $1.5 million).
The state that topped the list was Utah, which ranked no. 1 with 57.43 SBA loans per 100,000 people and no. 3 for having a 4.3 percent small-business growth from 2010 to 2013. Other states making up the top 10 were Colorado, California, Connecticut, New York, Washington, Florida, Washington D.C., Georgia and Massachusetts.
Because of lagging Census Bureau data and the volatility of certain metrics, such as quarterly venture capital funding, these type of lists are helpful to gain a snapshot in time of where Maine stands, but they do not offer a conclusive examination of how entrepreneurial a state really is.
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